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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Every measurement has error in it. Sometimes we know how big the error could be. Sometimes we don’t. The error in biological measurements can be really big. There are differences in living organisms based on their genetics and the environment they were raised in. If we only do a few experiments, we don’t know how much of the effect was what we were looking for and how much was just random chance.
As an example, there are a small percentage of the populace that is immune to HIV. If we were doing a trial with only a few persons in it and got one of these people, it could throw the results way off.
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