The Placebo Effect Not Just On Drugs

dvdme writes "It seems the placebo effect isn't just valid on drugs. It's also a fact on elevators, offices and traffic lights. An article by Greg Ross says: 'In most elevators installed since the early 1990s, the 'close door' button has no effect. Otis Elevator engineers confirmed the fact to the Wall Street Journal in 2003. Similarly, many office thermostats are dummies, designed to give workers the illusion of control. "You just get tired of dealing with them and you screw in a cheap thermostat," said Illinois HVAC specialist Richard Dawson. "Guess what? They quit calling you." In 2004 the New York Times reported that more than 2,500 of the 3,250 "walk" buttons in New York intersections do nothing. "The city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on."'"

Comments

This explains the political process

[Cornwallis]

I keep voting and nothing new happens.

Re:This explains the political process

[alen]

what do you expect to happen? i've lived in the US almost 30 years and everyone wants a government check and free health care but they don't want to pay for it.

after 30 years i like the US, A LOT

Re:This explains the political process

[ChefInnocent]

Oh for a mod point. I've come to look at the election process as voting for Coke or Pepsi when all I want is a glass of water. Transparent and no artificial additives.

Re:This explains the political process

[TheLink]

Vote for a glass of water then.

If enough people do that, instead of voting for Coke or Pepsi when they really wanted water, they'd get their glass of water eventually.

Right now seems like >98% vote for Coke/Pepsi.

Re:This explains the political process

[Smidge204]

More specifically, people want free health care but don't want "them" to have it, because "they" are moochers or lazy and are just taking advantage of the system. "If I get free handouts from the government, that's okay because I'm just getting my tax money back. God forbid someone else gets assistance, because that's my money, dammit!"

I know several people who have stated this point of view explicitly. The cognitive dissonance is tear-my-hair-out infuriating.
=Smidge=

Re:This explains the political process

[RandomFactor]

Even if you are afraid of the worse of the Coke/Pepsi candidates getting in, and therefore vote for the lesser or greater Hamiltonian parties we have today, you should still vote third party some of the time.

Specifically, if the race is polling such that the outcome is not in doubt (either for or against your candidate) then your vote becomes meaningless in deciding the outcome. At that point VOTE YOUR CONSCIENCE, (e.g. if you want Libertarian ideals, vote L)

It is a small thing, but every little scratch we can put in the prison walls of the two party system helps.

Re:This explains the political process

[Schadrach]

I've known someone who was ranting about those "damn liberals and their socialist programs, trying to push socialist health care on us now" *while* filling out forms to apply for Medicare.

Re:This explains the political process

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

We want free healthcare.

There's no such thing as free healthcare. Someone has to pay somewhere along the line...

It's the insurance companies that pays for astroturfing that gives the appearance that we really don't want universal healthcare. What was really amazing was the number of medicare recipients protesting against universal healthcare.

Medicare... you mean the insurance that people were force to pay into for maybe 50 years prior to receiving it? I can't possibly see why people would want what they had already paid for, especially since, after paying those premiums, they couldn't have invested that money for their future needs, like health insurance, themselves. I'm young enough to know that I'll never get my Social Security or Medicare premiums back, so I'll gladly forgo my future entitlements if the government will let me opt out now.

Social Security is $14.7 trillion in debt (and already in the red despite the projections we wouldn't be for another 7 years), Medicare is $77.1 trillion in arrears and likewise Medicare D is $19.4 trillion in the hole. We don't have the money for the entitlements we already have (and the "lock box" is a box full of promissory notes that, one day, Congress will pay back the money from the general fund that they've been stealing since 1967 to hide the deficits created by the Great Society and Vietnam). The CBO scoring of Obamacare was deliberately skewed by the assumptions they had to abide by written into the law and it ignores that the Doctor Fix alone was enough to obliterate the fake "savings."

The other amazing thing is how people believe that if we give tax cuts to the wealthy then jobs will magically appear. Never mind that we are talking about making Bush-era tax cuts permanent and not introducing new tax cuts. If the tax cuts were a panacea then why haven't they created new jobs in the past 3 years?

They weren't tax cuts, they were pre-bates. You save a couple bucks every paycheck, but you're still liable for the same tax amounts come April. Further, the pre-bates were so miniscule, they never created any emotional sense of tax savings. Stability is what produces jobs more than anything, and the Democrats decided to make healthcare their "one true issue" over the last two years, all while wavering on direct economic issues. They still have yet to pass a budget for the fiscal year that started a month+ ago, much less decide what the tax rate is going to be in 50ish days. Further, people STILL don't know everything that is in the healthcare law and that is STILL creating future uncertainty. It's pointless to hire and train new people today if you don't know if you'll be able to afford them in 6 months or a year.

Mainstream media creates perceptions. Perceptions don't always reflect reality.

Yes, like the notion that free health care can exist. Nothing the government does is for free, someone always is forced to pay one way or another.

Also the US government always seem to do what is good for corporations and hardly anything good for consumers. They try to make it appear it was good for consumers. Take the current "Health Care Reforms" that the Democrats passed last year. It doesn't come close to making health care free, in fact it forces us to purchase health insurance. So on the surface it looks like the consumers are finally getting affordable healthcare, in reality the insurance corporations are getting customers who are forced to purchase insurance.

Next thing you'll see is the government promising more jobs from exports by initiating free trade with a country whose growing economy is based on jobs being outsourced from the US. Oh wait it looks like Obama wants to announce something....

Wait, is this the same government that you expect to be your sugar daddy savior? They'll sell you out left and right, but you're going to trust them THIS time, right? Further

Re:This explains the political process

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Like which ones? I can't think of any agencies that don't do what they are supposed to.

TSA for one. Unless you think their stated purpose to "protect the nation's transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce" is not its real purpose.

And, if you think the TSA really is performing its stated purpose - note that not one single person "caught" by the TSA has been convicted, or even prosecuted, for being a terrorist threat to the flight they were prevented from boarding.

So no direct successes. Nor is the evidence for deterrence very strong either - if they were turning terrorists away from air planes they would just attack other targets, but the number of terrorist attacks on other targets has been something less than 1 per year and even those were smaller scale than thousands of drug-related violent crimes during the same period.

Re:This explains the political process

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I was actually wondering last night why governments in places like myanmar bother with voter intimidation when they only need to do a bit of number magic for vote counting (which happens away from the eye of [most] members of the public).

Iran tried that recently and it ended up being the closest they've come to losing control in the last 30 years. You might argue they just weren't slick enough, but that's a risk in and of itself too.

Re:This explains the political process

[AK Marc]

The government can give $10 to educational charities or $100 to prisons. I want the smallest government possible, so I'm for Head Start. That program causes a reduction in other services that, overall, saves me money.

But then, there are those that would rather spend $1000 on prisons than give one "needy" person $1 because they are anti-charity, not for an effective expenditure of money.

Re:This explains the political process

[Myopic]

All of those agencies do what they are supposed to. Are you complaining because they aren't 100% absolutely perfect in every way? If that's your standard, then I concede the point.

But it's not my standard. The EPA has successfully helped the environment by a huge margin since it started. Social Security in fact helps millions of people every day. As a child I received medical care through Medicare (or was it Medicaid? whichever, the point stands).

That's what I'm saying. Hey, if you (the general "you", not necessarily you specifically, Mr Mouse) oppose health care for the needy, then it's fine to oppose Medicare, but it's plainly WRONG to say that it doesn't do what it is supposed to. Same with the other things you have mentioned.

NCLB isn't a program or an agency, and I also don't support it, but it has had the intended effect of putting pressure on schools, rearranging funding, and blah blah whatever other details. I oppose it, but not because it hasn't been effective.

It is slashdot too.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The button that you press after you get, "slowdown cowboy" that asks you to wait 1 minute before posting again, does nothing. No matter how many minutes elapse, that button never gets reactivated. Slashdotters have typically installed greasemonkey, flashblock, adblock, noscript and thousand other add ons, they just blame their javascript interceptor is misbehaving and continue on.

Does this surprise anyone?

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Why would the effect only be limited to pharmaceuticals?

Re:Intentional?

[WrongSizeGlass]

If no one ever tells the masses that the elevator or crosswalk buttons don't do anything then of course they're going to keep pressing them. They may not help but the person doesn't know that it doesn't make a difference. At least when you hit something with a hammer you know something happened.

not placebo

[LiquidCoooled]

ok, so I arrive in a town at an intersection with a button.
I am going to press it because how the heck do I know whether its connected or not?

Re:not placebo

[Tsiangkun]

I'm the jogger. If you would have looked, made eye contact, and given me the right away to cross, I would not have to hit that button. I KNOW it causes you a longer wait. As soon as you learn that it is faster to yield to the pedestrian than to wait for a whole light cycle, the situation will change. As it is, you show no sign of yielding, so I hit the button.

Re:That's just sick

[mccalli]

If even one of them works, doesn't that mean I have to push them just to be sure?

Exactly. If you press a control that doesn't work you lose nothing. If you fail to press a control that does work you lose functionality. Whilst I agree with the effect they're suggesting, presenting it using examples of deliberately wiring-in dummies is ridiculous. If they then go back and ask people if they believed the button in question actually worked, well then there's the begins of the data we actually need for this.

Cheers,
Ian

Not sure "placebo effect" is accurate

[gosand]

"Placebo effect" implies a perceived improvement. I think it's obvious by the number of times people push elevator close door or street "walk" buttons, or fiddle with office thermostats, there is no perceived improvement.

Not sure author understands meaning of "placebo"

[ugen]

"Placebo" refers to situation where a patient does not know that the medication is inactive.

I am not sure about everyone, but I happen to know that most "close" buttons on elevators and most street crossing buttons to activate a pedestrian traffic lights do not work (the former by design, they are there for fire control mode, the latter mainly because they are broken :) ).
However, I still continue to use them and the reason is very simple:
1. They still work occasionally (as was the case just last week in a hotel elevator, where doors would close immediately by using close button, and stay open for extended periods of time without it, tested many times). It's a "nice surprise" when it works - and nothing is lost when it does not work.

2. They may be required occasionally. I know of a quite a few intersections where pedestrian traffic light won't turn green without the use of a button. It's not worth wasting a few traffic light cycles to find out whether the button is or is not needed. It's easier to just press it - if it works, great, if not - again nothing lost.

So, to conclude, this situation is nothing like placebo.

Well, perhaps except for thermostats, but I haven't worked in the office in years - and when I did, never bothered with these things.

Damn elevators.

[MaWeiTao]

I've known for years now that close door buttons in elevators have no effect. I've been in dozens of elevators and have tried the button for the hell of it to no avail. I don't bother anymore. I always assumed there was some kind of associated safety law. What I don't get is why they keep the damn button there; I assume it's cheaper to do so than to remove the button for the US market. I do know for a fact that the button does work overseas. It's why I would try the button when I got back to the States.

Honestly, I don't know if in this particular case it's a placebo effect so much as Americans being conditioned to believe that anything in a public space is likely busted or not working properly. There seems to be a general state of disrepair in the US that I haven't really encountered in other countries. On the one hand, you've got ham-fisted oafs and outright vandals who are compelled to break everything in sight. And on the other hand, you've got service people who can't be bothered to do their jobs, or management which apparently doesn't take enough pride to pay to get things fixed. But then, if something keeps getting broken, eventually you just give up and leave it be.

Re:Intentional?

[PitaBred]

It's usually right that you turn off of a red light, being the US and us driving on the right and all. And it's only certain big cities... it's perfectly legal to turn right on red in Minneapolis and Denver, as well as many other places. That said, the pedestrian always has right of way during those times. I actually don't mind walking around most big cities in the US... it's not that hard to pay attention to your surroundings and make sure the big metal boxes don't hit you.