Source: Laboratories of Gary Lewandowski, Dave Strohmetz, and Natalie Ciarocco—Monmouth University

Clinical research focuses on the efficacy of treatments for addressing disorders and illnesses. A challenge with this type of research is that participants often have pre-existing beliefs about the treatment, particularly expectations that the treatment will work.

Though it has been practiced around the world for centuries, yoga is a relatively recent fitness craze in the United States with a wide range of alleged benefits, including the belief that it improves one’s creativity. However, it is not always clear whether yoga is actually creating the benefits, like improved creativity, or the yoga practitioner’s expectations are really the cause.

This video demonstrates a two-group design that examines whether a person who believes he or she is doing yoga (but in reality is not) experiences similar benefits to a person who actually does yoga. Specifically, this study looks at whether there is a placebo effect such that merely believing you are doing yoga benefits creativity. 

Psychological studies often use higher sample sizes than studies in other sciences. A large number of participants helps to ensure that the population under study is better represented and the margin of error accompanied by studying human behavior is sufficiently accounted for. Further, human participants for research like this are often readily available and the experiment is quick and inexpensive to replicate. In this video we demonstrate this experiment using just one participant. However, as represented in the results, we used a total of 80 (40 for each condition) participants to reach the experiment’s conclusions.