History of the Control Group

Abstract

Abstract In contemporary behavioral and social research, scientific experimentation means comparing experimental groups to control groups and establishing the statistical significance of the resulting averages. Yet, this design is of a rather recent date. From the early nineteenth century, scientific experimentation with human beings has been a much debated topic. The rule of comparing groups, however, did not appear in methodological manuals until the second decade of the twentieth century. This article presents a history of the control group. It first discusses nineteenth‐century methodological views on human science experimentation, and explains why the notion of the control group could not be conceived at the time. Next, it describes and explains the introduction of control groups in the course of the twentieth century. By analyzing the nineteenth‐century values that excluded group comparison, it aims to identify the twentieth‐century principles endorsing it.

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