Applied Psychological Science × AI
Your models learn from people. We study the people.
PsyConsulting designs and conducts evidence-based human studies — producing the behavioral and psychological data that applied AI and LLM projects need to be accurate, safe, and genuinely human-centered.
Now forming a small number of founding engagements.
What we do
Focus areas
Four ways doctoral-level behavioral research plugs into a modern AI team — wherever your system meets a human being.
Human Studies & Data Collection
Designing and running rigorous studies with human participants — surveys, structured interviews, behavioral tasks — to produce the real-world, labeled data your models actually need.
Behavioral Data for Training & Evaluation
Psychologically grounded datasets, rubrics, and human-in-the-loop evaluation protocols for model training, fine-tuning, and alignment work.
Human–AI Interaction Research
Studying how real people understand, trust, and use AI systems — then translating those findings into concrete product, UX, and safety decisions.
Methodology & Measurement
Psychometrics, validated instruments, and sound research design brought to the human questions teams too often answer by intuition alone.
The approach
Most AI teams are rich in engineering and thin in behavioral science. We bring the missing half of the equation.
Rigor over intuition
Decisions about human behavior deserve the same methodological care as any published human-subjects study — not a hunch in a stand-up meeting.
Participants, respected
Studies designed with informed consent, privacy, and participant wellbeing at the center — the standards of professional research practice.
Insight you can act on
Not just data and dashboards, but clear, decision-ready guidance your team can build and ship against.
Who's behind it
The practice
Mark M. Peterson, Psy.D.
— Doctorate in Psychology
— Professor, Psychology & World Religions
— EMDR & Trauma-Focused Clinician
— Research & Measurement Specialist
PsyConsulting is the consulting practice of Dr. Mark M. Peterson — a psychology doctorate, award-winning professor of psychology and world religions, and EMDR and trauma-focused clinician, with roughly thirty years across clinical practice, research, and higher education.
That career has centered on a single question that turns out to matter enormously for AI: how do you study human beings rigorously, ethically, and usefully? His doctoral research — on the psychology of how people process emotion and memory — was built on exactly the kinds of human-subjects methods, measurement, and study design that applied AI work increasingly depends on.
PsyConsulting brings that craft to teams building systems that learn from, serve, and shape human behavior.
Selected work · forthcoming
The casebook is being written.
As founding engagements take shape, anonymized project summaries and research insights will live here. If you'd like to be part of that first chapter, the door is open.
Get in touch
Start a conversation
Tell me a little about the project, the system, or the human question you're trying to answer. I read every message personally and reply within a couple of business days.