You hear this on commercials all the time, what does it mean? ?

Question

Okay, you hear this on commercials all the time... what is a double blind study ? and if no one knows what that is they why is so "special" .??? I dont get it... please, no sarcastic answers.. 10 points to the one that does actually answer the question.

Answer 1

double-blind study - an experimental procedure in which neither the subjects of the experiment nor the persons administering the experiment know the critical aspects of the experiment; "a double-blind procedure is used to guard against both experimenter bias and placebo effects"

Answer 2

A"double-blind" study is a term to denote a scientific research test in which neither the doctor nor the patient knows whether a drug is the real test subject, or a "placebo"--a sugar pill, for example, that has no medicine in it at all. The reason for this type of test is to balance the subjects and the scientists--so the scientist doesn't "give away" some hint whether they are administering the real or phony drug (by word or even facial expressing). There is such a power of autosuggestion that patients will affect the test by their faith in the drug.      

Answer 3

Let's say that I have a magic pill that is supposed to make people giddy and I want to test whether it really does make people more giddy than a sugar pill does. The test subjects should not know whether they got the magic pill or just a sugar pill instead. The people that I hire to watch and measure the giddiness level after the pills are administered should not know beforehand which people in the test group really got the magic pill. Neither the test subject, nor the reviewer knows. That way, any giddiness increase noted by the testers is not due to their expectations. Increased giddiness is either by the test subjects expectation or by actual magic pill effectiveness.  If the test subjects don't even know that the magic pill is supposed to make them giddy, then we can rule that out and claim that the increased giddiness is the magic of the pill. The double blind experiment proves it!

- oops, we forgot to tell you that we carefully screened the test subjects to get the ones that would tend to have maximum giddiness with little or no side effects for the study. Remember that the company that is paying us big bucks to run this study wants certain results - and will go somewhere else if we don't give them their moneys worth.  

Please excuse the cynicism - but this type of making the statistics lie goes on all the time by both unscrupulous people and ignorant people.

Answer 4

A blind study is when they ask someone to try a product without telling them what the name is, because some people buy on name recognition. Double blind is when they also don't tell what the product is supposed to do, like cleaning products for example, it can remove rust stains although they don't tell the tester that so they are even more impressed when it works.

Answer 5

Yes, it's an experiment where the people doing the experiment don't know everything, like which pills were given to which participants.  It keeps their observations completely objective.

Answer 6

You want to know what it is and so far no one has answered it for you...for the best answer you choose a couple hours after you post it by going and visiting your question tab on profile...

A double blind experiment example would be taking coke and pepsi and putting them on a table.  What makes the study "double blind" is not only they test subjects not knowing which is which, but also the persons conducting the experiment, meaning the cup fillers and note takers do not know which is which...

It is a fact that if a person doing an experiment is biased toward an outcome or product, they will taint the experiment subconsciously.  

So, the cups are filled without knowing which is which, the number of times on or other(let us say #1 and #2) are picked is logged down. Then at the end the products are revealed and the points tallied up.

Answer 7

A blind study means they know nothing about you or you situation, therefore anything they learn is unbias!!!