placebo

The term placebo (placebo, fake drug) has both negative and positive uses.

• Placebo effect = a phenomenon in which a person is prescribed something that has no pharmacological effect, but the feeling of taking the drug causes the effect to appear.

• Whether a certain drug X is effective or not? In the context of

  • When there is no significant difference between the effect seen in the person who took X and the effect seen in the person who took the placebo.
  • Negative usage of “this is a placebo effect” in this context is “there is no special effect on X”

• In the context of behavioral economics.

  • In the control group and the group that drank the nutritional drink, the percentage of correct anagram questions was 9/15 for both groups.
  • But if you write in the brochure, “This nutritional drink works well for quiz assignments,” it goes up to 12.3/15.
  • In other words, believing it works actually increases the percentage of correct answers.
    • Source Unreasonable as expected
    • Perhaps self-assurance, (powers of) concentration, etc. will increase, resulting in a higher percentage of correct answers.
  • Positive usage of “this is a placebo effect” in this context is “the actual effect of what you think works”

• That this context is discrepant.

  • Isn’t that a placebo? (Isn’t that ineffective?)”
  • ‘Yeah, it’s a placebo, okay? (It works, right?)”

• There is a difference of opinion that

• In the context of medicine, the act of selling ineffective drugs to a suffering sick person (even if the disease is cured by the placebo effect) is unethical.

• In the behavioral economic realm, “prescribing yourself a placebo” is not a good idea.

  • Drinking coffee (many people believe that caffeine has an effect, but few have actually measured the effect)
  • Set a timer for 25 minutes and say, “I’m going to concentrate for the next 25 minutes.”
  • Believe that writing people on your hands and drinking will cause tension avoidance.

• and others of the same kind, and there is no ethical problem.

• So, to increase your own productivity, you should prescribe harmless drugs to yourself believing that they are very effective drugs!

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