HookThe room in Leipzig where psychology stopped being philosophy
In 1879, in a converted room at the University of Leipzig, Wilhelm Wundt did something nobody had done before: he studied the mind with a stopwatch. For two thousand years, questions about thought and feeling had belonged to philosophers, who argued them from the armchair. Wundt opened the first laboratory dedicated to psychology, trained observers to report the contents of their own consciousness under controlled conditions — a method he called introspection — and insisted the results be recorded systematically. That single decision, to bring measurement into the study of mind, is the moment psychology became a science and the reason AQA starts the whole approaches topic with him.
What follows is a two-century argument about the best way to explain human behaviour, and each approach in this topic is one voice in it. The behaviourists threw out the unobservable mind entirely and studied only what they could measure. Social learning theory put a thinking person back between stimulus and response. The cognitive approach modelled that inner mind like a computer; the biological approach reduced it to genes and neurochemistry; the psychodynamic approach dived beneath it to the unconscious; and humanistic psychology rejected the lot, insisting people have free will and cannot be reduced to any of it. You are not asked to pick a winner. You are asked to hold all seven in your head at once and, in the final comparison, to place each on the great fault lines of the subject — nature versus nurture, determinism versus free will, reductionism versus holism. Master those fault lines and the 16-mark comparison essay writes itself.
ModelOrigins — Wundt, introspection and the birth of a science
Before 1879, 'psychology' meant philosophical speculation about the soul. Wundt's contribution was method: he isolated conscious experience into its basic elements — sensations and feelings — an approach later called structuralism, and used standardised, replicable introspection in which trained participants described their reaction to a controlled stimulus, such as a ticking metronome. By controlling the stimulus and standardising the procedure, he made the study of mind empirical and repeatable.
Introspection's weakness became the launch pad for everything after it. Because inner experience is private, two people's introspective reports could not be checked against each other — the data were not objective or reliably measurable. In 1913 Watson attacked this head-on, arguing that a science must study only what is publicly observable, which meant behaviour, not consciousness. That rejection founded behaviourism and set the pattern for the topic: every later approach defines itself partly by how much of the hidden inner world it is willing to let back in.
MechanismThe behaviourist approach — learning by association and consequence
Behaviourism explains all behaviour as learned from the environment through two mechanisms. Classical conditioning, demonstrated by Pavlov, is learning by association: his dogs naturally salivated (an unconditioned response) at food (an unconditioned stimulus); by repeatedly ringing a bell (a neutral stimulus) just before the food, Pavlov made the bell alone trigger salivation — the bell had become a conditioned stimulus producing a conditioned response. Operant conditioning, demonstrated by Skinner, is learning by consequence: in his 'Skinner box', a rat that happened to press a lever received a food pellet and pressed more often. Positive reinforcement (adding a reward) and negative reinforcement (removing something unpleasant) both increase a behaviour; punishment decreases it.
The approach's great strength is scientific rigour — it studies observable behaviour under controlled laboratory conditions, giving it credibility and real-world applications from token economies to phobia treatments. Its great weakness is that it is environmentally deterministic and mechanistic: by explaining humans through studies of rats and pigeons, it ignores the role of conscious thought, which is precisely the gap the next approach was built to fill.
A worked AO3 chunk showing how to evaluate an approach rather than describe it: 'A strength of the behaviourist approach is its scientific methodology — by measuring observable behaviour in controlled conditions such as the Skinner box, it establishes clear cause-and-effect relationships, which gives the approach credibility as a science. However, this control comes at the cost of validity: much of the supporting evidence uses non-human animals, and while Skinner argued the same laws of learning apply across species, humans have conscious thought and free will that a rat pressing a lever cannot model. This is why social learning theory, which reintroduces mental mediating processes, is often seen as a more complete account of human learning.' Notice each sentence names a concept the mark scheme credits — cause-and-effect, validity, generalisation from animals, determinism — and ends by linking forward, so the evaluation drives an argument instead of listing pros and cons.
MechanismSocial learning theory — Bandura and the thinking observer
Bandura agreed with the behaviourists that behaviour is learned, but insisted it is learned socially — by watching others — and that cognition mediates the process. Learning happens through imitation of role models, driven by identification (we copy models we see as similar or admirable) and vicarious reinforcement (we imitate behaviour we have seen rewarded in someone else, not just behaviour rewarded in ourselves). His Bobo doll studies (1961, 1963) showed children who watched an adult attack an inflatable doll went on to reproduce that aggression, and did so more when they had seen the model rewarded.
Crucially, Bandura placed four mediational processes between observing a behaviour and performing it — attention, retention, reproduction and motivation — restoring the mind that behaviourism had banished. This makes SLT a bridge: more complete than behaviourism because it explains how humans learn abstractly and second-hand, yet still criticised for underplaying biological factors and for relying on lab studies of contrived aggression that may lack ecological validity.
ModelThe cognitive approach — the mind as an information processor
The cognitive approach studies the internal mental processes — perception, memory, attention, thinking — that behaviourism refused to touch, treating them as legitimate objects of scientific study to be investigated indirectly by making inferences from behaviour. Its central tool is the schema: a mental framework of beliefs and expectations, built from experience, that organises information and shapes how we interpret the world (and which can cause errors when it fills gaps with assumptions). To model the mind, cognitive psychologists use theoretical models (like the multi-store model of memory) and computer models that frame the mind as an information processor with input, storage and output.
The modern frontier is cognitive neuroscience — the systematic study of how brain structures underpin mental processes, made possible by brain-scanning technology such as fMRI. Tulving's work mapping different types of long-term memory onto different brain regions is a classic example. The approach's strengths are its scientific, objective methods and its huge applications (from CBT to eyewitness research); its weakness is that inference from behaviour to mental process can be indirect and, some argue, produces 'machine reductionist' models that ignore emotion and motivation.
ModelThe biological approach — genes, chemistry and evolution
The biological approach argues that to understand behaviour we must first look at its physical basis: everything psychological is at first biological. It works on three levels. Genes: behaviour is inherited, and the approach distinguishes the genotype (the genetic code you are born with) from the phenotype (the observable characteristics that result once genes interact with the environment) — twin studies, comparing concordance in identical versus non-identical twins, are the standard method for isolating genetic influence. Biological structures: the brain and nervous system shape behaviour. Neurochemistry: imbalances of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine are linked to disorders.
The approach also draws on evolution: behaviours that improved survival and reproduction were naturally selected and passed on, which is how it explains phenomena from attachment to aggression. Its strengths are a highly scientific, precise methodology and real-world applications such as psychoactive drugs. Its weaknesses are biological reductionism (reducing complex behaviour to genes or chemicals) and determinism (implying our biology dictates our behaviour, with uncomfortable implications for personal and legal responsibility).
ModelThe psychodynamic approach — the unconscious beneath the surface
Freud's psychodynamic approach argues that behaviour is driven by an unconscious mind — the vast, hidden part of the iceberg beneath conscious awareness, full of repressed memories and desires that still steer us. Personality has three parts in permanent conflict: the Id (present at birth, the pleasure-seeking mass of instinctive drives), the Ego (the reality-checking mediator that develops around age two), and the Superego (the internalised sense of right and wrong, our conscience, formed around age five). To manage the anxiety of this conflict, the ego deploys defence mechanisms — repression (burying threatening thoughts), denial (refusing to accept reality) and displacement (redirecting an impulse onto a safer target).
Personality is shaped through five psychosexual stages — oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital — and unresolved conflict at any stage leaves a lasting fixation. In the phallic stage, Freud's controversial Oedipus complex has a boy desire his mother and fear his father before resolving the conflict by identifying with the father, internalising his gender role and morality. The approach's strengths are its explanatory reach and its founding of psychotherapy; its fatal weakness for a science is that concepts like the unconscious are unfalsifiable — they cannot be empirically tested or disproved.
ModelHumanistic psychology — free will and the drive to grow
Humanistic psychology rejects the determinism of every approach above it, insisting humans have free will — we are active agents who determine our own development, not the products of conditioning, genes or unconscious drives. Its goal is self-actualisation: the innate drive to fulfil one's full potential, which sits at the peak of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That hierarchy is a pyramid — physiological needs, then safety, then love and belonging, then esteem — and each level must be substantially met before a person can climb towards the self-actualisation at the top.
Rogers argued that personal growth requires congruence: a match between the self we perceive and our ideal self. A gap between them causes low self-worth, and the gap often originates in conditions of worth — the strings parents attach to their love ('I will value you only if...'), which the child internalises. Rogers's client-centred therapy provides the 'unconditional positive regard' those clients never received. The approach is praised for being holistic and person-centred and for its optimistic, non-deterministic view of people, but criticised as unscientific, vague, and culturally biased towards Western individualism.
CaseComparing the approaches — the fault lines that structure the essay
The final leaf asks you to compare the approaches, and the way to score is to marshal them on the subject's great debates rather than describe each again. On nature versus nurture: the biological approach is strongly nature (genes, evolution), behaviourism and SLT are strongly nurture (all learned), while the cognitive and psychodynamic approaches sit in between. On determinism versus free will: behaviourism is environmentally deterministic, the biological approach biologically deterministic, the psychodynamic approach psychically deterministic (driven by the unconscious) — only humanistic psychology champions free will. On reductionism versus holism: the biological (genes, neurons) and behaviourist (stimulus-response) approaches are the most reductionist; humanistic psychology is the most holistic. And on nomothetic versus idiographic: behaviourist, cognitive and biological approaches seek general laws (nomothetic), while the humanistic approach studies the unique individual (idiographic).
Comparisons also run on scientific credibility (biological and cognitive high; psychodynamic and humanistic low, being hard to falsify) and on real-world usefulness (behaviourist token economies, biological drugs, cognitive CBT). The examiner does not want a paragraph on each approach in isolation; they want each debate used as a lens through which two or more approaches are set against each other.
A model comparison paragraph, annotated. 'The behaviourist and biological approaches agree that behaviour is determined rather than freely chosen, but they disagree on the source: behaviourism locates the cause in the external environment (conditioning), making it environmentally deterministic, whereas the biological approach locates it in internal genes and neurochemistry, making it biologically deterministic. Both therefore stand opposed to the humanistic approach, which alone insists on free will and self-determination. The practical significance is real: a deterministic approach yields powerful, testable treatments — behaviour-shaping token economies, serotonin-targeting drugs — that a free-will approach cannot, but it does so by denying the personal responsibility that the legal system and everyday life assume. The most defensible position is an interactionist one, recognising that biology sets predispositions the environment then shapes.' The paragraph never describes an approach in isolation — every clause is a point of agreement or disagreement between approaches on a named debate, which is exactly what 'compare' demands.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
AQA marks approaches essays out of 16 (6 AO1 + 10 AO3) across four levels, and the single biggest discriminator is whether AO3 genuinely evaluates or merely lists. For any 'discuss/evaluate the X approach' question, the safest AO3 spine is the debates: place the approach on nature–nurture, determinism–free will, reductionism–holism and scientific credibility, and treat each as a point that must be evidenced and explained, not asserted. A description of Pavlov's dogs that never reaches these debates is capped in the lower bands.
Comparison questions ('compare two approaches', or the 8-mark 'outline and compare') are won by structure: never write one approach then the other in two silos — organise by debate and set the approaches against each other within each paragraph ('both are deterministic, but they differ on the source...'). Use the correct technical vocabulary the mark scheme rewards — environmental versus biological versus psychic determinism, nomothetic versus idiographic, falsifiability — because precise terms signal understanding faster than paragraphs of narrative.
Watch the command word and the marks. A 6-mark 'outline' is pure AO1 and wants accurate detail with no evaluation; a 4-mark 'explain how the biological approach would account for [scenario]' is AO2 and needs concepts tied explicitly to the stem. Do not evaluate when only outline is asked, and do not merely describe when discuss is asked — mis-reading the command word is the error examiners report most.