OxfordAQA International A-level Psychology (9685): 3.4.2 Issues and debates in psychology – Study Guide

This guide covers section 3.4.2 Issues and debates in psychology in the OxfordAQA International AS and A-level Psychology (9685) specification, Version 3.1 (International A-level exams May/June 2020 onwards). The section sits in Unit 4: Approaches and application, which the specification labels a synoptic unit. The specification says Unit 4 is a 1 hour 30 minute written exam worth 90 marks and 30% of the International A-level, and that Section B, Issues and debates in psychology, carries 30 marks of compulsory questions.

Use it with the issues and debates revision notes and the issues and debates practice questions. The 9685 course hub and 9685 checklist show the rest of the course.

Coverage table

Syllabus reference	What you must know or be able to do (from the document)	Where assessed
3.4 (aims)	Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of concepts, theories, studies, methods and ethical issues; apply them in a range of contexts; analyse, interpret and evaluate them. Use knowledge from other areas of the course to illustrate answers in Sections A and B of Unit 4	Unit 4
3.4.2 Free will and determinism	Hard and soft determinism; biological and environmental determinism; the scientific emphasis on causal explanations	Unit 4, Section B
3.4.2 Nature-nurture	The relative importance of heredity and environment in determining behaviour; an interactionist approach	Unit 4, Section B
3.4.2 Holism and reductionism	Levels of explanation in psychology; biological reductionism and stimulus-response (environmental) reductionism	Unit 4, Section B
3.4.2 Psychology and science	Objectivity and the empirical method; replicability and falsifiability; theory construction and hypothesis testing	Unit 4, Section B

How Unit 4 is set out

Section 2.3 prints three 30-mark sections of compulsory questions: A, Approaches in psychology; B, Issues and debates in psychology; C, Applied psychology: work and the individual. Section 4.3.2 gives approximate Unit 4 weightings, as a share of the whole International A-level, of AO1 9%, AO2 8% and AO3 13%. The specification does not print command words or mark schemes; your teacher will confirm how each question type is marked.

The key instruction is synoptic: you are “expected to use knowledge and understanding from other areas of the course to illustrate and inform” Section A and B answers. Section 3.4.2 does not name gender and culture bias, psychic determinism, idiographic and nomothetic approaches or social sensitivity, so treat those as background if your teacher covers them.

Free will and determinism

Free will is the view that people can make genuine choices that are not fully caused by outside or internal forces. Determinism is the view that every behaviour has prior causes, so it could in principle be predicted.

• Hard determinism: all behaviour is caused. Free will is an illusion, and “choosing” is just a cause we have not identified yet.
• Soft determinism: behaviour has causes, but within those limits people can still make conscious choices. Free will and determinism are not seen as opposites.
• Biological determinism: behaviour is caused by genes, brain structures, hormones and neurochemistry.
• Environmental determinism: behaviour is caused by the environment, mainly through learning such as reinforcement and punishment.

Named positions. Skinner, in Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), argued against the idea of the “autonomous” person: behaviour is shaped by reinforcement history, so free will is an illusion. That is hard, environmental determinism. Bandura’s idea of reciprocal determinism, set out in Social Foundations of Thought and Action (1986), is a softer position: behaviour, the environment and personal factors such as thoughts all influence each other, so the person is one of the causes, not just the product of them.

Synoptic examples.

• Biological determinism, sleep. Narcolepsy type 1 is linked to the loss of brain cells that produce the neurotransmitter orexin (also called hypocretin). A person cannot simply decide to stay awake if that system is damaged.
• Soft determinism, social influence. Rotter’s (1966) locus of control describes a belief that outcomes depend on your own actions (internal) or outside forces (external). The specification lists it as an explanation of resistance to social influence: an internal locus is thought to help people resist pressure.

The scientific emphasis on causal explanations. Science looks for cause and effect. An experiment manipulates an independent variable and measures its effect on a dependent variable while controlling extraneous variables. That method assumes behaviour is determined: if it were not, there would be no regular effect to find. Prediction and control, the goals Watson set out for psychology in 1913, only make sense if behaviour has causes.

Evaluation.

• For determinism. It fits the scientific method and has produced treatments built on biological causes.
• Against hard determinism. People experience themselves as choosing, and many therapies assume people can change their thinking. Hard determinism is also hard to falsify: any behaviour can be called “caused” after the event.
• Belief in free will may matter. Vohs and Schooler (2008) found that participants who read a passage arguing that behaviour is determined were more likely to cheat on a later test. Later studies have reported contradictory findings, so treat this as debated.
• Soft determinism. It matches how psychologists work, with probabilities rather than certainties, but does not explain how a choice can be partly free and partly caused.

Worked paragraph. Biological determinism says behaviour is caused by the body rather than chosen (knowledge). In narcolepsy, a person falls asleep at unwanted times because orexin-producing cells are lost, so sleepiness in class is not a choice (application). This matters because it reduces blame and justifies medical treatment rather than punishment (analysis). However, a soft determinist would add that the person can still plan naps and routines that reduce the impact, so their behaviour is caused but not completely fixed (evaluation).

The nature-nurture debate

Nature is heredity: characteristics passed on through genes. Nurture is the environment, from conditions before birth to family and culture. The specification asks about relative importance, so argue about balance rather than picking a side.

• Nativist versus empiricist: abilities are largely innate or maturational, versus learned from experience.
• Interactionist approach: nature and nurture influence each other, so behaviour results from both working together. Asking “which one?” is often the wrong question.

Synoptic examples.

• Nature, cognitive development. Baillargeon (1987) used the violation of expectation method: infants watched possible and impossible events, and looking time was measured. Some infants as young as 3.5 months looked longer at impossible events, suggesting some understanding that hidden objects still exist. Piaget had placed object permanence later in the first year. Earlier understanding supports a stronger role for nature.
• Nurture, cognitive development. Vygotsky argued that higher thinking develops through social interaction and cultural tools such as language. Scaffolding by an adult moves a child forward.
• Interaction, biopsychology. Maguire et al. (2000) found that London taxi drivers had a larger posterior hippocampus than controls, and that its volume was positively correlated with time spent as a taxi driver. Experience appears to change the brain (plasticity).
• Interaction, sleep. The sleep/wake cycle depends on an endogenous pacemaker (an inherited internal clock) that is reset by exogenous zeitgebers such as light. Neither works alone. Narcolepsy type 1 is also interactionist: a genetic variant in the HLA system raises risk, and an immune trigger such as an infection is thought to start the loss of orexin cells.

Evaluation.

• Piaget is often misread as purely nature. His theory is interactionist: maturation sets the pace, but schemas only change through assimilation and accommodation of experience.
• Looking-time studies are open to interpretation. Longer looking may show novelty or perceptual interest, not knowledge, so Baillargeon’s data do not settle the debate.
• Interactionism fits the evidence best, but it is then harder to say how much each factor contributes, because each changes the other.

Worked paragraph. An interactionist approach says nature and nurture work together (knowledge). Maguire et al. (2000) found larger posterior hippocampi in London taxi drivers, with volume rising with time spent driving (application). This suggests that years of learning routes changed brain structure, so biology is not fixed at birth (analysis). However, the design was correlational, so people with larger hippocampi might have chosen the job; even so, the link with years of experience fits interaction better than either side alone (evaluation).

Holism and reductionism

Reductionism explains behaviour by breaking it down into its parts, often at a lower, more basic level. Holism argues that a person or group must be studied as a whole, because properties appear at the level of the whole that do not appear in any one part.

Levels of explanation. One behaviour can be explained at several levels, from the most to the least reductionist:

1. Biological: genes, neurotransmitters, brain structures.
2. Basic behavioural: learned stimulus-response links.
3. Psychological or cognitive: thoughts, schemas, information processing.
4. Social and cultural: group influence, norms, culture.

Example: schizophrenia. At the biological level, the dopamine hypothesis links positive symptoms to excess dopamine activity. At the cognitive level, Frith (1992) proposed a fault in the central monitoring of action, so a person may experience their own actions or inner speech as coming from outside. At the social and cultural level, the specification itself asks you to consider culture and gender bias in diagnosis.

• Biological reductionism: explaining behaviour at the physical level. Typical antipsychotics block dopamine D2 receptors, which supports the dopamine hypothesis.
• Stimulus-response (environmental) reductionism: explaining behaviour as learned links between stimuli and responses, ignoring what goes on in the mind. Pavlov’s and Skinner’s laboratory research reduces learning to conditioned associations.

Evaluation.

• Strength of reductionism. Clear, testable variables and practical treatments such as antipsychotic drugs.
• Limit of biological reductionism. Antipsychotics block dopamine receptors within hours, but symptoms usually take days or weeks to improve. Atypical antipsychotics have been reported to work better than typicals on negative symptoms, and other neurotransmitters such as glutamate are involved. So dopamine alone is an incomplete account.
• Limit of stimulus-response reductionism. Tolman and Honzik (1930) found that rats which explored a maze without food for 10 days, and were then rewarded on day 11, quickly matched rats that had been rewarded all along. They had learned the layout without reinforcement, which pure stimulus-response links cannot explain.
• Holism. Janis (1972) described groupthink, where the drive for agreement in a close-knit group overrides realistic appraisal of alternatives and leads to poor decisions. Such effects exist only at the group level. But holistic accounts are harder to test, because too many variables interact.

Worked paragraph. Stimulus-response reductionism explains learning as conditioned links between stimuli and responses (knowledge). Skinner would explain a rat’s maze running as a response strengthened by food (application). This gives precise, measurable variables, which is why it produced reliable laws of reinforcement (analysis). However, Tolman and Honzik (1930) showed that rats which had not been rewarded had still learned the maze, which only showed once food appeared on day 11; this suggests an internal cognitive map, so the reductionist account leaves out a mental level (evaluation).

Psychology and science

Objectivity means findings are not affected by the researcher’s expectations. The empirical method means gaining knowledge through observation and measurement rather than argument or belief.

Watson (1913), rejecting the introspection used in early laboratories, argued that psychology should be “a purely objective experimental branch of natural science”, that introspection forms no essential part of its methods, and that its goal is “the prediction and control of behavior”.

Example. Piaget built much of his early infancy theory from observing his own children, which risks observer bias. Baillargeon’s looking-time measure is more objective because it records seconds, although what the number means is still interpreted.

Replicability means a study can be repeated with the same method and give similar results. The Open Science Collaboration (2015), led by Nosek, repeated 100 studies that had been published in 2008. Of the original studies, 97% had statistically significant results; of the replications, 36% did.

Falsifiability is Popper’s criterion for a scientific theory. In The Logic of Scientific Discovery (German 1934, English 1959) he argued that a theory is scientific only if some possible observation could prove it false. Popper criticised Adler’s individual psychology because it could explain any behaviour, so nothing could ever count against it.

Theory construction and hypothesis testing. In the hypothetico-deductive cycle, a theory produces a testable hypothesis, data are collected, and the theory is supported, revised or rejected. Baddeley and Hitch proposed the working memory model in 1974. In 2000 Baddeley added the episodic buffer, partly because some amnesic patients could recall far more of a story in the short term than the phonological loop could hold. The model was revised to fit new evidence, which is how theories should develop.

Evaluation.

• For scientific status. Biological, behaviourist and cognitive research uses controlled experiments, objective measures and falsifiable hypotheses, such as Baillargeon’s test of Piaget’s timing.
• Against. Low replication rates and the role of interpretation challenge objectivity. Human participants react to being studied (demand characteristics), which physics does not face.
• A counter-argument. The replication problem was found by scientific methods, and responses such as larger samples and pre-registration of hypotheses are themselves scientific corrections.

Worked paragraph. Falsifiability means a theory must make predictions that could be shown to be wrong (knowledge). Piaget’s theory predicted that young infants lack object permanence, and Baillargeon (1987) found looking-time evidence of it in some infants at 3.5 months (application). Because the claim could be tested and challenged, Piaget’s theory meets Popper’s criterion, and the result led to revision of his timeline (analysis). However, critics question whether looking time measures knowledge, so falsification in psychology often depends on how a measure is interpreted (evaluation).

Common errors

• Saying soft determinism means “some behaviour is caused and some is free”. It means behaviour is caused, but conscious choice still operates within those causes.
• Treating “biological determinism” and “biological reductionism” as the same thing. One is about what causes behaviour; the other is about the level used to explain it.
• Defining falsifiability as “it has been proved false”. A falsifiable theory could be shown false; it may still be supported.
• Saying a failed replication proves the original was wrong. Differences in samples or procedure can also explain it.
• Writing a debate answer with no example from the rest of the course.
• Describing four debates in an extended answer with no judgement. AO3 carries the largest Unit 4 weighting.

Where to go next

The introductory topics guide gives you social influence and memory examples, such as locus of control and the working memory model. The Unit 2 biopsychology, development and research methods guide covers the Unit 2 topics many of these examples come from. For more examples, use the psychology of sleep, schizophrenia and scientific approaches guides. The 9685 exam preparation guide explains resits.

Official syllabus

OxfordAQA International AS and A-level Psychology (9685) specification, Version 3.1 (International A-level exams May/June 2020 onwards): section 3.4 (Approaches and applications), section 3.4.2 (Issues and debates in psychology), section 2.3 (Unit 4 structure) and section 4.3 (assessment objectives and weightings).