Abstract Although the concept of randomized assignment in order to control for extraneous confounding factors reaches back hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have been in an 1835 trial of homeopathic medicine. Throughout the 19th century there was a growing awareness of the need for comparison groups, albeit often without the realization that randomization could be a clean method to achieve that goal. In the second and more crucial phase of this history, four separate but related disciplines introduced randomized control trials within a few years of one another in the 1920s: agricultural science; clinical medicine; educational psychology; and social policy (specifically political science). This brought increasing rigor to fields that were focusing more on causal relationships. In a third phase, the 1950s through 1970s saw a surge of interest in more applied randomized experiments in economics and elsewhere – both in the lab and especially in the field.

中文翻译：

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随机分配进入社会科学

摘要 虽然随机分配以控制外来混杂因素的概念可以追溯到数百年前，但第一个经验性应用似乎是在 1835 年的顺势疗法试验中。在整个 19 世纪，人们越来越意识到需要比较组，尽管通常没有意识到随机化可能是实现这一目标的一种干净的方法。在这段历史的第二个也是更关键的阶段，四个独立但相关的学科在 1920 年代的几年内相互引入了随机对照试验：农业科学；临床医学；教育心理学; 和社会政策（特别是政治学）。这给更多关注因果关系的领域带来了越来越严格的要求。在第三阶段，