The people in the control group act as a control set-up. They do not receive the factor or active medication that the people do in the experimental group, which acts as the experimental setup.
A controlled experiment can use a control group or a controlled setup, but is designed so that only one variable is manipulated at a time. This is necessary for the experiment to produce accurate results because if there are multiple variables then the scientists cannot know which variable produced which result.
The scientific method is used in the experimental process and in a controlled setup. The scientific method has several steps, which are: ask a question, do background research, construct a hypothesis, test the hypothesis by doing an experiment, analyze the data and draw a conclusion and communicate the results. The scientific method is the method by which all experiments are conducted and allows scientists to ask and answer scientific questions through observations and experiments.