Approaches in Psychology: The basic assumptions of the following approaches:

The idea

An assumption is the founding belief an approach holds about where behaviour comes from. It is not a study and not a therapy, and that is where most of the marks go missing. Behaviourism holds that we are born a blank slate, that behaviour is learned from the environment by association and consequence, and that laws found in rats hold for people. Social learning theory adds that much learning is indirect, from watching models, with thought in between. The cognitive approach holds that internal mental processes are real and can be studied scientifically by inference. The biological approach holds that everything psychological is at first biological. The psychodynamic approach holds that unconscious forces and early childhood shape adult personality. Humanistic psychology holds that people have free will and are actively self-determining.

What earns the marks

• An assumption expressed as a belief about the origin of behaviour, for example that all behaviour is learned from the environment, rather than as a description of a study.
• Behaviourist: blank slate at birth, learning by classical and operant conditioning, only observable behaviour as data, and animal findings generalised to humans.
• Social learning: behaviour acquired by observation, imitation and vicarious reinforcement, with cognitive mediation between stimulus and response.
• Cognitive: internal mental processes are legitimate subject matter, inferred from behaviour and represented in theoretical or computer models.
• Biological: genes, neurochemistry, hormones and brain structure as the basis of behaviour, so the mind is treated as physical.
• Psychodynamic: the unconscious drives behaviour, personality has a tripartite structure, and early experience is formative.
• Humanistic: free will, the whole person, and subjective experience as the proper subject matter.

Common mistakes and how to put them right

• Answering with the evidence instead of the belief.

  Put it right: Pavlov's dogs support the behaviourist assumption, they are not the assumption.

• Giving one assumption twice in different words when two are asked for, such as 'behaviour is learned' and 'we learn from our environment'.

• Presenting social learning theory as pure behaviourism and dropping the mediational element, which is the thing that separates them.

Exam tips

• If two assumptions are asked for, number them and give each one sentence of belief plus one sentence of what follows from it.
• Start each with 'this approach assumes that', which forces the answer into the right form and stops it drifting into a study.
• In an applied question, name the assumption first and then read the scenario back through it, rather than describing the approach in the abstract.