By Julia Nelson

Imagine a randomized controlled trial that studied whether a particular medicine was more effective when delivered by a red or a green syringe. Such an experiment is so obviously pointless because (most of the time, anyway) we are confident that it is the chemical properties of the medicine and their interaction with the body—not the color of the syringe that delivers it—that affects the target disease or condition.

Unfortunately, too many social scientists and policymakers make equally confident assumptions about interventions to solve social problems. To even begin to measure program effectiveness, you must first decide which part of the intervention is the medicine and which is the syringe. But addressing poverty, crime, family breakdown, or academic underperformance is far less straightforward than dealing with a bacterial or viral infection.

For example, one of the nonprofit Woodson Center’s mini-grant recipients, Robin, teaches chess to kids in Southeast Washington, D.C. Although work like Robin’s is rarely the subject of research dollars, anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that kids in her program perform better in school and may even enjoy better long-term outcomes than demographically similar individuals who are not in such a program. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this is true: is chess the medicine or the syringe?

Read the full op-ed on The Giving Review.