Experimenter's Bias - Physical Sciences

Physical Sciences

If the signal being measured is actually smaller than the rounding error and the data are over-averaged, a positive result for the measurement can be found in the data where none exists (i.e. a more precise experimental apparatus would conclusively show no such signal). If an experiment is searching for a sidereal variation of some measurement, and if the measurement is rounded-off by a human who knows the sidereal time of the measurement, and if hundreds of measurements are averaged to extract a "signal" which is smaller than the apparatus' actual resolution, then it should be clear that this "signal" can come from the non-random round-off, and not from the apparatus itself. In such cases a single-blind experimental protocol is required; if the human observer does not know the sidereal time of the measurements, then even though the round-off is non-random it cannot introduce a spurious sidereal variation.