What is the difference between holistic (systems thinking/approach) and reductionism

Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Reductionism is a theory in psychology centered on reducing complex phenomena into their most basic parts. It is often contrasted with holism , which is focused on looking at things as a whole. These two approaches are often pitted against one another.

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 the sum-product is more than simply the sum of its parts. Reductionism is an approach that is used in many disciplines, including psychology, that is centered on the belief that we can best explain something by breaking it down into its individual parts.

If you want to understand something, the reductionist approach would propose simply taking a look at each of its constituent pieces. If you wanted to understand a car, for instance, you would look at each part of the engine, body, and interior.

The big question in psychology is not whether or not reductionism has value—it is to what extent it can be useful.

Reductionism can be quite helpful in some types of research, but in many cases, the sum is much more than simply the total of its pieces. The complete item in question has what are known as emergent properties that are simply not present in its smaller pieces.

In the example of a car, looking at each individual component can tell you a great deal about the mechanics of the vehicle, but you 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.

When trying to understand human behavior, scientists using this perspective would say that the best way to understand it would be to look at the parts that make up each system of the human brain and body. By knowing how each part works, reductionists suggest that we can then form an understanding of the whole based on what we know about each element that contributes to how the whole functions. Within psychology, there also exist different areas in which reductionism operates.

At its most basic level, reductionism might focus on the neurons and neurological processes that impact how people think and act. Another very basic level of reductionism would involve looking at DNA and genes to determine how human behaviors are influenced by genetics. This level of reductionism might also focus on the different parts of the brain and how each structure in the brain affects different processes and behaviors.

Another level of reductionism would focus on how behavior can be reduced to stimulus-response cycles i. The cognitive approach would also represent another aspect of reductionism centered on understanding how people gather, store, process, and use information.

Higher levels of the reductionist approach might take a broader look at how specific things such as social interactions and culture impact how people think and act. As you can see in each of these examples, reductionism involves taking psychological topics and breaking them down into a much more narrow focus. So 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 reductionism can be useful. 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.

It allows researchers to focus on a specific problem. For example, researchers might utilize the reductionist approach when studying a psychiatric condition such as depression.

Rather than trying to account for all of the many different forces that may contribute to depression, a reductionist perspective might suggest that depression is caused by biological processes within the body.

When approaching a truly difficult problem, it can be all too easy to become overwhelmed by all the questions and information that are available. When studying psychological issues, for example, researchers might struggle to even form a basic hypothesis unless they find some way to focus their attention on a very small aspect of a phenomenon.

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 of their studies. OpenLearn works with other organisations by providing free courses and resources that support our mission of opening up educational opportunities to more people in more places. All rights reserved. The Open University is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in relation to its secondary activity of credit broking.

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Of course, this creates another problem. Of course, now we have another problem: that even our most holistic thinking cannot be infinite and complete. Even holistic thinking must draw a boundary somewhere.

At the very least between what we consider and what we do not. At that moment a distinction forms between what we decided to consider and what we decided not to consider. This boundary is a distinction where we identify some thing s as being inside the scope of our observation and some other things as being outside the scope.

This in turn causes yet another problem which is that the choice of a boundary is a subjective one, requiring perspective, so we must consider that these distinctions we make for the whole and each subsequent distinction we make of the parts is perspectival.

Change our perspective and the distinctions we make change, too. This is one of 6 "Sacred Cows" of Systems Thinking.

See the table below for all sacred cows and their scientifically valid replacements and then click on the links to read more about each. Systems thinking is a plurality of hundreds of methods and models that all cohere around four patterns of thought DSRP. Here lies the problem… No matter how holistic one gets, there is always a larger whole to act as context, and one is therefore always surgically removing the whole under consideration from the whole it is a part of, which is one of the chief criticisms with reductionism.