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No Control Group
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Scientific experiments are a funny thing. When doing one, you need to have two groups — the control group and the experimental group. Heck, sometimes there can be multiple control groups (it's a common misconception that a control group has no intervention at all, or only a placebo—the control group may be getting a standard treatment, and more than one treatment may be approved). This is done to make sure that the results of the experiments actually come from the things the scientists are doing, and don't happen on their own due to the Placebo Effect or something in the test environment they weren't aware of. Fictional scientists will never do this. If creating a race of monsters or trying to make a superhuman soldier, there will be no control group. All of the people will be turned into monsters or Super Soldiers, or die from the treatments. Then again, most experiments in fiction are far-fetched enough that the purpose of a control group would be to make sure that people weren't just psychosomatically growing to 30 feet and shooting lasers out of their eyes. Of course, procedure is still procedure, and said experiments sometimes take place in worlds which do have people manifesting similar things quite spontaneously. In any case, the experimenters should be finding out how much of the treatment was necessary to display effects... If time/funding/ego concerns whittle the testing down to just one person, then you get Professor Guinea Pig. Sometimes this trope will be averted for Black Comedy or similarly humorous reason. A real life application of this trope is experimental treatments conducted on terminally-ill patients: they know that they're dying, they've tried pretty much everything else, so they will willingly sign approval forms and let you start Playing with Syringes on the long shot that you might be able to save them. This is actually fairly rare, as even if the subject lives, the resultant information is of far less value without knowing exactly what you did that saved them... which is what you learn from the control group. (Well, that, and to make sure the 'treatment' didn't actually kill them faster.) The reason it's done at all is that it's considered unethical to deny possibly-lifesaving treatment from a terminally ill patient in order to use them as part of a control group. This does not refer to a team of Control systems engineers within a larger engineering organization, or lack thereof. |
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While Radham Academy in Twig does practice the scientific method with their Bio Punk technology, they tend to prefer iterative improvement over testing with a control group. Any even marginal successful experiment will be tested to destruction, and then a new and improved version will be made. | |
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In House, Thirteen is placed in the placebo group for a Huntington's Disease medication, which Foreman is able to find out by the nurse's small talk. Therefore, not only is the staff willing to spread this information around, said nurse even mentions that the real medication has a foul smell while the placebo doesn't, meaning they're trivially easy to tell apart which makes the whole exercise utterly pointless by countering the placebo effect. Also worth noting: in a proper double-blind medical study, no one knows which group is the placebo (or at least, not the people administering the medication) to prevent the researchers from accidentally giving the patients clues (for instance, through tone of voice or body language). | |
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The Community episode "Social Psychology" has a test going on to observe the reaction of subjects to repeatedly being told to wait. The problem is the observation goes on in a group setting, when subjects should have been isolated from each other. Experiencing previous breakdowns may have influenced the breakdown of later subjects. Though given how the administrator reacts when one of them doesn't break down, and his amusement when others do, it's pretty clear that this "experiment" was conducted for his own entertainment as much as anything. | |
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In Double Homework, Dr. Mosely/Zeta is running a sex experiment on her summer school class. However, there is no mention of a control group of girls who aren't in a classroom with a popular alpha male classmate, an angry beta male classmate, and a grossly incompetent teacher. | |
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SCP Foundation: SCP-1765 are three near godlike beings who run experiments on the trapped staff members of Site-37. The base was split into four sections. Three are basically given various forms of torture, while the fourth is left as a "control group", unharmed by the experiments. Considering these experiments include "throw fireballs at the scientists while they run away" and "try to measure an ever-changing series of pipes", there is not much point to the control group. | |
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In Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave, the female protagonist decides to experiment on a group of lab mice with a drug that turns people into zombies. She tells a fellow classmate that she'll set one mouse aside as a control group, and then in the next shot she goes back on her word and gives the drug to the control group. In a later scene, the classmate she lied to lets the mouse out because he thought it didn't have the drug, and ends up being bitten and turned into a zombie for his trouble while the mouse escapes to infect others. So not only did the protagonist violate scientific protocol that she was well aware of, but she lied about it and as a result endangered human lives and is directly responsible for at least part of the local Zombie Apocalypse. | |
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In Inhuman, the Naitec scientists had no control group at first, but corrected this error a few years into their Tyke-Bomb army project. Interestingly, they were exterminated not by their creatures, but by their theocratic clients. | |
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The X-Files: Subverted in the episode "Red Museum", which gets this one right. A small town was being used to test one of the evil conspiracy's plans for turning people into half-alien monsters. The method being tested here was feeding them beef from cattle injected with alien growth hormones, which failed to turn them into aliens, but did turn several teenage boys into super-predatory rapists. The conspiracy guys also had one of their men establish a weird cult run out of a nearby farmhouse whose members were all vegetarians, in order to act as a control group. (We already know what happens if you feed people beef from cattle not injected with alien growth hormones.) | |
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In Firestarter, Dr. Wanless tells the students that half of them will be receiving distilled water and the other half will be receiving a mildly hallucinogenic drug called "Lot 6", but it's made clear later on that all of the volunteers received "Lot 6", which is actually a highly dangerous Psycho Serum. It is implied that he lied because he knew that there was a 50% mortality rate from the drug and he needed an excuse for why half of the participants in the study were gone the next morning. | |
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V for Vendetta: The prisoners in the government facility were all exposed to experimental treatments. Not a single one of them seemed to be given placebo drugs. This is probably because it's a parallel to Nazi Germany and the main object is to sadistically kill minorities using a face-saving rationale, not to do actual science. After all, for real science, half-starved and worked-nigh-to-death subjects are less than ideal. | |
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Night of the Lepus actually gets this right. Now if only the annoying kid hadn't swapped two rabbits, the film would never have happened. | |
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Portal 2 shows that Cave Johnson doesn't quite grasp how control groups are meant to work: | |
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The Northern Exposure episode "The Robe" averts this. When the inhabitants of Cicely sign up for a medical trial, there is a control group, and much of the episode consists of Maurice seeking assurance that obviously the most important man in town wouldn't have been given a placebo, and Joel vainly attempting to explain "randomised" and "double blind" to him. | |
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El Goonish Shive: Averted. Tedd uses Sarah as a control test subject and is frustrated that he can't use Nanase as one since she's too Genre Savvy. | |
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In Dr. Franklin's Island, the titular doctor turns teens into Mix-and-Match Critters and gives them Electronic Telepathy. Semi and Miranda are able to use the latter to get into contact with a long-lost friend who tells them that he was kept as a human, presumably as a control or to help monitor what they say to each other. (He's lying.) | |
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Machine Man has a laboratory's worth of scientists testing out an entire line of Better Parts on themselves. Better Spleens, Better Eyes, Better Muscles... | |
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In addition, even in biological settings controls are not always necessary. If you are testing a serum to turn people into super-soldiers, there's no point in having a control group because we already know that people don't spontaneously turn into super-soldiers when given a placebo. Any such effect can only be the result of the serum, with no control group needed to know that. Control groups are only a necessity when looking for relatively small effects that can only be seen by statistically studying large groups. A serum to slightly increase sporting performance would need a control group to be sure any effect was not simply due to people unconsciously trying harder because they think they should be doing better after being injected with something. A serum that turns people into Captain America with an immediate large increase in muscle mass and the ability to run many times faster than any other human, not so much. | |
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