History Main / NoControlGroup

->''[Caesars CEO Gary Loveman] likes to say there are three things that can get you fired from Caesars: [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking Stealing, sexual harassment and running an experiment without a control group.]]''

** In addition, even in biological settings controls are not always necessary. If you are testing a serum to turn people into super-soldiers, there's no point in having a control group because we already know that people don't spontaneously turn into super-soldiers when given a placebo. Any such effect can only be the result of the serum, with no control group needed to know that. Control groups are only a necessity when looking for relatively small effects that can only be seen by statistically studying large groups. A serum to slightly increase sporting performance would need a control group to be sure any effect was not simply due to people unconsciously trying harder because they think they should be doing better after being injected with something. A serum that turns people into Captain America with an immediate large increase in muscle mass and the ability to run many times faster than any other human, not so much.

* A nice little aversion in ''StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' where Sisko, Jake, Nog, and [[ItMakesSenseInContext Quark]] are surveying a planet, Nog notes they are going to check other water sources to make sure the elements in the water they are reading isn't unique to the local area.

** As Victorian-era sexologists like Havelock Ellis and von Kraft-Ebbing were vocally frustrated with their society's squeamish refusal to acknowledge ''any'' form of human sexuality whatsoever for reasons of propriety, the (black) joke hypothesis could well have been the case. They were, after all, scientists who were trained in appropriate methodology [[note]]even a cursory glance at their published work makes this clear[[/note]] and who carefully trained others to treat the subject matter carefully and diligently.

[[folder:Real Life]]
* A RealLife example, [[http://lesswrong.com/lw/37k/rationality_quotes_december_2010/35rk attributed to Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr.]]:
-->'One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.
-->
-->At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. [[EmergencyTransformation That would have doomed half of them to their death.]]”
-->
-->God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”'
** Because of the ethical considerations of giving potentially dying people placebos and condemning them to death, many medical drug tests have a "control" group which receives the best known conventional treatment (the "gold-standard regimen") while the test group receives the new drug, and it's compared to the known rather than to completely untreated people.
** There have been more than a few cases of doctors deciding to forgo control groups in order to rush out a life-saving drug, only for it to be tragically realized later how ineffective and/or fatal it actually was.
* This is believed to be the origin of the saying "stop it or you'll go blind". Because early sex researchers thought that "normal, respectable" people would be offended at the researchers questioning them about something as private as sex, the researchers decided to ask low-status people, most notably the blind housed in institutions. They found a high incidence of masturbation amongst the blind. Since there was no control group, people simply assumed that the high numbers were abnormal ([[ScienceMarchesOn they're not]]) and that [[FalseCause the blindness was caused by masturbation.]] Or it may have just been a joke which some people took seriously. Nobody now knows for sure.
[[/folder]]

* This is believed to be the origin of the saying "stop it or you'll go blind". Because early sex researchers thought that "normal, respectable" people would be offended at the researchers questioning them about something as private as sex, the researchers decided to ask low-status people, most notably the blind housed in institutions. They found a high incidence of masturbation amongst the blind. Since there was no control group, people simply assumed that the high numbers were abnormal ([[ScienceMarchesOn they're not]]) and that the blindness was caused by masturbation. Or it may have just been a joke which some people took seriously. Nobody now knows for sure.

** Ironically, this may violate experimental procedure in a different way. A second variable introduced into the experiment is known as an [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding procedural confound]], and poses a danger to the validity of the experiment.

* In Creator/StephenKing's ''Literature/{{Firestarter}}'' [[MadScientist Dr. Wanless]] tells the students that half of them will be receiving distilled water (and the other half will be receiving a mildly hallucinogenic drug called "Lot 6"), but it's made clear later on that all of the volunteers received "Lot 6" (which induces a wide variety of psychic powers in the subjects, some of which are permanent -- not to mention acting as a mutagen which produces even stronger results in the children of those who receive it).

* Despite usually being the epitome of unscientific, ''TheXFiles'' actually gets this one right. In the episode ''Red Museum'', a small town was being used to test one of the evil conspiracy's plans for turning people into half-alien monsters. The method being tested here was feeding them beef from cattle injected with alien growth hormones, which failed to turn them into aliens, but did turn several teenage boys into super-predatory rapists. The conspiracy guys also had one of their men establish a weird cult run out of a nearby farmhouse whose members were all vegetarians, in order to act as a control group.
** Except a proper control group in that case would consist of people being fed beef from cattle not injected with alien growth hormones.
*** We already know what happens if you feed people beef from cattle not injected with alien growth hormones. Vegetarians included.
**** But do we know what happens if you feed people in that area beef from cattle not injected with alien growth hormones, along with other food grown in that area? If you have a control group in all the same conditions, you get a more precise result.

Scientific experiments are a funny thing. When doing one, you need to have two groups -- the control group and the experimental group. Heck, sometimes their can be ''multiple'' control groups. This is done to make sure that the results of the experiments actually come from the things the scientists are doing, and don't happen on their own due to placebo effect or something in the test environment they weren't aware of.

Scientific experiments are a funny thing. When doing one, you need to have two groups -- the control group and the experimental group. Heck, sometimes their can be ''multiple'' control groups. This is done to make sure that the results of the experiments actually come from the things the scientists are doing, and don't happen on their own due to placebo effect.

A real life application of this trope is [[EmergencyTransformation experimental treatments conducted on terminally-ill patients]]: they know that they're dying, they've tried pretty much everything else, so they will willingly sign approval forms and let you start PlayingWithSyringes on the long shot that you ''might'' be able to save them. This is actually fairly rare, as even if the subject lives, the resultant information is of far less value without knowing exactly ''what'' you did that saved them... which is [[CaptainObvious what you learn from the control group.]] (Well, that, and to make sure the 'treatment' didn't actually kill them ''faster''.)

A real life application of this trope is [[EmergencyTransformation experimental treatments conducted on terminally-ill patients]]: they know that they're dying, they've tried pretty much everything else, so they will willingly sign approval forms and let you start PlayingWithSyringes on the long shot that you ''might'' be able to save them. This is actually fairly rare, as even if the subject lives, the resultant information is of far less value without knowing exactly ''what'' you did that saved them... which is [[CaptainObvious what you learn from the control group.]]

Scientific experiments are a funny thing. When doing one, you need to have two groups -- the control group and the experimental group. This is done to make sure that the results of the experiments actually come from the things the scientists are doing, and don't happen on their own due to placebo effect.

* Humorously averted in [[http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0545.html this]] ''Order of the Stick'' comic. A test group of captured peasants is to be pushed off a tower into a rift leading to the SealedEvilInACan; a control group is just going to be pushed off the other side of the tower.

* Speaking of having a control group yet still botching its implementation, in ''Series/{{House}},'' Thirteen is placed in the placebo group for a Huntington's Disease medication, which Foreman is able to find out by the nurse's small talk. Therefore, not only is the staff willing to spread this information around, said nurse even mentions that the real medication has a foul smell while the placebo doesn't, meaning they're trivially easy to tell apart which makes the whole exercise utterly pointless by countering the "placebo effect".

* Speaking of having a control group yet still botching its implementation, in ''Series/{{House}},'' Thirteen is placed in the placebo group for a Huntington's Disease medication, which Foreman is able to find out by the nurse's small talk. Therefore, not only is the staff willing to spread this information around, said nurse even mentions that the real medication has a foul smell while the placebo doesn't, meaning they're trivially easy to tell apart which makes the whole exercise utterly pointless.

** Also worth noting: in a proper double-blind medical study, ''no one'' knows which group is the placebo (or at least, not the people administering the medication) to prevent the researchers from accidentally giving the patients clues accidentally (for instance, through tone of voice or body language).

* ''NightOfTheLepus'' actually got that right. Now if only the annoying kid would not have swapped two rabbits, the film would never have happened.
* ''Film/ResidentEvil''.

->''[Caesars CEO Gary Loveman] likes to say there are three things that can get you fired from Caesars: Stealing, sexual harassment and running an experiment without a control group.''

** Because of the ethical considerations of giving potentially dying people placebos and condemning them to death, many medical drug tests have a "control" group which receives the best known conventional treatment while the test group receives the new drug, and it's compared to the known rather than to completely untreated people.

* ''VForVendetta'' -- The prisoners in the government facility were all exposed to experimental treatments. Not a single one of them seemed to be given placebo drugs. This is probably because, in the graphic novel, it was a parallel to NaziGermany and the main object was to sadistically kill minorities using a face-saving rationale, not to do actual science. After all, for ''real'' science, half-starved and worked-nigh-to-death subjects are less than ideal.