Prompt: Imagine that you are an online tutor for an undergraduate Research Methods course. One day, you get this email:

Dear Tutor, I am having some trouble understanding why it is so important to randomly assign participants to experimental conditions. It seems to me
that if you have a large enough sample, the results would probably be valid even if you didn’t bother to randomize the participants. Why is it important to
go through the trouble of randomizing participants? Also, if you are going to randomly assign participants, how should you do it?