ABSTRACT
The wide variety of methods and designs employed by experimental psychologists is intended to compare individuals and groups or treatments and conditions in order to describe behavior or test hypotheses. The minimum laboratory study in psychology assesses an experimental effect by comparing a condition where a treatment has been applied with one where it has not. Psychology is concerned, broadly, with describing, explaining, and predicting mental processes and behavior in humans and other animals in a wide variety of environmental contexts, Man is the reference point in this psychological nexus. Phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and cultural comparisons are principal in psychology because together they encompass the scope of substantive thinking and empirical study of man's mental processes and behavior in the widest variety of contexts. The principal comparisons in psychology share a significant number of philosophical and theoretical assumptions, orient themselves similarly to empirical inquiry, confront similar methodological problems, and are invested in reaching parallel kinds of conclusions.
