Steve Tippins Ph.D.Helping doctoral students get their dissertation accepted, succeed in their careers, & change the world | Academic Career Advisor | Dissertation Chair & Founder, Beyond PhD Coaching | 35 + years of experience.

The Simplest Explanation of Experimental Design

10 May 2026 · 1 min

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0:39

In this brief video, the speaker illustrates the concept of experimental design by contrasting a superstition with a proper scientific experiment. He tells an anecdote about a baseball player who attributes his hitting success to eating chicken before games—a classic post‑hoc fallacy. He then explains that a legitimate experimental design would involve selecting a large sample (e.g., 500 players), randomly assigning them to a chicken‑eating condition versus a control, and measuring batting averages to assess whether chicken actually causes better performance. The video ends with a call‑to‑action, asking viewers to comment the word “help” to receive a link to a free dissertation‑help community.

Chapters

So we can say experimental design going back, does X cause Y? Does eating chicken before every baseball game cause you to be a better batter? There actually was a baseball player who was a very good hitter and he had chicken before every single game because one time he ate chicken and he played well. Now that's not an experimental design, that's more of a superstition, but if we expand that out and looked at 500 baseball players and fed them chicken and then looked at how well their batting average that would be more of an experimental design. Drop the word "help" in the comments below and I'll send you the link to my free dissertation help community.