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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.
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!
Sometimes walk buttons do something. I do know some traffic lights around Austin which will have reds all four ways if the buttons are pressed.
Other lights don't do much, if anything.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Exactly, no placebo affect here, just poor documentation.
Ah, you see it is different in the United States - there is no pedestrian phase. They just 'allow' pedestrians to cross when traffic is moving in their direction. So, if North South traffic has a green light, North South pedestrians have a green light. Similarly for East West.
The vast majority of traffic lights in the United States don't apparently have a separate period for pedestrians to cross unencumbered by motor vehicles - which outside the big cities are also allowed to turn left of a red light, even when pedestrians have a Walk signal.
Then they wonder why no-one wants to walk anywhere!
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?
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.
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.
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.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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...