Artificial Psychology

This paper traces the historical and theoretical evolution from human and animal psychology toward the emerging field of artificial psychology. Beginning with behaviorism and ethology, it explores the transition to cognitive and holistic models, culminating in the formulation of artificial psychology as both a scientific discipline and an engineering practice. The work introduces a tripartite structure of Artificial Intelligence—application, replication, and auto-replication—and examines how these stages facilitate increasingly autonomous cognitive architectures. The concept of artificial psychology is analyzed not merely as a human-engineered construct but as a potential self-reflective system within AI. As artificial systems reach the auto-replication phase, artificial psychology may diverge from its anthropocentric origins, giving rise to novel, non-human forms of cognition grounded in flexible, non-biological logic. This marks a fundamental ontological shift from simulation to authentic artificial subjectivity, with profound ethical and philosophical implications for responsibility, autonomy, and post-human intelligence.