One of the most important advancements in scientific methodology, dating from it’s development in the mid-19th century, is the double-blind protocol, a method of testing in which neither the experimenter nor the subjects are aware of certain key variables in the study, like the identity of the control group and the test group.
First proposed by one Claude Bernard, a physiologist, it was a bit of an extreme departure from the earlier Enlightenment attitude that only trained scientists were qualified to conduct experiments. Double-blinding has the advantage of side-stepping the problems of experimenter biases and expectation, and is a superior method overall to single-blinded studies, and not just in medical research either.
It is highly useful in the physical sciences as well, such as the incident in the early 1900s with the alleged discovery of N-Rays by René Blondlot at the University of Nancy in France: Just previously, X-Rays had been discovered, and Blondlot believed he had uncovered yet another form of radiation, N-Rays.
It turned out that when a double-blind test of the procedures to produce N-Rays was covertly conducted by a visiting American physicist, that detection of them was simply the result of subjective misperception, that they did not actually exist, caused by the prior belief and expectation to see them by Blondlot and his associates.
During the double-blinding procedure, key components of the instruments thought to produce the rays were secretly altered. Blondlot saw the rays when they should not have been there (an aluminum prism, thought to refract the rays, was surreptitiously removed) by his own belief in how they should behave, and were not seen when they should have been (a lead screen was removed from one such test, unknown to him) had they been real.
This protocol was a revolutionary idea when first proposed, and is occasionally even done in paranormal research, though the studies have a distressing tendency when so done to produce negative results, often well within the boundaries of chance when independently conducted.
Even those with pro-paranormal sympathies at the time, when they are both honest and competent, produce such results in experiments, which sometimes leads a wee few of them to adopt a more skeptical stance, even if they continue to truly believe in psychic phenomena shortly after the original failed study.
In any case, double-blinding is one of the many methods of science used to ferret out the secrets of Nature, and human test-subjects in a manner that allows a more objective examination of whether something actually works, on what, in what way, and how well. It’s a development that was truly remarkable when it was conceived and even now one of the best of many scientific methods. It will likely be around much longer until a better system is discovered in that evolving social enterprise we call science. Fnord.
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