Up Learn – A Level Psychology (AQA) – approaches to psychology (Ao3)
Limitation of the Biological Approach: Reductionist
A limitation of the biological approach is that it’s overly reductionist, because it ignores social and cultural causes of behaviour.
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More videos on Approaches to Psychology (AO3):
Strength: The Biological Approach is Scientific (free trial)
Approaches to Psychology (AO3)
Last time, we saw that our second strength of the biological approach is…
Our second strength of the biological approach is the application to treating genetically inherited conditions.
But, there are also limitations of the biological approach, which we’ll look at now.
So, we’ve seen already that the biological approach looks for…
The biological approach looks for biological causes of behaviour. It explains behaviour in terms of processes in the brain…which are then explained in terms of genetics.
So, we can say that the biological approach is…
We can say that the biological approach is a reductionist approach…it’s reduces behaviour all the way down to what the cells in the brain are doing [zoom]…and what genes we have in our cells [zoom in more].
Now, this is useful, because it helps us to understand behaviour in terms of cause and effect relationships in the body.
For instance, suppose someone is feeling really down, and wanting to stay in bed and eat ice cream all day instead of leaving the house.
The biological approach might offer explanations like: his brain is acting in a way that is making him feel sad and lazy…or he has genetically inherited a sweet tooth, which is why he wants ice cream.
But… might be that the reason he’s doing this is that he’s just been through a rocky breakup, or he’s not made the volleyball team.
We can argue that, in these situations, it would be better to focus on these social causes of behaviour, rather than on a microscopic biological cause like DNA.
But, by using a highly reductionist approach, the biological approach ignores these social or cultural causes of behaviour.
And so, we can say that a limitation of the biological approach is…
A limitation of the biological approach is that it’s overly reductionist.
So, to sum up, the first limitation of the biological approach is that…
The first limitation of the biological approach is that it’s overly reductionist, because it ignores….
The biological approach is overly reductionist, because it ignores social and cultural causes of behaviour.