Table of ContentsView AllTable of ContentsOverviewUsesBenefitsDrawbacksExamplesReductionism vs. Holism
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Overview
Uses
Benefits
Drawbacks
Examples
Reductionism vs. Holism
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The reductionist approach is often contrasted with holism, which is focused onlooking at things as a whole. Where a reductionist would propose that the best way to understand something is to look at what it is made up of, a holist would argue that things are more than simply the sum of their parts.
Verywell / Emily Roberts
Overview of the Reductionist Approach
Reductionism can be quite helpful in sometypes of research. However, in many cases, the sum is much more than simply the total of its pieces. Complete items have what are known asemergent propertiesthat are simply not present in their smaller pieces.
In the example of a car, looking at each individual component can tell us a great deal about the mechanics of the vehicle. But we will not know other details, such as how comfortable the interior is, how smooth the ride is, or how good the gas mileage will be until the pieces are reassembled back into the whole.
The big question in psychology is not whether or not reductionism has value—it is to what extent this approach can be useful.
How Reductionism Is Used In Psychology
When trying to understand human behavior, scientists using this perspective would look at theparts that make up the human brainand body. By learning how each part works, they can form a better understanding of the whole based on what is known about each element that contributes to how the whole functions.
Reductionism can be used within psychology to study this field on a few different levels. At its most basic level, reductionism might focus on:
A slightly higher level of reductionism might focus on how behavior can be reduced to stimulus-response cycles (i.e., behaviorism). The cognitive approach would represent another aspect of reductionism centered on understanding how people gather, store, process, and use information.
Higher-level uses of the reductionist approach may take a broader look atdifferent psychology topics. For instance, this approach could be used to look at how social interactions and culture impact the way that people think and act.
As is seen in each of these examples, reductionism involves taking psychological topics and breaking them down into a more narrow focus.
Benefits of Reductionism
Why would researchers choose to take a reductionist approach when looking at different psychological phenomena? While this process often involves oversimplifying things, there are ways in which reductionism can be useful.
More Precise Focus
One of the major benefits of reductionism is that it allows researchers to look at things that can be incredibly varied and complex—such as the human mind and behavior—and break them down into smaller parts that are easier to investigate. This allows researchers to focus on a specific problem.
Making the Complicated Less Intimidating
While this point of view neglects other factors that might contribute, such as genetics, social relationships, and environmental variables, it gives researchers a more narrow focus. By using reductionism to simplify what they want to study, researchers can explore a component in much greater depth.
Types of Variables in Psychology Research
Drawbacks of Reductionism
While reductionism has some important benefits, it also has a few significant downsides that should be noted.
Ignores Other Contributing Factors
A clear downside of reductionism is that it is so totally focused on the smaller elements that contribute to a phenomenon that it fails to account for other forces that might play a role as well.This can provide an incomplete picture.
In the example of researchers taking a biological approach to explaining depression, they might focus their studies on chemical reactions and balances within the body that contribute todepression symptoms. Although this might lead to important medical advances in the treatment of depression, it excludes other contributing factors such as cognition, hereditary influences, personal problems, substance abuse, and other variables.
Doesn’t Account for the Whole
While reductionism can lead to exploring components of a phenomenon in greater depth, it also misses how these variables interact with one another. Few things have only one simple cause. Additionally, complex systems are dynamic and always changing.
Examples of Reductionism in Psychology
There are a number of different approaches to psychology that are reflective of a reductionist approach to science, including the following.
Personality Testing
Tests such as theMyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)andthe Enneagram of personalityare good examples of how reductionism can be used to reduce certain aspects of psychology (namely, personality) into smaller parts.
The MBTI, for example, suggests that personality can be broken down and understood as four different dimensions. These four dimensions—extraversion versus introversion, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perceiving—are then used to create a “type” of personality that describes each individual.
Biopsychology
Biopsychology is centered on understandinghow biological processes contribute to human behavior. This represents a reductionist approach because researchers are focused on a specific part of the human experience.
When approaching a mental health condition, for example, biopsychologists would suggest that the condition is the result of a biological process in the brain and body. To treat the issue, they may recommend medications that deal with it on a physiological level.
Research using reductionism has not provided conclusive explanations as to a biological basis for mental disorders or psychopathologies.
Behaviorism
Thebehaviorist approach to psychologyfocuses on how interactions with the environment contribute to learning and human behavior. At its strictest, behaviorism suggests that all human behaviors can be thought of in terms of conditioning and reinforcement.This reductionist approach ignores other factors such as cognition and biology in favor of focusing solely on environmental influences.
Cognitive Psychology
The cognitive approach focuses on studying howinternal mental processescan be carefully and objectively studied. This psychological approach is reductionist because it focuses only on cognition and neglects other factors that might contribute to behavior.
A cognitive psychologist might explain a psychological condition in terms of the underlying thought patterns that contribute to the person’s feelings and behaviors. They might recommend a treatment approach centered on changingunhealthy cognitionsto replace them with more positive, realistic ones.
Overview of Cognitive Psychology
The reductionist approach to science is frequently contrasted with the holistic approach, which approaches things as a whole rather than focusing on individual parts. The holistic approach does not discount the importance of each individual component but instead suggests that understanding the whole requires looking at how these parts work on different levels as well as how they interact and influence one another.
There are many areas of psychology that tend to take a more holistic approach to the science of human thought and behavior.Social psychology,humanistic psychology, andpositive psychology, for example, are more focused on understanding how people function on the whole rather than looking at a tiny slice of the human experience.
Summary
Critics of reductionism often suggest that this approach oversimplifies complex things, but this does not mean that the reductionist approach is not useful. Human behavior is often so varied and complex that breaking certain aspects down into smaller parts allows researchers to understand it in different ways.
While relying solely on reductionism might lead to gaps in knowledge, using this approach to learn more about some topics can be useful and informative. Whether a more reductionist or holistic approach would be the most beneficial often depends upon the specific topic and situation.
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4 SourcesVerywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.Kesić S.Systems biology, emergence and antireductionism.Saudi J Biol Sci. 2016;23(5):584-591. doi:10.1016/j.sjbs.2015.06.015Bakker GM.A new conception and subsequent taxonomy of clinical psychological problems.BMC Psychol.2019;7(1):46.. doi:10.1186/s40359-019-0318-8Borsboom D, Cramer A, Kalis A.Brain disorders: Not really: why network structures block reductionism in psychopathology research.Behav Brain Sci. 2018;42:E2. doi:10.1017/S0140525X17002266Staddon J.Theoretical behaviorism.Contemp Behaviorisms Debate. 2021;702:79-95. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-77395-3_7
4 Sources
Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.Kesić S.Systems biology, emergence and antireductionism.Saudi J Biol Sci. 2016;23(5):584-591. doi:10.1016/j.sjbs.2015.06.015Bakker GM.A new conception and subsequent taxonomy of clinical psychological problems.BMC Psychol.2019;7(1):46.. doi:10.1186/s40359-019-0318-8Borsboom D, Cramer A, Kalis A.Brain disorders: Not really: why network structures block reductionism in psychopathology research.Behav Brain Sci. 2018;42:E2. doi:10.1017/S0140525X17002266Staddon J.Theoretical behaviorism.Contemp Behaviorisms Debate. 2021;702:79-95. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-77395-3_7
Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
Kesić S.Systems biology, emergence and antireductionism.Saudi J Biol Sci. 2016;23(5):584-591. doi:10.1016/j.sjbs.2015.06.015Bakker GM.A new conception and subsequent taxonomy of clinical psychological problems.BMC Psychol.2019;7(1):46.. doi:10.1186/s40359-019-0318-8Borsboom D, Cramer A, Kalis A.Brain disorders: Not really: why network structures block reductionism in psychopathology research.Behav Brain Sci. 2018;42:E2. doi:10.1017/S0140525X17002266Staddon J.Theoretical behaviorism.Contemp Behaviorisms Debate. 2021;702:79-95. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-77395-3_7
Kesić S.Systems biology, emergence and antireductionism.Saudi J Biol Sci. 2016;23(5):584-591. doi:10.1016/j.sjbs.2015.06.015
Bakker GM.A new conception and subsequent taxonomy of clinical psychological problems.BMC Psychol.2019;7(1):46.. doi:10.1186/s40359-019-0318-8
Borsboom D, Cramer A, Kalis A.Brain disorders: Not really: why network structures block reductionism in psychopathology research.Behav Brain Sci. 2018;42:E2. doi:10.1017/S0140525X17002266
Staddon J.Theoretical behaviorism.Contemp Behaviorisms Debate. 2021;702:79-95. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-77395-3_7
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