Member-only story
I stumbled across this cool set of experiments from 2017 on the Placebo effect and creativity…
Sounds cool — let’s just check I understand the placebo effect: this is when there is a positive effect without any intervention, normally medication?
Correct. It is normally used to describe the effect of medication. For example, in testing new painkillers some study participants will receive a pill with no medication. Many of these report less pain after taking this pill. This is ascribed to “psychological” mechanisms such as attention.
But the placebo effect is pretty strong!
Yes, it is very strong (up to 50% of the impact of the real drug, on average)— one of the, if not the, best and safest medical interventions in the world. It is also used in the case of sham operations to great effect. But it does depend on the ailment. Pain is particularly strongly affected with placebos but cancer is not. So it is not a panacea.
Ok, that is in the medical domain but what about in creativity?
Well, this is interesting because the placebo, and its evil brother the nocebo effect (when you get a negative effect), are extremely well documented in the medical literature but these researchers wanted to gather some solid scientific evidence of whether this could be used in other domains…
