Are Placebos a Design Pattern for Change?
Friday, February 25th, 2011
Check out The Strange Powers of the Placebo Effect. It is a well produced 3-minute video recap on the research about placebos, suggesting that size, color, cost, branding, tech-intensity and geographical location all matter when it comes to effectiveness. Placebos can improve sports performance, prevent death, relieve pain, help depression, become addictive and just make use feel better or worse.
Placebos are chemically and therapeutically inactive. They work by shifting our beliefs, reshaping our expectations, reframing our thinking and changing our behavior. They play off of our deepest mental models about authority and science and the need to do something rather than nothing. They combine hope and fear in a one two punch and reduce complexity down to simple acts. Great cognitive design.
The amazing thing is that they produce life altering and reproducible outcomes. Sometimes they even work when someone knows they are taking a placebo!
The design question is how can we ethically harness these effects to produce positive outcomes in organizational and behavior change programs? Said another way, how much of successful organizational behavior change is due to placebo effects rather than leadership with therapeutic impact?
