The nine lenses
Your course outline lists nine perspectives. Each one is a school of thought with its own idea of what a person is, what counts as evidence and what questions are worth asking. Read this page first if the names are new to you. Each case guide then applies every lens to one study.
A perspective is a broad way of looking at people. A paradigm is a shared set of assumptions and methods that a research community takes for granted, a term made famous by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn in 1962. In everyday course use the two words overlap.
Behavioural
What in the environment produced this behaviour?
Behaviour is learned from the environment, through rewards, punishments and associations. Study what people do, not what they think.
- Key names
- Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner
- Typical methods
- Controlled experiments that change the environment and count observable behaviour, often with animals.
- Watch out for
- It can ignore thoughts and feelings, because they cannot be observed directly.
Applied in: The Bobo doll study
Cognitive
What is happening in the mind between input and action?
People take in information, store it, interpret it and use it. Mental processes such as attention, memory and expectation explain behaviour.
- Key names
- Ulric Neisser, George Miller, Aaron Beck; Albert Bandura in his later work
- Typical methods
- Experiments that measure memory, attention and reaction time; models of information processing.
- Watch out for
- It can treat the mind like a computer and leave out emotion, the body and culture.
Applied in: The Bobo doll study
Psychoanalytic
What unconscious wishes and conflicts lie underneath?
Much of mental life is unconscious. Early relationships, inner conflicts and defences shape feelings and actions.
- Key names
- Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Erik Erikson
- Typical methods
- Clinical case studies, free association, interpretation of dreams and of the therapy relationship.
- Watch out for
- Many of its claims are hard to test or to prove wrong.
Applied in: The Bobo doll study
Biological
What do the brain, hormones and genes contribute?
Behaviour depends on the body: brain systems, hormones, genes and evolutionary history.
- Key names
- Charles Darwin, Donald Hebb, Roger Sperry
- Typical methods
- Brain imaging, hormone measures, twin and adoption studies, studies of brain injury, animal research.
- Watch out for
- It can slide into "biology is destiny" and forget that experience also changes the body.
Applied in: The Bobo doll study
Humanistic
How does the person experience this, and what helps them grow?
People are whole persons with free will and a drive to grow. Their own experience and meaning matter most.
- Key names
- Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May
- Typical methods
- Interviews, personal accounts and other qualitative methods that stay close to lived experience.
- Watch out for
- Its key ideas, such as self-actualisation, are hard to measure.
Applied in: The Bobo doll study
Cultural
Would this look the same in another culture?
Culture shapes what people learn, value and consider normal. Findings from one culture may not travel.
- Key names
- Richard Shweder, Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, Barbara Rogoff
- Typical methods
- Cross-cultural comparison, ethnography (long-term observation inside a community), cultural studies of child-rearing.
- Watch out for
- Comparing whole nations can turn culture into a stereotype.
Applied in: The Bobo doll study
Critical
Whose interests does this knowledge serve?
Psychology is shaped by power and society. It can hide social problems by treating them as problems inside individuals.
- Key names
- Ian Parker, Isaac Prilleltensky and Dennis Fox, Ignacio Martín-Baró, feminist psychologists
- Typical methods
- Analysis of language and power, history of the discipline, participatory action research.
- Watch out for
- It is better at questioning research than at producing new evidence of its own.
Applied in: The Bobo doll study
Decolonial
Whose knowledge counts, and who decided?
Mainstream psychology grew from Western, colonial power. Other knowledge systems, including Indian ones, deserve equal standing.
- Key names
- Frantz Fanon, Durganand Sinha, Ashis Nandy, Sunil Bhatia, Linda Tuhiwai Smith
- Typical methods
- Indigenous and community-led research, local concepts and languages, histories of how psychology spread.
- Watch out for
- It can romanticise "tradition" or treat a whole region as one culture.
Applied in: The Bobo doll study
Social
How do other people and the situation shape what we do?
Behaviour depends strongly on other people: their presence, their example, group norms and roles.
Applied in: The Bobo doll study