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Theoretical psychology originated from the philosophy of science, with logic and rationality at the base of each new idea. It existed before empirical or experimental psychology. Theoretical psychology is an interdisciplinary field involving psychologists specializing in a wide variety of psychological branches.
Experimental psychology refers to work done by those who apply experimental methods to psychological study and the underlying processes. Experimental psychologists employ human participants and animal subjects to study a great many topics, including (among others) sensation, perception, memory, cognition, learning, motivation, emotion; developmental processes, social psychology, and the neural ...
Experimental methods are very popular in psychology, going back more than 100 years. Experimental psychology is a sub-discipline of psychology . Statistical methods applied for designing and analyzing experimental psychological data include the t-test, ANOVA, ANCOVA, MANOVA, MANCOVA, binomial test, chi-square, etc.
Thus thought experiments belong to a theoretical discipline, usually to theoretical physics, but often to theoretical philosophy. In any case, it must be distinguished from a real experiment, which belongs naturally to the experimental discipline and has "the final decision on true or not true", at least in physics.
A wide range of research methods are used in psychology. These methods vary by the sources from which information is obtained, how that information is sampled, and the types of instruments that are used in data collection. Methods also vary by whether they collect qualitative data, quantitative data or both.
The experimental analysis of behavior is a science that studies the behavior of individuals across a variety of species. A key early scientist was B. F. Skinner who discovered operant behavior, reinforcers, secondary reinforcers, contingencies of reinforcement, stimulus control, shaping, intermittent schedules, discrimination, and generalization.
Skinner box. In the behavioural sciences (e.g. psychology, biology, neurosciences), an experimental paradigm, is an experimental setup or way of conducting a certain type of experiment (a protocol) that is defined by certain fine-tuned standards, and often has a theoretical background.
In some cases, independent variables cannot be manipulated, for example when testing the difference between two groups who have a different disease, or testing the difference between genders (obviously variables that would be hard or unethical to assign participants to). In these cases, a quasi-experimental design may be used.