Do you talk to plants to help them grow? If not, imagine you have a friend who claims that talking to her plants makes them grow taller. Being sceptical, you ask if she wouldn’t mind taking part in an experiment. She is to pick six of a set of twelve new plants at random, set them aside and never talk to them but just water and generally tend them.
The other six plants are to be raised in the same environment but you ask her to talk to all of them equally on a regular basis. We now have a control group and an experimental group. Let’s say that, after 3 months of this treatment, the talked-to plants (experimental group) actually have grown much taller than the other ‘control group’. Your friend swears they ‘understand’ her. Apart from the unlikely requirement that her plants have picked up the English language, your psychology methods training leads you to think of several possible alternative explanations.
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