What is a Double Blind Test?
Neither side knows who is getting what. That is, if you are testing a product, the product and control are numbered. The people setting up the test know which number is which, but neither the person administering the test, nor the person trying it know which is which. That way, the person administering the test can’t possibly give any cues to tell the person receiving the product which is better.
A double blind test is a scientific test in which neither test subjects nor administrators know who is in the control group and who is in the experimental group. The intent is to create an unbiased test environment, ensuring that the results of the testing are accurate and will stand up to analysis by other members of the scientific community. The concept of a double blind test is an excellent example of the scientific method, since it aims to be entirely objective and potentially repeatable. Before delving into the details of a double blind test, it helps to understand how scientific testing is typically administered. For our purposes, we will use a test of a new pharmaceutical product as an example, although such testing can also be performed to research other matters of interest in fields such as psychology. The goal of the test is to determine whether or not the medication is effective, and what the side effects of the medication may be. One could simply offer the medication to a g
>What is the purpose of it? It’s a test of a medical treatment in which neither the patients nor the people who administer, coadminister, or evaluate the effect of the treatment by having contact with the patients and their caretakers, know whether or not the treatment or the placebo control is being given to any given patient. This avoids (or controls for) the placebo effect in the patients, and also the unconscious biased observation effect in the evaluators. The randomized double blind clinical trial is the gold standard for gauging the effect of treatments in which the treatment endpoint is at all susceptible to unconscious bias by either treators or treatees. Obviously, not all treatments NEED to be looked at in this manner. For example, since nobody really seriously thinks that people mentally influence the size of their tumors, a drug which shrinks tumors can be tested in a single blind fashion (ie, only the radiologists aren’t told who got the drug).
