The Placebo Effect
If you’re anything like us at The Decision Lab, you might be a little bit addicted to coffee. When you wake up in the morning groggy and tired, maybe you think to yourself ‘I need coffee!’ You might even warn your co-habitators not to speak to you before you’ve had that first cup.
What if you were given a decaf cup of coffee unknowingly? It’s very possible that you would still feel more awake, even though you haven’t ingested any caffeine. Your brain thinks you have, and sends signals to your body corresponding with that assumption.
Even if it is in our minds, our brains have powerful effects on our bodies. Believing that we drank caffeinated coffee helps us feel more energised and ready for the day, regardless of whether there is actually any caffeine that leads to physiological differences in our bodies. Our minds playing tricks on our bodies in this way is known as the placebo effect.
The placebo effect is a phenomenon where people experience a response to a substance or treatment even if that substance or treatment has no known positive effects. Although the coffee example is one we might all be able to relate to, the placebo effect is usually discussed with reference to medicine. Someone who is given a sugar pill for a headache, but told that it is a painkiller, oftentimes will feel better, even though they didn’t ingest any medicine.
The crazy thing is - it’s not all in our heads (excuse the pun)! Studies have shown that people believing they are getting better can lead to physiological improvements.
Eventually it became clear that our emotions, attitudes, and thoughts profoundly affect our bodies, sometimes to the degree of life or death. Soon mind-body effects were recognized to have positive as well as negative impacts on the body. This realization came largely from research on the placebo effect — the beneficial results of suggestion, expectations, and positive thinking.
— Physician and author Larry Dossey in his book, Reinventing Medicine: Beyond Mind-Body to a New Era of Healing 1
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
