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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."'"
I keep voting and nothing new happens.
Is it really intentional?
I thought the walk-buttons was just there because no-one bothered to remove them, and later because they shared house with the beeper that helped blind people. So a lot of crossing had walk-buttons simply because they had beepers, even if the walk button wasn't connected.
My computer isn't responding when I click an icon. I click again. Nothing. So I click it really hard 30 times in a row. Now the computer decides to respond. Clearly, the computer can read my frustration, and therefore hurries to open the 32 firefox windows I requested.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
it actually only shows how little pride they have in their work...
Well yes and no. It is true that most of them have no effect in normal operation, but when the elevator is in service mode (i.e. apartment move mode), then doors stay open until you press the close button.
In my sister's apartment, the close button has a effect. The normal door open time is about 40 seconds, and it will close the instant you press the close button (i.e. after 5 seconds). In the office building that I'm in (mid 60s construction), the close button has no effect unless the elevator is in service mode).
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
Why would the effect only be limited to pharmaceuticals?
Technoli
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?
liqbase
Or how little respect people actually deserve.
I read an article in the Washington Post ~20 years ago about people waiting in lines. A hotel was constantly receiving complaints about the speed of their elevators. They kept tweaking the elevators, but the complaints continued to roll in (despite the quantifiable improvements). Rather than continuing to pursue the problem with technology, they turned to psychology and installed mirrors in the elevator lobby. Seems that if people have something interesting to look at (to them at least), the time passes more quickly and they do not notice that the elevators are slow. After they made this final change, the complaints stopped. I think about this every time I see a mirror in an elevator lobby.
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
I was recently in an office building where the elevators had no buttons at all. In front of the elevator was a keypad where you typed which floor you needed to go to, the system assigned you an elevator and you could only get on and be delivered to your earlier chosen floor.
http://virtualize.wordpress.com/
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
"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.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
"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.
I dunno about NY, but it varies here in Ohio.
1) Some lights change at the same rate, regardless of pressing the button.
2) Lights with chirpers/beepers/buzzers will only make noises if the button is pushed. I think all of these change at the same interval regardless of pressing the button, the button merely tells the light to activate the speaker when it switches.
3) In the suburb where I live, the walk lights won't show unless you hit the button. The timing of the traffic lights doesn't change, you just get a nice walk light. This is rather obnoxious because you get yelled at if you cross when a walk light would have been active if you had hit the button...
4) Some lights won't change unless you hit the button - about the same as described by the poster from Austin.
5) The one light I know for absolute sure doesn't do anything if you hit the button, is near where I work. Hit the button, don't hit the button, do either all day, it doesn't matter, the sign will never switch to "walk"...
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
They are a good aid in me repeatedly hitting it both before and after someone boards the elevator, and a visual aid to my sighing in exasperation when they make it on the elevator. They convey exactly the message I intended.
"most elevators installed since the early 1990's, the close door button has no effect"
and yet i frequently use the close door button to real effect in nearly every elevator i have been in in the last fifteen years including ones installed since 2000.
meanwhile, some news claims aren't factual but people believe they are because they are made by news agencies.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Ah, one of the first positive things that I noticed when I moved overseas was that the "door close" buttons on elevators actually worked. You push them, the door closes. It's that sort of literal-mindedness when a culture apes another culture without knowing why it's doing so. The "how" but not the "why". They didn't know that door close buttons were placebos put in place to lie about giving control. Instead, they connected them up to the control circuits, and when you press the button, by God, the elevator doors close. You can even close the doors directly after they open, ignoring the pleas of people running to get in. Heh, that was another education as well, seeing as I had previously thought that holding elevator doors open for random strangers was something that 'everybody did' - turns out, it's just our culture that does it.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The elevator close button not doing anything is certainly true most places in the U.S. It isn't worth pushing the button. Go somewhere like Hong Kong, though, and when you hit the door close button the doors close right now. If someone is halfway through the door when you hit it, too bad - they get chopped in half. I love it.
Walk buttons are different. I can see not having them hooked up at busy intersections, especially at intersections where there are always (or nearly always) pedestrians waiting to cross. Where I live, the buttons absolutely work - the walk signal doesn't illuminate and the signal timings are different if you don't push the button. It is all about maximizing the flow of vehicular traffic while protecting pedestrians. Interesting that they leave the buttons there even when they don't do anything, but I seriously doubt there are many (if any) places where walk buttons were installed purely for the placebo effect.
Also - you call that an article? Worst. Submission. Ever.
Here is a rule of thumb for article submitters: if you can repeat the entire 'article' in the summary, you chose a bad article. Try at least digging up some of the original sources to link to (like the Wall Street Journal article mentioned).
the close door buttons DO work in our building (FWIW we have Otis) but there's a trick which I've experimentally confirmed: something has to trip the sensor between the inner & outer doors to make it think someone has gotten on or off. I can consistently (100x out of 100 tries) replicate the following behavior: if elevator stops on floor w/nobody waiting I simply waive my hand in the gap, press the close button & the doors immediately close/elevator continues - press the button w/o something having tripped the sensor & it just sits there till its normal timeout period.
individual results may vary but I've successfully been doing this for 10+ yrs at my current employer...
I'm primarily a pedestrian, so I've had time to test out the walk button. Most of the time, the walk button only makes the walk sign change, otherwise it just says at the stop hand icon.
The times it does change things is usually near parks or by little used streets where if it was disconnected you'd be waiting a very long time.
I agree. This seems more like behaviorism - if I push this button, I may get a reward.
As for the thermostats, they are kidding themselves if they think people actually believe they work. People stop calling because at that point the realize it is pointless to continue complaining, because nothing is going to be done about the situation.
After reaching the level cap, I'd join pug groups and in the role of "healer". I had gear with special effects that did nothing and created all manner of macros to create these effects while at the same time emoting that I was healing my target.
After the wipe, when they'd call me on it (I have yet to find an addon that will monkey with other people's trackers) I'd try to explain that I was doing this strictly for research and they were in the placebo group.
Somehow, this did not seem to appease them.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
All these examples seem a bit specific or they assume the people affected are all too dumb to realize someone's trying to fool them...
'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.
Around here most elevators don't even seem to have a "close" button, they do have an "open" button though. And if you press one of the "go to floor #n" buttons the doors tend to close immediately. As an example, in the building I live in the best way to get the doors to close quickly is to pass through the elevator door and make sure you're clear of the "don't squish the humans" sensor and then hit a floor button, door closes immediately and elevator gets going.
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."
Duh. Of course people stop calling you, they're sweating their asses off and you show up and say "nothing wrong here" half a dozen times and then you install a thermostat that doesn't work. Most likely they just end up figuring out how to disable the alarm connected to the windows so they can get some relief that way (seriously, I've seen this problem in several workplaces, the building maintenance guys swear up and down that the ventilation system is fine yet one office which isn't even facing the sun most of the day has stuffy air and a constant temperature above 25 C, in the latest case they finally installed a thermostat that did nothing, we just stopped calling them about the issue (the thermostat was clearly not connected to anything)).
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."'"
Here in .se the buttons do work. In fact, if you don't press the button the light never turns green. You still have to wait until the lights for the cars are right though (which kind of sucks, it just switches the light for pedestrians from a default "you're not allowed to cross" to "please wait your turn".
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
When I was a young-hacker, I worked as a bellman.. It was slack work except when tour busses came in and then it was a scramble to get luggage up to the rooms. It meant multiple trips with a full cart and no passengers... What I couldn't handle was the long rides down to the lobby stopping at 10+ floors to pickup additional passengers... I soon discovered that if I held the 'door close' button while the elevator was descending, it would stop at the floors where people had pushed the 'down' button but the door wouldn't open. The elevator would stop. Hesitate for about 1.5 seconds, and then start moving again. The unfortunate drawback was that outside of the car, the 'down' light would go out and the waiting passengers would have to press it again to call for another elevator. I then learned that I didn't have to hold the door-close button. If I felt the car slow down and managed to press the button before the car came to a full stop, I could trigger the override.
Eventually, I got a copy of a master key (which I still have) that allowed me to just put the elevator in service mode and didn't have to override anything.
Agreed.
Also - I don't know about you, but when I press a "close doors" or a "use crosswalk" button and press it, and nothing happens, I tend to press it again. If there was a placebo effect in play, why would I bother pressing it again? The placebo effect suggests that I would be happy with the outcome, rather than stabbing relentlessly away at a soulless machine, like a rat trying to get a food pellet, muttering and cursing the infernal, non functional button and the soul sucking society it seems to embody, when all I want to do is get downstairs and across the street to a bar so I can drown my sorrows in a few glasses of gin and try to muster the courage to talk to that girl who is always there even though I know she's probably damaged goods and wouldn't give me the time of day besides...
I'm sorry, what were we talking about again?
Years ago my dad replaced the furnace and thermostat in my parents' house. What he didn't tell my mom was the new thermostat was installed in a different location in the house and he left the old one in its original location. Prior to this my mom was constantly pushing the thermostat up and down and making the house too hot or cold for everyone else. She continued this adjustment on the old disconnected thermostat for years after, apparently satisfied, even though it had no effect.
With a straight face, yes Al Gore would have gone to war with Iraq in his first term.
The Clinton/Gore administration were hawkish on Iraq from 1993 on. The escalation of bombing radar, C2 and C3 nodes in the Northern and Southern No-fly zones were all Clinton policies. Desert Fox was a Clinton administration operation, and the Democrats were fired up in 1999 to start a war with Serbia and invaded Haiti in 1995.
Al Gore ran in 2000 as being more interventionist abroad than George W. Bush did
http://www.ontheissues.org/al_gore.htm
http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Al_Gore_Foreign_Policy.htm#Internationalism
Following the loss in 2000, Gore went to an oppose Bush policy mode from the spring of 2002 which continues.
Of course, the disproof of your position is simple and actually happened.
An individual vote is worthless. No election with more than probably 10,000 voters (WAG here) would ever proceed to conclusion if the tally was 50% +1. The uncertainty would make recounts essentially unending, interested parties would split hairs until their donors' budgets ran out and the larger team of lawyers "won" and were vindicated by an "authority". People would be angry and call for a different outcome, but their voices would fade away eventually. Of course, this is all academic, because individuals' votes really can make a difference! If we voted for unicorns, and REALLY, TRULY believed, Tinkerbell would deliver them, right? I mean, nothing like the ever happened, did it?
An individual can greatly affect an election, but not by voting. Individuals affect elections by convincing other individuals to follow their lead, be it through charisma, money, intimidation, trickery, etc. If every single large scale political donor, PAC organizer, get-out-the-vote volunteer and party official didn't vote at all, their effect on the election would be almost precisely identical. It's not the vote that decides things, it's how they convince many, many other people to vote. Not as individuals, but as a herd.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
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.
"Ask your Doctor"
With a straight face, yes Al Gore would have gone to war with Iraq in his first term.
I don't buy that, you fail to account for two things. First, the Cheney factor. Secondly the fact that Gore would have probably been busy in Afghanistan as retaliation for 9-11. Its possible he might have just sent in some special forces and concentrated on getting Bin-Laden. Given the f**kup in Tora bora, which probably can be blamed partially on the Iraq "strategy" its possible we might actually have been out of the intervention before the 04 election because Bin Laden would have been caught. Instead we spent 700B busting a 3rd rate dictator that was effectively hemmed in. If Sadam had acted up, Gore probably would have just bombed him same as Clinton.
it is just a placebo that comes with every operating system
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The green is extended a bit when the walk-light is used.
I often get up early to jog or bike. At 6:00 AM, when I'm on a side street coming to an intersection with an arterial, and the light is red for me and green for the arterial, pressing the walk button will _immediately_ change the light for the arterial to yellow.
At 8:00 AM, however, with rush-hour traffic clogging up the arterial, the walk button appears to do nothing.
Desert Badger, the operation was written up late in '99 and early '00, Clinton and Blair had already agreed if a Northern or Southern Watch plane went down in Iraq they'd use it as the trigger for an invasion of Basra and Kurdistan. Those planes weren't going to keep doing CAPs forever without an accident.
I still firmly believe that with Gore in the White House the US would have gone into Iraq. Lieberman was just as hawkish about Iraq as Cheney was.
The Tora Bora "fuck up" happened before the war drums started beating for Iraq, really it was a hold over of the post-Vietnam and Desert One idea that the US public wouldn't stomach any military casualties.
We didn't bomb the crap out of fires in the Hindu Kush or go into Tora Bora cause we didn't want American casualties nor did the lawyers think we could just bomb camp fires.
...65 degF in the winter and disable the 2 degree adjustment entirely.
So you end up with women bringing in 1.5kW heaters to place under their desks? <sarcasm>That's efficient and safe. </sarcasm>
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
So, I went to the link to read TFA, and realized that the TFS isn't a summary at all. It's just a copy/paste of the entire blog post with the line breaks taken out. It's amazing what constitutes "New for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" these days...
I think the "door close" buttons cause the crosswalk lights to change, and the "walk" buttons cause the elevator doors to close.
"our democracy"
You mean the one that is ruled by the rich because of the people who let it be ruled by the rich (and the people that vote for the same two parties over and over again)? Yeah, what a nice democracy! I just love it when the government is able to pass bills and laws which clearly violate our freedom and privacy without the consent of the people, and what's worse is that people seem to support these bills and laws because they 'stop' those dirty 'terrorists'. I'd say these idiots are in need of some actual education, and no, the public school system isn't cutting it.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I'm generally amazed when a button actually DOES work. (I lived in a building where the elevator doors instantly responded. That was great.)
When buttons do nothing, I just fume at the city or whatever agency I happen to live under the management of.
But Placebo?
Far too much is attributed to that effect. I think there must be a sliding scale of environmental awareness where some people are a lot more easily fooled than others. Heck, I know this to be true. I wonder if perhaps those who cry, "Placebo Effect!" are among those who are more easily fooled and thus have a hard time working out what reality is actually doing most of the time. Perhaps this is why science is so important to them? Their instincts are poor and thus they need a reliable system of reality reading, not to fall back on or use in conjunction with, but as their primary guide to existence.
Hm. Interesting.
-FL
The point about office thermostats is true where I work. I have a nice new office complete with thermostat. The temperature regularly climbs to beyond 82 Degrees F (that's ~28C), when I complained about it, they told me to use the thermostat to adjust the temp. That was the point where I told them that I watched the process of construction as they built the office, and that I know that the thermostat is a dummy (looks good, but isn't connected to anything, wires just dangling in the wall). At this point they realized they were busted, but still wouldn't do anything for me. The claim is that fixing this for me would require the re-balancing of the the entire building, and they weren't going to do it for just one person. So I keep a fan going for when it's too warm, and a sweater for wen it's too cold. For them the ruse still worked, I don't complain any longer, 'cause I know that nothing will change.
"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." Nice Fox News talking points. As an employer, I can tell you that this particular Fox News talking point is absolute hogwash. It's so wrong, it's laughable. Employers don't decide to hire or not hire people based on taxes. Maybe huge, tax-dodging employers do (ie: Haliburton, Wal-Mart), but small and mid size employers hire people when they need them, regardless of what the tax rate is now or in the future. Do you honestly think that Joe Blow sandwich shop owner thinks, "I really need to hire another person to cover the morning shift, but I'd better hold off because my tax bill may go up by 3% next year"? C'mon. You don't have to be a business owner to understand this. You just have to be able to think. The whole "uncertainty" story that Fox News/Republicans have drummed up is just plain stupid. Nobody knows what the future holds.
I don't respond to AC's.
You're darn tootin' we notice!!!! They HVAC people stopped getting calls because people got tired of adjusting the thermostat that never worked and calling the HVAC people. While we may sometimes push that "Close Door" button on the elevator, those of us who use an elevator long enough have realized the timing hasn't been effected since "the late '90s". Isn't New York in enough debt without having to install extra push buttons on every corner of the city if the buttons aren't going to do anything?
And psychologists wonder why Americans are so up tight, their blood pressure skyrocketing, etc... because the darn "conveniences" don't flippin' work! And apparently, they don't work on purpose. And then we get felt up and/or violated when we use the convenience of quickly traveling from one place to another.
Maybe indeed.
But who should really vote for the Libs?
Quote wiki: "The political platform of the Libertarian Party reflects its brand of libertarianism, favoring minimally regulated, laissez-faire markets, strong civil liberties, minimally regulated migration across borders, and non-interventionism in foreign policy that respects freedom of trade and travel to all foreign countries."
The Libertarians seem more obsessed about quantity than quality - whether for Government or regulation.
That sort of thinking seems rather stupid to me. Less does NOT automatically mean good. I don't see how "minimally regulated, laissez-faire markets" is going to serve the US people well. Trust me, you want _well_ regulated markets, not minimally regulated markets.
It's quality that matters more, not quantity.
Just look around the world and you'd see countries in deep shit because of small corrupt governments and minimally regulated "everything".
The markets need good regulation, and sometimes that means _heavy_ regulation, sometimes minimal regulation[1]. You have to put the right people in charge of stuff, but when the people at the top are obsessed with quantity and not quality, they're getting the fundamentals wrong already, so what can you expect?
[1] Remember the people voting at the ballot boxes would be doing just about as good a job (if not worse) voting with their wallets.