participant is assigned to the Experimental group. If the coin lands tails-up, the participant is assigned to the Control group. At the end of the experiment, the experimenter finds differences between the Experimental group and the Control group. Because each participant had an equal chance of being placed in any group, it is unlikely the differences could be attributable to some other preexisting attribute of the participant, e.g. those who arrived on time versus late.

Potential issues

Random assignment does not guarantee that

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