Where do the main approaches in psychology stand on reductionism?
The biological approach. Reductionism is often equated with physiological reductionism, offering explanations of behaviour in terms of physiological mechanisms. The evolutionary approach uses evolutionary reductionism when reducing behaviour to the effects of genes, as in some explanations of altruism or atypical behaviour. The behaviourist approach uses a very reductionist vocabulary: stimulus, response, reinforcement, and punishment. These concepts alone are used to explain all behaviour. This is called environmental reductionism because it explains behaviour in terms of simple environmental factors. Behaviourists reduce the concept of the mind to behavioural components, i.e., stimulus-response links. The cognitive approach uses the principle of machine reductionism. Information-processing approaches use the analogy of machine systems, and the simple components of such machines, as a means to describe and explain behaviour. More recent computer innovations, such as the Internet and c
