This past Wednesday, March 8th, my fundamentals in biomedical sciences (II) class was visited by fellow student, Jarnae Harris, a senior from the interventions in biomedical sciences course. This course is known as a capstone program, where seniors, after dedicating their high school careers to the biomed program, can choose a specific course of study to focus on individually during the course of the school year. Jarnae has chosen to study cognitive pyschology. As a part of her course, she is required to do an outreach project about her topic. She chose to visit my class and teach us all about the Placebo Effect.
The Placebo Effect is a phenomenon is which people display real signs of treatment without receiving any treatment at all. The word comes from Latin, meaning "I will please". The Placebo Effect works by controlling/taking advantage of ones:
Disposition (way of thinking)
Expectations
Classical conditioning (learning through association)
Social Cues (signals expressed through facial expressions/body language/etc)
There are also instances of a "Nocebo"Effect which is the exact opposite of the Placebo Effect, negative outcome from a placebo treatment.
The Placebo Effect goes outside the realm of medicine, though. Those who work in Marketing have been using the effect to their advantage for years. For instance, water companies use nice packaging to trick its patrons into believing the water is of higher quality, thus gaining consumers and justifying high prices. To test this, my class was given three different cups (same style of cup) with different brands of water. We were to taste the water, then arrange the water into an order: least to most expensive. My class was incredibly wrong, with only two students guessing which was the most expensive water correctly (me, of course, being one of the two). This was a fun experience, but it makes you wonder how often marketing companies use your own brain against you!
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