AP PSYCHOLOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -Cognitive Psychology The cognitive approach focuses on studying how internal mental processes can be carefully and objectively studied. This approach is reductionist because it focuses only on cognitions and neglects other factors that might contribute to behavior.

Detailed explanation-2: -At least three types of reductionism can be distinguished: ontological, methodological, and theoretical. Ontological reductionism is the position that the higher-level structures are reducible to lower-level structures.

Detailed explanation-3: -Thus, the ideas that physical bodies are collections of atoms or that a given mental state (e.g., one person’s belief that snow is white) is identical to a particular physical state (the firing of certain neurons in that person’s brain) are examples of reductionism.

Detailed explanation-4: -In psychology, breaking complex things down into simple parts can be helpful for looking at behavior from a different perspective. Reductionism, or reductionist theory, is the idea that complicated behaviors and phenomena can be better explained by “reducing” them into small, simple pieces.