Deception, Efficiency, and Random Groups: Psychology and the Gradual Origination of the Random Group Design

@article{Dehue1997DeceptionEA,
  title={Deception, Efficiency, and Random Groups: Psychology and the Gradual Origination of the Random Group Design},
  author={T. Dehue},
  journal={Isis},
  year={1997},
  volume={88},
  pages={653 - 673}
}
  • T. Dehue
  • Published 1997
  • Psychology, Medicine
  • Isis
In the life sciences, psychology, and large parts of the other social sciences, the ideal experiment is a comparative experiment with randomly composed experimental and control groups. Historians and practitioners of these sciences generally attribute the invention of this "random group design" to the statistician R. A. Fisher, who developed it in the 1930s for agricultural research. This essay argues that the random group design was advanced in psychology before Fisher introduced it in… Expand
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