Software development is about people solving problems. They do this alone or in groups, for themselves or for others, with knowledge, experiences and biases. People solving problems have been empirically studied for more than two hundreds years in psychology, affecting not only treatment processes, but also economics, management, marketing, teaching and numerous other disciplines. What can we learn from how psychology researchers do their empirical studies and succeed in achieving useful results and affect practice? In this talk I will examine similarities and differences in use of empirical methods in psychology and software engineering and summarize this in what I argue has the potential of improving the quality and impact of our empirical software engineering studies.