issues and debates paper 3

• univerality= a claim that generalisations can be made about behaviour regardless of gender
• bias= preconceptions held by psychologists about typical male/ female behaviour.
  • alpha bias: exaggerates differences between genders eg theories of sexual attraction (men=promiscuous, women=choosey)
  • beta bias: minimises the differences eg fight or flight responce was generalised to women 
• androcentrism= a consequence of beta bias
  • where results from investigating men are generalised to women 
  • male behaviour seen as normal, women abnormal
  • eg the medialisation of premenstral syndrome 

• universality and bias = research mainly conducted on white Americans. this is a problem if we generalise it universally.
• ethnocentrism= belief that your own culture is superior.
• cultural relativism= the acknoledgement that cultures are different and behaviours are not universal
  • imposed etic: a researcher imposes their own cultural views on the rest of the world.
  • etic approach: ethnocentric - another culture observed from our perspective.
  • emic approach: not ethnocentric - culture observed from within (local residence)

• determinism= free will has no place in explaining behaviour
• hard determinism= all behaviour has a cause dictated out of our control that can be identified and described.
• soft determinism= all behaviour has a cause but there is some consious control (cognitive approach)
  • biological determinism: behaviour is cause dby biological factors (genes, hormones)
  • environmental determinism: Behaviour caused by features of environment (reward and punishment- skinner)
  • psychic determinism: behaviour caused by unconsious conflicts beyound are control (frued - psychodynamic approach)(instincts and drives)
• the scientific emphasis on casual explanations
  
  • =every event has a cause that can be described by general laws
  • =laws are important to predidct future events 

the extent to which behaviour is caused by inherited or aquired characteristics

• nature (nativists) = 
  • human characteristics and some knowledge is natural 
  • heritability coefficient (0-1) 1 = genetically determined
  • iq= 0.5
• nurture (empricists)=
  • mind is a blank state at birth
  • environmental influences - key feature
• relative importance of heredity and environment=
  
  • nature + nurture are hard to seperate eg twin studies 
  • the focus now is to see the relative contribution of both on behaviour
• the interactionist approach= 
  
  • eg the theory that psychopathology is caused genetically but triggered environmentally

• holism=whole experince needs to be understood to understand behaviour
• reductionism= behaviour is explained by breaking it down to simple parts 
  • biological: physical level (genes)
  • envirommental: stimulus and responce pavings 
• levels of explanation=
  
  • high= social+cultural - influence of social groups 
  • middle=psychological - cognitive, behavioural, environmental
  • low= biological - genetics, brain structure, neurochemistry 

• idiographic= 
  • descirbes nature of individual 
  • suggests we should be studied uniquely 
• idiographic research techniques= case studies- qualititive data
  
• nomothetic=
  • establishes laws
  • behaviours are generalised and can be measured
• nomotheic research techniques= lab experiments, quantative data