The jelly Belly experiment

How scientific was the Jelly Belly experiment? In your blog you should introduce the Jelly Belly experiment and its hypothesis: Does prior knowledge of flavors influence taste? Go through the inductivism and the characteristics of good experiments: controlability, measureability, repeatability.

The Jelly Belly experiment was actually kind of fun.

There was a design in the experiment: there were 4 groups, in 2 of them the "taster" was blinded and in the other 2 he-she was allowed to see what she was eating. The Jelly Beans were given in a order unknown to the taster, who however was allowed to be read the names of the tastes he had to recognise. The final comparison between the results of the groups whose taster was blinded and the ones whose taster was allowed to see gave the clear verdict that prior knowledge influence taste.

However. i'm not sure whether it can be considered a scientific experiment. The experiment was not completely controlled, because same variables should have been taken into consideration and instead they were just random, such as the characteristic of the taster (smoker-non smoker, ecc); for what concern the measurability, somevariables were measurables, such as the number of jelly beans and their type, but others such as drinking water after eaten the jelly bean was not constant, just random. The experiment could be repeated by other people, but as the taster is a person, the results may not be the same. I think that when you have to deal with experiments on animals, the Harvard law of animal behavoiur always apply: "in carefully controlled laboratory conditions animals do what they damned well please". And animals are humans, after all.