Why do scientific experiments (mainly in neuroscience and psychology) need to be done on more than 1 person? I was under the impression that the most important part of determining the study’s accuracy was to ensure that the outcome had a less than 5% chance of occurring without the theorised variable.
Couldn’t a situation emerge where the outcome was almost certainly attributed to the variable in question even with one person. For example, something extremely random, like (stupid example) a blood clot forming in someone’s left pinky finger after being reminded of childhood trauma (and it was predicted beforehand).
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When you perform an experiment you may not be able to account for all variables, like your blood clot example. These unaccounted for variables can be known as noise. Performing an experiment again at a later date allows the study to occur with different noise variables. If you can perform the experiment again successfully with different noise variables then you know what you were testing is successful and not just a fluke from an outside noise variable.
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