> double (triple?) blind study of mice
Would that be a study where the mice are not aware of if they are in the control or not?
Has the placebo effect been seen in mice?
Would that be a study where the mice are not aware of if they are in the control or not?
Has the placebo effect been seen in mice?
Seriously though, the idea that mice might have a placebo effect is fascinating. I would have thought that the placebo effect would require some high-level form of self-awareness (which perhaps mice do have, I don't really know) and an understanding of at least the purpose of medicine. Maybe not though...
Edited to add: On a more serious note, I don't know if mice are susceptible to a Hawthorne-like effect http://psychology.about.com/od/hindex/g/def_hawthorn.htm Even physical science researchers have to deal with observer effects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_%28physics%29
Edited to clean up brain-drained errors.
In brief, any time you have a subjective measurement (for instance, the experimenter assigns a number from 1 to 5 based on how "distressed" the mice -- or human patients -- look), that subjective measurement can be subtly biased. So if the experimenter doesn't blind his experiments properly, you can see a placebo effect in animal studies.
It is appropriate to refer to these studies as double or triple blind because the single blind usually refers to the patient.
Single blind: patients do not know which group they are in
Double blind: experimenters do not know the group identities
Triple blind: overseeing committees do not know the group identities
- http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/relandval.php
- http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/Courses/Psy624/Validity.ht...
But basically, the placebo effect only exists for subjective measurements. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#Mechanism_of_the_effect) If something exists only in subjective measurements and not objective measurements... I'll let you draw your own inference.