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issues, approaches and debates

Reductionism

In this column, psychologists take an issue, approach or debate and apply it to a psychological topic or research area. Here, Peter Manning looks at the issue of reductionism in psychology.

When it comes to psychology, do you prefer the whole-cake approach? or do you prefer to study the component ingredients?
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When you want to explain behaviour using your psychological knowledge, how do you do it? Is there a best explanation or are the explanations provided by different approaches supportive of each other? To ask such a question is to be concerned with the meaning of the term ‘reductionism’ and how it relates to the range of approaches deployed by psychology.

Consider this question:

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Specification changes from September 2011

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Yes, we can!: understanding self-efficacy

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