Many of the discussions that take place within psychology are not technically psychological, but rather philosophical. Philosophy provides an epistemological and conceptual framework that we use to interpret and produce data, and that preliminary phase is not a scientific task; rather, it has to do with defending a point of view and arguing why it is better than other philosophical positions.

This is something that happens in all sciences, because all of them are based on philosophical foundations that have normally been discussed for decades. However, something happens in psychology that is not so common in the hard sciences as in physics: the scientific debate and the debate of ideas are very mixed and can easily become confused. This happens, in part, because of the popularity of a philosophical position known as reductionism . Let’s see what it consists of and what implications and risks it may have in the field of psychology.

What is reductionism?

Reductionism is a framework of interpretation of reality through which everything that happens in a system ( whatever it is, from a company to a human brain) can be understood by studying individually its “pieces”, its components.

Moreover, from reductionism it is assumed that the connection between those pieces and the properties that those pieces express is less debatable than the relationship between the system as a whole and the properties it has, so the general arises from the individual and the opposite never happens. For example, the characteristics of a complex phenomenon, such as the movements of a marabout of ants, arise from the sum of individual behaviors of each of these insects.

In turn, if we study the components of a phenomenon we will conclude that this phenomenon can only change in a certain and limited number of ways, since its components determine the paths of change through which the set can pass. The ants will not be able to survive without a queen ant, because their genes tie them to live in a colony totally dedicated to reproduction.

Reductionism in Psychology

The reductionist perspective can be very useful, and yet it carries a danger to be taken into account: it can generate circular explanatory frameworks when trying to understand what happens in a complex and changing phenomenon, as we will see.In particular, when reductionism is applied to psychology or neuroscience , this risk is relatively high.

The result of this drawback is that, many times, reductionism is resorted to due to technical and methodological limitations and when interpreting the data obtained through such research, it is “forgotten” that the decision to isolate a problem in its relatively simple parts was a philosophical action, and not an objective or scientific one. Let’s look at an example related to cognitive sciences and the study of the brain.

The Study of Intelligence

Intelligence is a concept as interesting and popular as it is controversial, since there is no very clear and comprehensive definition of what it is or what it is not. In fact, the most abstract definitions of this characteristic already show why it is difficult to limit it to one definition: it is the capacity to adapt quickly and effectively to new problems. As “new problems” is a necessarily open concept (one cannot know in advance what is a new problem for someone), intelligence can only be understood as a complex phenomenon whose background is constantly changing, as are all our conscious and unconscious mental activities all the time.

How can we identify the biological processes on which each person’s intelligence exists? Because it is such a complicated task, many researchers prefer to analyse activation patterns in specific parts of the brain and compare the combination of these parts of the nervous system with the scores each person obtains in an intelligence test. In doing so, it has been discovered that the main biological differences that distinguish the most intelligent people from those who are less intelligent are found in the frontal lobes, the parietals and the anterior cingulate of each brain hemisphere.

From a reductionist perspective, this can be interpreted as showing that these parts of the brain are the main ones involved in the person’s intelligence, the ones that trigger the whole process of reasoning and maintaining information in the working memory, etc. The rest of the encephalic structures may be indispensable, but in any case they are auxiliary members, they participate by helping in the work of the others.

This explanation sounds very natural and convincing , so it can be taken as an objective fact alien to philosophy, but in reality it is far from explaining the neurobiological basis of intelligence.

What if this mental capacity were not the task of parts of the brain working each on its own and “pooling” their work from time to time? What if intelligence was based on the real-time coordinated work of millions of neurons throughout the brain, in turn interacting with other nerve cells and with the substances that reach them through the blood vessels? If this explanation described well the logic of the biology behind intelligence, would previous research have detected it?

No; because of reductionism, a description of the effects that a global system has on the pieces of the brain would have been confused with the causes of what is seen in that global system. In the same way that it is not the sad or inexpressive face that produces depression in people with this type of disorder .

Conclusion

Psychology is an area of research that seeks to explain many things: from the behaviour of buyers to the most effective learning methods, to the way in which drug use affects social relations and a host of topics that have little to do with these. Basically, any part of reality in which there is a living being learning certain habits and behaviours (voluntarily or involuntarily) psychology has a hole.

But psychology does not try to explain everything in the sense that physics could explain everything , since in human actions all kinds of very complex phenomena intervene, both of genetic and historical, cultural and contextual roots. That is why reductionism should only be taken as a tool, and not as a philosophy that allows generating simple explanations about facts that are not.