Blinded experiment
experiment in which information about the test is masked to reduce bias
In a blind or blinded experiment, information that could influence participants or investigators is withheld until the experiment is completed. Blinding is used to reduce or eliminate potential sources of bias, such as participants’ expectations, the observer-expectancy effect, observer bias, confirmation bias, and other cognitive or procedural influences.
Blinding can be applied to different participants in an experiment, including study subjects, researchers, technicians, data analysts, and outcome assessors. When multiple groups are blinded simultaneously (for example, both participants and researchers), the design is referred to as a double-blind study.
In some cases, blinding is desirable but impractical or unethical. For example, it is not possible to blind a participant receiving a physical therapy intervention, or a surgeon performing an operative procedure. Well-designed clinical protocols therefore aim to maximize the effectiveness of blinding within ethical and practical constraints.
During the course of an experiment, a participant becomes unblinded if they deduce or otherwise obtain information that has been masked to them. For example, a patient who experiences a side effect may correctly guess their treatment, becoming unblinded. Unblinding is common in blinded experiments, particularly in pharmacological trials.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Blinded experiment” as experiment in which information about the test is masked to reduce bias. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q608510. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blinded experiment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.