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The Fake-Out: an Informal Take on the Placebo Effect

Myers' Psychology for the AP Course Third Edition



Think about how we blindly consume medicine. Our craving for a solution, any solution to heal our physical troubles produces totally twisted theories. Taking tablets three days into a cold, we become children again and believe in magic instead of the more obvious, boring explanation that it naturally healed itself. In the 1700s, bloodletting seemed reasonable. People sometimes improved afterwards; when they didn't, psh, the disease was the problem not the so-called treatment. We have to control other variables to actually understand the effect of a remedy. 

And that is exactly how new medicines and methods of therapy came to be. Participants were randomly assigned into a control and experimental group. The first group receives the real deal (a true drug for example). The other group receives a bogus-treatment - a fake (maybe a pill with without a drug in it). The subjects are usually blind to which treatment they are receiving. In an oblivious x2 situation both the participants and researchers don't know which group is which. This prevents any sort of favoritism from the gullible who take the treatment, and the researchers who eagerly wait like panting dogs for their hypothesis to come true. 

In oblivious x2 situations, researches can check a therapy's effects frfr apart from the subjects and experimenters beliefs. In fact, just THINKING a treatment works can relieve your tensions; even if the medicine isn't real! This fake-out effect is proven to reduce pain, depression and anxiety (Kirsch, 2010). Athletes wildly run faster when given a supposedly performance-enhancing drug (McClung & Collins, 2007). Decaf-coffee drinkers were increasingly alert when they thought their brew was spiked with caffeine (Dawkins et al., 2001). And the more expensive the treatment, the better it seemed to work. To know how real a therapy actually is, researches have to control for a possible fake-out effect. 

Comments

  1. ACOctober 1, 2023 at 11:56 AM

    I liked how you were able to make the text much more conversational by saying things like "psh" and "frfr" to simplify the text from things like "the practitioner inferred the disease was too advanced to be reversed" and "neither participants' or researchers' expectations can bias the results".

    ReplyDelete
  2. Elyse LazradoOctober 1, 2023 at 8:52 PM

    Hi Arya! I really liked how you used simple language and first person to connect with your audience. I also liked how you used relatable examples, like the coffee one, to help the reader comprehend the lesson better. I felt that by doing this the textbook was a lot easier to understand.

    ReplyDelete

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