Double Blind Procedure

The double-blind procedure, a procedure that eliminates biasness hence generating more precise results is widely used by psychologists in experimental research to determine the cause-effect relationship. This essay will describe the nature, the purpose and advantages of using the double-blind procedure in scientific research.

Myers (2002) defines the double-blind procedure as a procedure where both the experimenter and subject are unaware about which subjects have received the actual treatment or the placebo. The subjects are randomly assigned to two different groups, that is the experimental and the control group. The former is given the actual treatment, while the latter receives a placebo which serves as an inauthentic substitute of a treatment that has no substantial chemical distinguishing qualities or active agent (Feldman, 1999). However, both groups do not know if they are receiving the actual treatment or not.

The double-blind procedure is usually used when testing a drug or in psychotherapy. When testing a drug, the person administering the drugs should be ignorant about whether they are dispensing the actual drug or the placebo (Feldman, 1999). For instance, the experimenter administers the drugs using a set of numbered containers. Alternatively, get someone else dispense them (Carlson & Buskit, 1997). For psychotherapy, someone performs the psychotherapy and someone else evaluates the results (Carlson & Buskit, 1997).

Several factors can affect the actual results of an experiment. Among them are experimental and subject bias. Experimental bias concerns anything that misconstrues the experimenter's comprehension of the relationship between the dependent and independent variable (Feldman, 1999). Subject bias is the tendency of the subject to behave atypically. The double-blind procedure evades experimental and subject bias as the experimenter evaluates results unbiased as the experimenter is uninformed about whether the subject has received the actual treatment or the placebo and the subject will behave normally as they do not know if they have received the actual treatment or the pseudotreatment, the placebo. Therefore, the results and any distinctions among the control and experimental groups are clearly based on the independent variable and has to be the effect of the treatment. For example, in an experiment to evaluate a drug that encourages engagement in conversations, after administering the drugs to the experimental group and the placebo to the control group, the experimenters talk with participants and evaluate the conversation's degree of excellence which are not easy to assess. Thus, the experimenter might be biased and unintentionally give the participants in the experimental group better evaluations because they know that this group has been administered the real drug (Carlson & Buskit, 1997).