This article traces the historical origin of social experimentation. It highlights the central role of psychology in establishing the randomized controlled design and its quasi-experimental derivatives. The author investigates the differences in the 19th- and 20th-century meaning of the expression "social experiment." She rejects the image of neutrality of social experimentation, arguing that its 20th-century advocates promoted specific representations of cognitive competence and moral trustworthiness. More specifically, she demonstrates that the randomized controlled experiment and its quasi-experimental derivatives epitomize the values of efficiency and impersonality characteristic of the liberal variation of the 20th-century welfare state.

In 1995, the Dutch Minister of Health proposed that a randomized clinical trial (RCT) with heroin-maintenance for severe abusers be conducted. It took nearly four years of lengthy debates before the Dutch Parliament consented to the plan. Apart from the idea of prescribing heroin, the minister and her scientific advisers had to defend the quite high material and non-material costs that would arise from employing the randomized controlled design. They argued that the RCT represented the truly scientific approach and was the royal way to unambiguous results. In the present article, I question this common dual justification of RCTs. First, I situate the historical origins and the basic assumptions of the ideal experiment in 20th-century economic liberalism. Secondly, using the Dutch heroin experiment as an example, I discuss human-science experimentation as an attempt to create reality rather than merely record it. Finally, I discuss some surprising responses by heroin users. These responses display the assumptions of RCTs discussed in the historical section, and underline the importance of the culture of heroin use. In the epilogue, I suggest that cultural aspects of heroin consumption can best be studied by thorough ethnographic research.

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This is the story of the remarkable psychologist John E. Coover, who, in the early 1900s, was the first to advocate the comparison of experimental and control groups as a methodological necessity. Moreover, the author raises the issue of why control groups were launched about a century ago, and why psychology was comparatively early in codifying group comparison as a methodological routine. In dealing with these questions, the author discusses the relations between turn-of-the-century science and society as well as between psychophysical research and educational experimentation. Furthermore, the mystery is solved of how Coover's rightful place in the received history of experimental controls could be taken by precisely the authors whom he criticized for the lack of controls.

In contemporary behavioral and social research, scientific experimentation means comparing experimental groups to control groups and establishing the statistical significance of the resulting averages. Yet, this design is of a rather recent date. From the early nineteenth century, scientific experimentation with human beings has been a much debated topic. The rule of comparing groups, however, did not appear in methodological manuals until the second decade of the twentieth century. This article presents a history of the control group. It first discusses nineteenth‐century methodological views on human science experimentation, and explains why the notion of the control group could not be conceived at the time. Next, it describes and explains the introduction of control groups in the course of the twentieth century. By analyzing the nineteenth‐century values that excluded group comparison, it aims to identify the twentieth‐century principles endorsing it.

Since the transition from finalism to contextualism, the history of science seems to be caught up in a basic dilemma. Many historians fear that with the new contextualist standards of rigorous historiography, historical research can no longer be relevant to working scientists themselves. The present article argues that this `dilemma of rigor vs relevance' is particularly urgent to `community' historians affiliated with the very scientific communities whose history they study. The solutions of Kurt Danziger and J. F. Hans van Rappard, both community historians of psychology, are discussed, and the author adds her own community historian's views for debate. These include, that there are no cogent reasons for completely rejecting finalism, but that, at present, rigorous symmetrical contextualism actually is the best way to produce relevant results. It is also argued that the common tale of scientists only tolerating congenial histories might be largely based on misinterpretations.

This article discusses the predicament of historians becoming part of the history they are investigating and illustrates the issue in a particular case. The case is that of the randomized controlled trial (RCT)-more specifically, its use for testing the effects of providing heroin to severe heroin abusers. I counter the established view of the RCT as a matter of timeless logic and argue that this research design was developed in the context of administrative knowledge making under twentieth-century economic liberalism of which it epitomizes some central values. I also argue that the applicability of the RCT depends on the degree to which its advocates can define the issue to be studied according to its inherent values. Next, I demonstrate how advocates of an RCT with heroin provision in the Netherlands steered the political discussion on heroin provision and how the values of economic liberalism also shaped the results of the Dutch maintenance experiment. In addition, I relate how my analysis of this experiment became part of political debates in the Netherlands. Contrary to my intentions, adversaries of heroin maintenance used my critique on the heroin RCT as an argument against heroin maintenance. Such risks are inherent to historiography and sociology of science aiming at practical relevance while challenging treasured scientific beliefs. I conclude that it still seems better to expose arguments on unjustified certainties than to suppress them for strategic reasons.