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 want to make statements about a population, you have to do experiments that test against that population. One person does not represent a whole population. There is a lot that can be said about the general human condition from experiments on individuals, but without including many many more people, you can not know if it really is universal, or if it is a quirk of the subject.
If you want to make statements about a person then you can perform experiments on that one person and make general statements about that, but those are rare outside of clinical spaces.
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