No Treatment
A negative control may be a population that receive no treatment. That is to say that an independent variable is set to nothing. For example, an experiment for a snowboard wax is designed to see if the wax improves the speed of snowboarders in race conditions. The control group is given new snowboards with no wax applied. Participants in the primary experiment are given identical snowboards with the wax applied. Here the control group serves as a baseline comparison to see if the wax improves average speeds.Placebo
A trial of a new medication uses a placebo as a negative control. The placebo is designed to look like the medication but contains a food substance that has no medical significance. This is done to control for the possibility that participants will feel healthier or perhaps be cured due to the placebo effect.Wait List Control Group
A wait list control group is a group that receives no treatment or a placebo during an experiment. At the end of the experiment, they are given the treatment in the study or a standard treatment that is known to work. This is done for ethical reasons and to make a study more attractive to participants. For example, a trial of a new hearing aid device may assign a negative control group devices that do nothing. When the trial is over, all participants may be provided with a free device that is known to work well. This is to compensate for the stress of using a novel device that may not work well or a placebo that doesn't work at all.| Overview: Negative Control | ||
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Definition | An experiment that is run in parallel to a primary experiment with the same procedures except that the treatment is changed to something that is predicted to have no result. | |
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