Eggcorn Forum

“Double blind” and “double bind,” both of which entered the vocabulary of technical English in the middle of the twentieth century, are systematically confused, even in reputable scientific literature.

A double-blind trial is an experiment in which neither the person administering the experiment nor the person to whom it is administered know which alternative is the control (placebo, possibly) and which is the focus of the test. Both participants wear a figurative blindfold that hides from them the underlying facts.

A double bind is a dilemma, a situation in which you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. In psychology it refers to a mental impasse caused by contradicting commands.

A Google search for “double bind trial” displays references to numerous sites in which “double bind” is used in situations referring to double blind trials. Switching to a Google book search for the phrase brings up references to about fifty published books and articles that make the same mistake.

A semantic path leads from the term “double blind” to the term “double bind.” In a double blind experiment, blinding become a sort of binding because both parties are securely bound to their state of ignorance. In addition, the experimenter is in a double bind in a double blind trial: if she accepts the conditions, she doesn’t know what she is administering; if she does look, the experiment is ruined. At least some of the people who confuse the two terms, I suspect, have traveled an eggcornical path to arrive at the error.