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).
In: 0
Sure. A situation like that could happen. Famous quote but I forget the author, “if I found a talking a pig, nobody would care about my N of 1.”
But statistically, n of 1 could be an accident. If I predict the clock will say 5pm randomly, there is still a chance I’d be right even if I wasn’t accurately predicting the time beforehand. That’s what we have to account for and that’s why we need more than 1 test.
The number of observations necessary depends on the true size of the effect. E.g., if I’m perfectly precise every time I guess the time, you wouldn’t need very many tests to be confident about it. If I’m a mess and only right a little more than random chance, you’d need many, many tests to tell it’s different than chance.
Latest Answers