Placebo Effect

Had an interesting conversation the other night about "The Secret," and whether or not your attitude toward something can affect its outcome. This write-up in Slate harmonizes with some of my personal skepticism on the subject.

What's interesting to think about, though, is that much of our social reality is constructed. I was trying to use the example of the 4-minute mile, which at one time people thought was impossible to beat. Turns out it's not. The problem, with this example, though, is that it's anecdotal evidence - impossible to repeat the experiment, so to speak. We can't go back in time and re-do the breaking of the 4-minute-mile record, this time without a widespread assumption that it was impossible.

The placebo effect, though, seems like a good example of the social construction of reality. People feel like their pain medication is working better if a doctor in a white coat gives them an injection, instead of getting an intravenous drip that doesn't signal when the medicine is going in.

I thought this was a fairly well-established phenomenon, but it turns out there's controversy here as well. Anyway, the pain relief scenario seems to be fairly well-established. And to me demonstrates a good example of reality as socially constructed. A lab coat signals "doctor," and therefore means less pain. But the placebo effect in any given experiment doesn't show up in the same number of people, nor does it work with a uniform intensity.

If the placebo effect is related to the human tendency to construct reality, then it doesn't give us an answer as to how much of that reality is indeed susceptible to placebo reactions. Unlike what the book "The Secret" might say though, our minds' influence is at the very least less than 100%.