What Is A Double Blind Study? - Blinded Experiments For Doctoral Students In Organization Studies

Описание: I provide a double blind study definition, and define a single blind study. I provide rationale about why it is important to do a double blind experiment.

What is a double blind study? A double-blind study occurs when neither the subjects or the researcher know who is in the treatment and control condition of an experiment.

What is a single blind study? A single blind study occurs when just the subjects do not know who is in the treatment and control condition of an experiment. They may or may not know that they are an experiment, but if they do know, they have no idea if they are in the treatment or control condition.

Who uses blinded experiments? Traditionally, double blinded experiments are used in psychology, marketing, or medical research. Blinding in clinical trials is essential. However, it is becoming increasingly important in other fields like economics, strategy, or sociology.

Why do you want to blind experiments? A single blinded experiment mitigates things like the placebo effect, the Hawthorne Effect, or social desirability bias. Basically, people often want to help the researcher out by trying to guess how they should act, and behaving in that way. They may also actually feel like the treatment or intervention is actually doing something to them.

What do double blind studies control for? A double blinded experiment is particularly important to mitigate confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency of researchers to favor one’s hypothesis based on preexisting knowledge. Often, it is very easy for researchers to wish for their hypotheses to be confirmed, so they often act in the way to confirm those hypotheses. To mitigate these biases, it is believed that blinding the researcher themselves from knowing the results is an effective way to mitigate confirmation biases.

What Is the double blind procedure? Normally what you would do is select the number of subjects that you would like to have in a treatment group and a control group. If you would like only one treatment group and one control group, normally looks like about 30 subjects in each. Then you are creating not random number generator in MS Excel or similar program. For example, you might use the =rand() function, and for every subject above 0.5 you would assign the treatment.

If you wanted to create a double-blind procedure, you were the first randomize across the subjects and then randomize across the experimenters. For example, you would tell experimenters (A,B,C,D) that each of the conditions was either I or II, and not tell them what the I or II was the treatment or control.

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David Maslach is a research professor of entrepreneurship, innovation, and business strategy, I discuss topics, such as behavioral science, strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and apply these to my new peer proofreading and editing platform. Topics include the sharing economy, altruism, investing in technology, and bounded rationality. My favorite videos pertain to incentives, goal setting, and learning from failure to drive behaviors such as weight loss, stopping telemarketers, creating novel technologies, and creating new movements.

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