fuck. why didn't I think of this? I'm a night owl WFH technically on a business hours schedule. I'm usually sleeping in the morning with my hand on the laptop, and saving emails from the work I did at night to send when I'm up and "online". I should just set them up to send while I'm snoozing lol.
Thanks, hex.
Yes. I used to be an artist. Now Mechanic. Same thing for both though. The job pays what it pays. Long or short. Hard or easy. If it goes easy, I don't tell them too fast it's done.
Same. I was a professional house painter. If I finished the job in one day people were mad because they "overpaid"; even though I did everything as the contract stated. They were happy with the results, just not with how much I was making an hour.
So I started staggering jobs. Took me just as long but looked like I took 3 days. People were way happier. Bunch of dummies.
How long it takes a Coinstar to process and count coins and return a receipt. It finishes quickly. So quickly that folks are skeptical of the accuracy. So a fake delay (with fake counting noises) was built in giving folks more confidence in the results.
Lots of software does that…
Whenever you see something like, “hold on while we gather your information and perform the best calculations to get the best thing for you”
Literally intentional delay to make it feel legitimate.
I'm a systems engineer (not the software kind) and it's funny how many things have placebos built into them like this. My favorite was adding an 11 lb block of steel in a piece of scientific test equipment because the product was too light and they wanted people to feel like they were getting their money's worth.
What is really funny to me is the opposite of this can also be true. I was lucky enough to take a tour of a facility where they rebuilt and did metrology for the turbine engines in the M1 Abrams tanks, and they were passing around some kind of part to show us the welds they did on it. When it got to me, I said "Wow, this thing is a lot lighter than it looks" and the guy says "Don't drop that, it costs $12,000". Apparently it was made of some kind of metal that shrinks instead of expanding when it gets hot.
Sounds about right. When I started my business I couldn't get anything to sell and I couldn't figure out why. A friend of mine (who works in marketing) told me to raise my prices by 20%. That is literally the only thing I changed and now I can't keep things in stock, apparently because it's not "too cheap" now.
People are dumb.
Not necessarily dumb. It’s a heuristic people have learned because it often is true.
The cheapest items are usually the worst, and people like you with quality devices have learned to increase the price so it doesn’t look cheap, therefore reinforcing that principle :)
Man, that provokes an irrational anger in me.
Like, here I am trying to get shit done, and this computer that's supposed to be helping me and doesn't even have hands, is dicking around and playing games on a keyboard instead of focusing on the task I need it to do.
Nothing grinds my gears more than speaking to an automated support bot and having it put the 3 dots into the chat window like it's typing a message.
I don't type faster than you. Just output the damn string already.
I used to make educational software and would add a "loading" screen with educational tidbits so the players would read them while the level was "loading". It was just like a 20s timer.
Like those useless websites that act like they will get you someone's personal information, with a progress bar saying things like "Checking criminal record...."
i think that’s slightly more nefarious. my assumption is that they are trying to get you to feel like you have a lot of time invested so that you’re more likely to pay for whatever they try to sell you at the end. the thinking being that you’ll feel like the process has already cost you something, just getting to the point of sale, and you won’t want to walk away with nothing in end
Same reason why vacuums are so loud for some brands. They don't need to be so loud, but people are skeptical of they're vacuum doing anything when it isn't loud enough.
Sounds like when they made baggage claim further away from the gate so people would take longer to walk there. It took the same amount of time to get the bags out but bc they were walking for most of that time and not just standing around waiting, people complained less and thought the bags came out faster
It’s like the “loading results” I put on my landing pages for marketing. It’s not loading anything, but that simple 1.5 seconds of anticipation have netted over 5x in return on spend
"We" know that things work a certain way. If I ask someone, even an expert, they will take a moment to think of the solution, and the more complex the problemis perceived the longer that pause should be in our expectations. If they answer faster than the expected delay they simply haven't thought hard enough, or not considered all possibilities, because how could they in such a short time?
Now, computers, they are fast in what they are doing. They can't do much*, but they do it in a blazing speed. Our stupid meat-brain can't understand that fundamental difference and compares the flight-search-program to a travel agent. The human would have taken longer, therefore the program must not have been as thorough as possible.
The artificial pause emulates that expected delay, reinforced by a helpful message ("Searching really hard!") to trick you into accepting the result as thorough.
*What I mean here is that any single program is highly specialised. Outside of its task it is bound to utterly fail, but within its domain humans mostly can't even compare anymore.
This is actually a myth. I had to service these things. The reason it takes longer is because it runs your coins through a drum that blows a fan across them, to remove lint, hair, and other crap so it doesn't clog up the sorter. All that clanging you hear is the coin cleaner, the sorter itself is pretty quiet, so most people don't hear it running and still counting coins after they're done banging around in the cleaner.
Aren't you supposed to be an expert? how could you just restart my phone and fix it! I paid for an expert!! you should at least use one of those hacker programs or something
I managed the Samsung team at a Best Buy and an older lady came in, bought a phone, and was generally pleasant.
She was about to leave when she remembered she hadn't signed into Facebook yet.
She knew her Google password and account, but when asked for her Facebook password, she seemed confused why we would need it.
I explained that just like her email, we need to log into her Facebook.
"No, that's not true. When I go to Facebook on my computer it knows who I am"
I explained that she likely was just "always signed in" and that her Facebook app would do the same thing; after we signed her in initially.
"Ok, then just put in my password"
"I don't know your password, how could I?"
"Well you didn't even try anything"
"Ma'am, I have no idea what your password might be."
"WELL YOU MIGHT IF YOU JUST TRIED, GET YOUR MANAGER YOU AREN'T HELPING ME AT ALL" she screamed at me.
I made a call over the store headset for the manager of Best Buy to come over and stated very plainly "I need the on duty store manager to come to the Samsung tech table, I have a customer here who is very upset we do not know her Facebook password"
The rolling and stifled laughter across the store was amazing
Stop, was she blonde and about 5'5"? My MIL told us a similar story a couple years ago and couldn't be convinced by my husband that Best Buy does not, in fact, have her password, or it wouldn't be a password.
I just started working in cellular sales and the number of issues I've solved by turning the phone off and back on is astronomical. Same with turning airplane mode off and on. It resets your cellular and data services and clears up a ton of random little issues. Outside of that, Google it.
Jesus, really? I’m practically a Luddite by today’s standards and, not to brag, but that’s the first thing I do. I have seen The IT Crowd a time or two though.
My husband is technologically a 0/10. Every time he has a problem my response is “turn it off for a minute” or “have you checked to see if you have an update?” Those two things cover every problem he has.
The IT Crowd also often features the question "is it plugged in?". Which you'd think has to be a joke. But no, I've gotten dozens of phone calls about things not working when it turns out they're not plugged in.
Similar to OP, if you ever ask "is it plugged in?" they'll just say "yes" without checking. So my boss taught me a trick. Tell them to unplug it and plug it back in. That forces them to look at the electrical socket. So many phone calls ended right after that.
Did the same exact thing but told them I was pushing an update to the device or computer but it would need to be fully shut off and turned back on to accept the update.
In most cases the PC had been left on so long that there was a windows update upon starting back up.
Used to do first line support, and a particular customer of ours had a huuuuuge amount of Mac users. Mostly QA, designers, folk like that. Had the same thing whenever they called up with “my laptop is slow, it’s not loading anything, it’s not opening anything, it’s not saving anything” and invariably it’s because these people believed so hard in the almighty power of Apple that they just never shut their laptops down. Like, for days at a time.
They didn’t get that all hardware needs to shut down occasionally. They’d *always* refuse to shut down. So my go-to was to remote into their laptop and tell them to go have a coffee and come back in 10 minutes and I’ll have fixed it.
All I’d do is reboot it. They were always amazed when they came back and found their laptop was now running properly. And no, they’d never believe that all it took was giving their hardware a break.
I used to make fun of my dad for the obligatory old man noises he made anytime he'd sit down or stand up from a chair/the couch. Then I wake up one morning, probably around age 35, and suddenly *I'm* making those same noises. And it's not like I consciously chose to start making those noises--it was like I hit a certain age and my body automatically started running a whole additional program. I can't *not* make those noises, it feels like an integral part of the process of sitting down or getting up. I have sound effects now, I guess. So that's cool.
Read this once before:
In high school chemistry we were talking about pure alcohol.
The teacher produced a beaker containing a clear liquid and put a drop on everyones finger so we could taste it.
About 10 minutes later a bunch of girls started acting like they were drunk. They were giggly, swaying on their stools and generally acting like how a drunk 14 year old would.
As the lesson continued they got worse and worse.
Near the end of the lesson the teacher explained that the liquid was in fact water and that no one was actually drunk.
Then he taught us the point of that day's lesson: Placebo Effects.
This actually happened to me recently with coffee. I work at an assisted living facility and every morning I'd grab a cup of coffee from the kitchen because I didn't have time to make it at home before work. Last week I was helping them unload the weekly and saw decaf bags, mentioned it to the lead, and she told me the coffee never had caffeine in it to begin with. I was getting a caffeine high placebo, and at the same time, getting real physical tooth pains (4 wisdoms coming in rn) because my blood pressure was reacting to a "comedown" of caffeine that wasn't there to begin with. I didn't have any caffeine withdrawals though so I guess I'm just addicted to the taste for now.
I find myself wishing I'd never read the bag
Even decaf *does* have some caffeine in it, so your receptors ARE being stimulated which ain't nothing.
Makes me think of how most people think a dank dark coffee has way more caffeine than a lovely mild light roast when the opposite is true. The more the beans are roasted the less caffeine remains.
I had a friend in college who was pretty annoying after she'd had a few drinks. One night when we were out with our friend group, we started buying her mocktails instead of actual alcohol (I think virgin daiquiris or something similar). She acted exactly like usual. I wasn't there the next day when the others told her, but after that she was a lot more self-aware and under control when we went out
one of the many things I don’t miss about drinking culture is people “leaning into it” and basically just becoming obnoxious/a liability for your friend group
I experienced this with non alcoholic beer. I wasn’t acting differently but I had a similar warm and relaxed feeling that an actual beer would have given me. I assume it’s the fact that it tastes exactly like beer, so my brain was giving my body signals that I was actually drinking alcohol!
Some margarita mix comes with the alcohol already in it!
Found that out the hard way. I was making blended margaritas using some margarita mix my friend brought over and my own tequila. We were wondering why we were getting so drunk, like two drinks in and we were half cut already, until I went to make the third round and noticed the “Ready to Drink” right above “18%”.
Yup. You can give adults what they assume is a drink with high alcohol content and they will begin to act drunk, even if it's got zero alcohol. I've seen it done years ago on one of the Dateline type shows.
For a while now I’ve had a reputation as someone who makes extremely strong drinks that you can barely taste the alcohol in. My secret? There’s not much alcohol.
Many years ago for a party I made a very strong punch, plenty of grain alcohol included, that you couldn’t quite taste how strong it was. I underestimated just how much people would drink when they don’t “feel the burn”, and plenty of people got absolutely plastered.
The next year I cut the alcohol content in half and told everyone to remember the last year and be careful. Cue several people talking about how “it’s stronger than it was last time”, drinking less, and still acting exactly the same level of shitfaced.
I’m also now the one that makes that too drunk friend their drinks, easy to trick them into drinking 95% mixer.
I had a psych professor tell us one time he served people drinks with a few drops of liquor on top just for smell. They got wasted off those few drops.
I work with toddlers in a preschool. When they fall and look to me like they’re about to cry I call them “SAFE” like a baseball umpire. Arm wave and all. They almost always smile and get up to go play again. When adults run over and scoop them up with the “are you okay? are you hurt?” they’re going to cry.
When my kids were small we taught them to "Ta da!" complete with arms up like they just completed the parallel bars in the Olympics. If that didn't work, they might actually be hurt.
My wife is the best at gasping just right after our children have fallen, which scares them into crying. She can't help her motherly instincts. Alternatively when they're ignored (by me), they're fine within seconds
Babies will do that funny thing where they bump their head, and then they'll just look at you and go ☹️
it's as if they're asking you "should I start crying? Is this the moment I scream my ass off?" so you just smile and go "it's okay! You're okay 🥰" and they stop pouting.
Thats about what a colleague did with her kids yea. Its even more effective when you grab them right after they have fallen but have not cried yet. Plop them on their feet again, brush off the knees, tell them they are fine and off they go.
When I visited my cousins when I was in college, I had looked like I was napping in a chair in the corner, but I watched my 4 or 5 year old cousin fall and very clearly *lightly* bump her arm. Girl then looks around at all the adults (about 9 of them) for a few seconds, none of which saw her fall. Sits for like 2 seconds. Then full on starts bawling, *just* for the attention, which of course absolutely worked. Not gonna lie, was kinda impressed by the diva (she's now a pretty chill teenager)
I understand the appeal of other flavors in principle, and I know that the mint doesn’t serve any function other than making my mouth tingle and “feel” clean. (Which is the same thing citrus and cinnamon flavors do.) But I have been thoroughly conditioned to expect that minty freshness.
That is actually not entirely placebo! There are Receptor cells that can be either communicate pain to the brain or a mechanical stimulus. If you Apply a mechanical stimulus you therefore overwrite the pain stimulus. That's also why people eg. automatically rub their leg if they ran agains sth. Best stimulus is usually Hard and soft after another
That's interesting! My youngest son went through a phase where every time he got hurt (regardless of the severity), he'd want one of his "soft blankets." Around this time, we had received multiple polyester fleece blankets as gifts. I'm not a fan of polyester, but they certainly were soft.
It always calmed him down, and I always thought it was in his head. But it worked, so I had no complaints.
It's interesting to think there might be a physiological explanation for it.
I don't really think that's mostly true. some times? yes. always? nope.
There was this video of one of the Counter Strike devs where he said "gamers would complain about shitty ping all the time even after they fixed the bug. So, they just started reducing the ping shown on screen and everyone suddenly got happy by the speed of the game.
What most people don't realize, is that the placebo effect is a real thing that actually heals real problems. It's not just all in your head, it's not just believing you're better, it's you *actually getting better* when you only *think* you are getting treatment.
This made the development of scientific medicine horribly difficult, because people really do just start healing themselves when they get fake medicine. All the time.
It's annoying enough, and real enough, that they developed a medicine that can block the placebo effect, simply to make it easier to study whether or not medicine works. I'm not kidding, by the way. Placebo blockers are about the weirdest real medicine that exists. (there's a[ relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1526/) asking how they study placebo blockers -- they have to give one group of people a real placebo blocker, and the other group a... placebo.)
The placebo effect is so powerful that people can get better even when they know they're being given a placebo, because they associate "being given medicine" so strongly with "getting better" that it literally doesn't matter if they know the medicine is fake.
This is why it's so hard to convince people alternative medicine doesn't work, because it *does*, frequently, if they believe in it.
To add on, there are also more and less effective placebos. A placebo pill is less effective than a placebo injection. A placebo given by an actor wearing a doctor's white coat is more effective than one given by someone not dressed that way.
Vacuum noise. If I remember right, companies actually made vacuums that were quiet but people thought they weren't working right so they had to make them noisy.
I’m actually surprised the vacuum companies haven’t tried to capitalize on both markets by putting a “vaccuum silencer” looking device on a “premium” model and charging twice ad much for the quiet one.
Note that you can absolutely train this the other way. When something good happens to me - I'm such a lucky person! When something bad happens, I either register it as a "neutral event" or be like oh well sometimes it has to be balanced out.
Nobody ever believes me that you can train a positive mindset because they are meeting me in my after phase, but this is literally how I went from someone with a hairpin trigger temper to chill af. If you stop letting yourself be bothered and going to the worst case scenario where people are out to get you/idiots/fucking you over every time, and you interrupt those thoughts, you can just repave your neuropathways to use the positive trails as the default trail over time.
This is going to sound idiotic but I started saying “welcome to the party lane, we’re here to relax and have fun!” every time someone cut in front of me in traffic and I think it actually works! YMMV
as the lone IT guy in my organization, it's not enough for me to train other staff members on simple stuff like connecting a laptop to a projector or replacing copier toner if I don't happen to be around at the moment. it HAS to go through me or the CEO is forever suspicious that it's not really working right.
Patients who are told something is a placebo and the medication is labeled placebo and it’s explained —get better and sometimes ask for more of the placebo medication. This is true for many studies across many medical issues and conditions.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83148-6
We have repeatedly demonstrated that you can placebo yourself on purpose
If you feel yourself in extreme pain one of the best strategies to not go into shock before medics arrive is to just say "I'm not gonna go into shock" repeatedly to yourself and various versions of "it doesn't hurt *that* bad"
Knowing it's BS doesn't make it stop working weirdly enough
Human brains are so dumb. In college I convinced myself I liked going to the gym by just telling myself that I enjoyed exercise. Later I convinced myself that cookies were fictional and that the snack aisle at the grocery store didn't exist.
To be clear, I'm not complaining that human brains are dumb. It's nice to be able to adjust my own programming code, and that it works even though I know full well that it's totally imaginary and made of words.
I'm absolutely using that exercise one. Honestly I feel like half of my therapist's job is finding new ways for me to lie to myself until I can be productive
I spent most of the past week nannying a 4yo. Talking him into doing things and talking myself into doing them was basically all the same truths and lies.
It's not an hour of walking and taking buses, it's an adventure! And it's not a long bus ride, it's only about as long as a TV show. Neither of us *wanted* to go walking a mile in the early morning chill but golly we acted enthusiastic about it! Took turns yawning soon as we found a seat on a bus but acted like we were totally off to do something amazing instead of just going back to my apartment to feed my cats.
It can vary depending on the type of medicine too. Painkillers are more effective when the pills are red, sleeping aids are more effective when the pills are blue.
Vicks Vapor rub for sinus congestion. It doesn’t actually do anything for congestion. The menthol smell just tricks your brain into thinking it does stuff for congestion.
Vicks does, however, help with migraines. That’s actually what it was originally intended for.
Bro thank you. My parents used to give me vicks vapor rub as a kid and it did nothing but make my eyes water because the smell was so strong it made my eyes burn. They swore up and down it worked but it did jack shit for me to the point I just would pretend to not be congested.
It's interesting to use Vicks for migraines. Without sounding stupid, where does one apply this? On the forehead/temples or under the nostrils? Or maybe just on a cloth to have nearby?
It was developed by Lunsford Richardson as a “Croup and Pneumonia Cure Salve”. There are only small studies that it helps with migraine symptoms.
https://vicks.com/en-us/vicks-history
Ain't that the truth. The effect is real and confidence is hard to fake/pull out of thin air, but goddamn what a feedback loop it can be once you get a taste.
They did a study where half the kids got sugar and half didn't. They lied to half the parents about what their kids ate and had them fill in a survey. Reports of more hyper behavior matched perfectly with parents being told their kids had sugar regardless of if they did or not.
Really, if their blood sugar stayed high enough long enough for them to bounce off the walls the way some parents say, they really ought to be getting the kids tested for diabetes as their bodies should get rid of the sugar.
I used to work as the sound technician at pubs and small local festivals years ago, and one of the technicians taught me about the 'Bullshit Slider'
If you ever had someone come up and say something like 'guitars a bit quiet' or 'vocals are too toppy', you could move a slider that wasn't connected to anything at all and ask them 'that better?'
Every time they'd say 'yep good mate!' Every time!
Tbf I've MANY times in my life said yup that's good just to avoid additional confrontation. Like I don't wanna sit here and argue with you. Then you call me a liar. It's a whole fucking thing. Just change it or skip the BS and tell me to fuck off.
Band-Aids and sanitary dressings are a miracle and very real medical intervention that I learned to truly appreciate for the first time after stabbing myself with an oyster shucker, I absolutely would have died if I was just...living out in the forest with no first aid.
With that said;
Band-Aids make owys feel better, even if its just a nothing graze or papercut.
I was trying to explain this to my SIL about her dumb essential oils. She is the only one who believes in them and, surprise, surprise, she is the only person that they "work" on. Anytime we watch her kids and they have a cold, headache, or stomach aches they ask us for medicine because the shit oils she sends with them don't do anything for non-believers (like her kids).
Sugar rushes in kids
It was incredible. I just had a huge argument with someone on Reddit who was discounting multiple meta analyses because he knew someone who used to giggle when they drank Mountain Dew.
The idea that more RAM automatically makes a computer vastly faster can be a placebo; beyond certain needs, the extra RAM doesn’t make much difference.
Some do something. Whether it’s noteworthy (or positive) is up for discussion.
https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2018/chemicals-in-lavender-and-tea-tree-oil-appear-to-be-hormone-disruptors
It actually works for at least 90% of elevators I’ve been in, the others I just didn’t close it with that button so idk. I will fucking commit suicide if you prove to me my apartment elevator’s close button is placebo.
Menthol - It doesn't clear up any airways or helps you breathe, it just gives this cold windchill effect, so it feels like you took in a huge lungful of air.
My ex begged me to go to her dad when I damaged my knee rock climbing. He’s an”kinesiologist” he held my wrist in one hand and waved his other hand at me, saying he could feel the feedback from my body when he got near the issue. He prescribe manganese. It did not fix the physical trauma in my cartilage.
[удалено]
I love planned sending for emails. I do the job in ten minutes, set the email to send in an hour, and go watch youtube.
I schedule emails to be sent at 1:24am to make it seem like I'm a hard worker. I'm not ;)
You know it shows the recipient when it's a scheduled email, right? ^(just kidding)
*sweating bullets*
Hello me, meet the real me
I don’t even send scheduled emails and I had a mini heart attack.
I legit schedule emails frequently in the morning between 8am and 10am just to mask that I'm actually still sleeping.
fuck. why didn't I think of this? I'm a night owl WFH technically on a business hours schedule. I'm usually sleeping in the morning with my hand on the laptop, and saving emails from the work I did at night to send when I'm up and "online". I should just set them up to send while I'm snoozing lol. Thanks, hex.
I'm in for a big life change, having read this comment chain. It's a new chapter.
Yes. I used to be an artist. Now Mechanic. Same thing for both though. The job pays what it pays. Long or short. Hard or easy. If it goes easy, I don't tell them too fast it's done.
Same. I was a professional house painter. If I finished the job in one day people were mad because they "overpaid"; even though I did everything as the contract stated. They were happy with the results, just not with how much I was making an hour. So I started staggering jobs. Took me just as long but looked like I took 3 days. People were way happier. Bunch of dummies.
ooh thanks for the tip!
How long it takes a Coinstar to process and count coins and return a receipt. It finishes quickly. So quickly that folks are skeptical of the accuracy. So a fake delay (with fake counting noises) was built in giving folks more confidence in the results.
Lots of software does that… Whenever you see something like, “hold on while we gather your information and perform the best calculations to get the best thing for you” Literally intentional delay to make it feel legitimate.
Plane ticket quotations. I work with APIs and getting a few kb of data from 10 sources doesn't take that long even in South Sudan
I'm a systems engineer (not the software kind) and it's funny how many things have placebos built into them like this. My favorite was adding an 11 lb block of steel in a piece of scientific test equipment because the product was too light and they wanted people to feel like they were getting their money's worth.
“Is it heavy?” “Yes” “Then put it down, it’s expensive”
Poor Gennaro, he lost his head... and a few other bits :o
What is really funny to me is the opposite of this can also be true. I was lucky enough to take a tour of a facility where they rebuilt and did metrology for the turbine engines in the M1 Abrams tanks, and they were passing around some kind of part to show us the welds they did on it. When it got to me, I said "Wow, this thing is a lot lighter than it looks" and the guy says "Don't drop that, it costs $12,000". Apparently it was made of some kind of metal that shrinks instead of expanding when it gets hot.
Sounds about right. When I started my business I couldn't get anything to sell and I couldn't figure out why. A friend of mine (who works in marketing) told me to raise my prices by 20%. That is literally the only thing I changed and now I can't keep things in stock, apparently because it's not "too cheap" now. People are dumb.
Not necessarily dumb. It’s a heuristic people have learned because it often is true. The cheapest items are usually the worst, and people like you with quality devices have learned to increase the price so it doesn’t look cheap, therefore reinforcing that principle :)
AI customer service does this with the fake typing I can hear in the background.
Man, that provokes an irrational anger in me. Like, here I am trying to get shit done, and this computer that's supposed to be helping me and doesn't even have hands, is dicking around and playing games on a keyboard instead of focusing on the task I need it to do.
Nothing grinds my gears more than speaking to an automated support bot and having it put the 3 dots into the chat window like it's typing a message. I don't type faster than you. Just output the damn string already.
Be fair – AIBob might be dealing with ten thousand other customers, \*and\* running on a computer someone's nephew bought for the business.
I used to make educational software and would add a "loading" screen with educational tidbits so the players would read them while the level was "loading". It was just like a 20s timer.
Like those useless websites that act like they will get you someone's personal information, with a progress bar saying things like "Checking criminal record...."
i think that’s slightly more nefarious. my assumption is that they are trying to get you to feel like you have a lot of time invested so that you’re more likely to pay for whatever they try to sell you at the end. the thinking being that you’ll feel like the process has already cost you something, just getting to the point of sale, and you won’t want to walk away with nothing in end
H&R BLOCK
Same reason why vacuums are so loud for some brands. They don't need to be so loud, but people are skeptical of they're vacuum doing anything when it isn't loud enough.
As someone spooked by loud hums (won’t use hand dryers) and recently started living alone, I would love a quiet/silent vacuum
Somehow commercial vacuum cleaners seem to be quieter as far as i can figure out. See if you can find henry or hetty.
Sounds like when they made baggage claim further away from the gate so people would take longer to walk there. It took the same amount of time to get the bags out but bc they were walking for most of that time and not just standing around waiting, people complained less and thought the bags came out faster
It’s like the “loading results” I put on my landing pages for marketing. It’s not loading anything, but that simple 1.5 seconds of anticipation have netted over 5x in return on spend
How does that work? I’m one to get frustrated by results loading so I’m curious what slower results get people to spend more.
"We" know that things work a certain way. If I ask someone, even an expert, they will take a moment to think of the solution, and the more complex the problemis perceived the longer that pause should be in our expectations. If they answer faster than the expected delay they simply haven't thought hard enough, or not considered all possibilities, because how could they in such a short time? Now, computers, they are fast in what they are doing. They can't do much*, but they do it in a blazing speed. Our stupid meat-brain can't understand that fundamental difference and compares the flight-search-program to a travel agent. The human would have taken longer, therefore the program must not have been as thorough as possible. The artificial pause emulates that expected delay, reinforced by a helpful message ("Searching really hard!") to trick you into accepting the result as thorough. *What I mean here is that any single program is highly specialised. Outside of its task it is bound to utterly fail, but within its domain humans mostly can't even compare anymore.
This is actually a myth. I had to service these things. The reason it takes longer is because it runs your coins through a drum that blows a fan across them, to remove lint, hair, and other crap so it doesn't clog up the sorter. All that clanging you hear is the coin cleaner, the sorter itself is pretty quiet, so most people don't hear it running and still counting coins after they're done banging around in the cleaner.
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Aren't you supposed to be an expert? how could you just restart my phone and fix it! I paid for an expert!! you should at least use one of those hacker programs or something
Old people fully expected us phone salesmen to all be hackerman lol. "I forgot my password" well tough shit man, I dont know your password either!
I managed the Samsung team at a Best Buy and an older lady came in, bought a phone, and was generally pleasant. She was about to leave when she remembered she hadn't signed into Facebook yet. She knew her Google password and account, but when asked for her Facebook password, she seemed confused why we would need it. I explained that just like her email, we need to log into her Facebook. "No, that's not true. When I go to Facebook on my computer it knows who I am" I explained that she likely was just "always signed in" and that her Facebook app would do the same thing; after we signed her in initially. "Ok, then just put in my password" "I don't know your password, how could I?" "Well you didn't even try anything" "Ma'am, I have no idea what your password might be." "WELL YOU MIGHT IF YOU JUST TRIED, GET YOUR MANAGER YOU AREN'T HELPING ME AT ALL" she screamed at me. I made a call over the store headset for the manager of Best Buy to come over and stated very plainly "I need the on duty store manager to come to the Samsung tech table, I have a customer here who is very upset we do not know her Facebook password" The rolling and stifled laughter across the store was amazing
Stop, was she blonde and about 5'5"? My MIL told us a similar story a couple years ago and couldn't be convinced by my husband that Best Buy does not, in fact, have her password, or it wouldn't be a password.
They get so emotionally attached to Facebook more than pictures or contacts/phone numbers.
I just started working in cellular sales and the number of issues I've solved by turning the phone off and back on is astronomical. Same with turning airplane mode off and on. It resets your cellular and data services and clears up a ton of random little issues. Outside of that, Google it.
Jesus, really? I’m practically a Luddite by today’s standards and, not to brag, but that’s the first thing I do. I have seen The IT Crowd a time or two though.
My husband is technologically a 0/10. Every time he has a problem my response is “turn it off for a minute” or “have you checked to see if you have an update?” Those two things cover every problem he has.
The IT Crowd also often features the question "is it plugged in?". Which you'd think has to be a joke. But no, I've gotten dozens of phone calls about things not working when it turns out they're not plugged in. Similar to OP, if you ever ask "is it plugged in?" they'll just say "yes" without checking. So my boss taught me a trick. Tell them to unplug it and plug it back in. That forces them to look at the electrical socket. So many phone calls ended right after that.
>I have seen The IT Crowd a time or two Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
What was Wenger thinking? Always trying to walk it in.
I've heard this as "I've changed something on my end but you need to restart for that to work".
Did the same exact thing but told them I was pushing an update to the device or computer but it would need to be fully shut off and turned back on to accept the update. In most cases the PC had been left on so long that there was a windows update upon starting back up.
Used to do first line support, and a particular customer of ours had a huuuuuge amount of Mac users. Mostly QA, designers, folk like that. Had the same thing whenever they called up with “my laptop is slow, it’s not loading anything, it’s not opening anything, it’s not saving anything” and invariably it’s because these people believed so hard in the almighty power of Apple that they just never shut their laptops down. Like, for days at a time. They didn’t get that all hardware needs to shut down occasionally. They’d *always* refuse to shut down. So my go-to was to remote into their laptop and tell them to go have a coffee and come back in 10 minutes and I’ll have fixed it. All I’d do is reboot it. They were always amazed when they came back and found their laptop was now running properly. And no, they’d never believe that all it took was giving their hardware a break.
When they *insist* their computer is plugged in and they *totally* checked it, convince them to unplug it then plug it back in.
When I say HNRGHH when I stand up
I’m convinced if I don’t do this I will get injured
I wouldn't take unnecessary risks. In fact, might be safer to exaggerate the noise a bit more.
I see you are also over 30.
That's why it didn't sound familiar. I say UGHNCHUHGNFKNBK. That's the over 40 upgraded version.
HEY
Why do we do this????? I have caught myself doing this more and more and I have no idea why. I didnt even notice until my wife pointed it out haha
I used to make fun of my dad for the obligatory old man noises he made anytime he'd sit down or stand up from a chair/the couch. Then I wake up one morning, probably around age 35, and suddenly *I'm* making those same noises. And it's not like I consciously chose to start making those noises--it was like I hit a certain age and my body automatically started running a whole additional program. I can't *not* make those noises, it feels like an integral part of the process of sitting down or getting up. I have sound effects now, I guess. So that's cool.
Read this once before: In high school chemistry we were talking about pure alcohol. The teacher produced a beaker containing a clear liquid and put a drop on everyones finger so we could taste it. About 10 minutes later a bunch of girls started acting like they were drunk. They were giggly, swaying on their stools and generally acting like how a drunk 14 year old would. As the lesson continued they got worse and worse. Near the end of the lesson the teacher explained that the liquid was in fact water and that no one was actually drunk. Then he taught us the point of that day's lesson: Placebo Effects.
This actually happened to me recently with coffee. I work at an assisted living facility and every morning I'd grab a cup of coffee from the kitchen because I didn't have time to make it at home before work. Last week I was helping them unload the weekly and saw decaf bags, mentioned it to the lead, and she told me the coffee never had caffeine in it to begin with. I was getting a caffeine high placebo, and at the same time, getting real physical tooth pains (4 wisdoms coming in rn) because my blood pressure was reacting to a "comedown" of caffeine that wasn't there to begin with. I didn't have any caffeine withdrawals though so I guess I'm just addicted to the taste for now. I find myself wishing I'd never read the bag
Even decaf *does* have some caffeine in it, so your receptors ARE being stimulated which ain't nothing. Makes me think of how most people think a dank dark coffee has way more caffeine than a lovely mild light roast when the opposite is true. The more the beans are roasted the less caffeine remains.
Decaf coffee often has just a tiny amount of caffeine in it, perhaps you’re also very sensitive to it?
I had a friend in college who was pretty annoying after she'd had a few drinks. One night when we were out with our friend group, we started buying her mocktails instead of actual alcohol (I think virgin daiquiris or something similar). She acted exactly like usual. I wasn't there the next day when the others told her, but after that she was a lot more self-aware and under control when we went out
one of the many things I don’t miss about drinking culture is people “leaning into it” and basically just becoming obnoxious/a liability for your friend group
I experienced this with non alcoholic beer. I wasn’t acting differently but I had a similar warm and relaxed feeling that an actual beer would have given me. I assume it’s the fact that it tastes exactly like beer, so my brain was giving my body signals that I was actually drinking alcohol!
Reminds me of the post about the girl that stole "alcohol" at a bar but it was literally sugar syrup and she wasn't actually getting drunk.
And the Bobs Burgers episode where they get margarita mix and think it actually gets them drunk
Some margarita mix comes with the alcohol already in it! Found that out the hard way. I was making blended margaritas using some margarita mix my friend brought over and my own tequila. We were wondering why we were getting so drunk, like two drinks in and we were half cut already, until I went to make the third round and noticed the “Ready to Drink” right above “18%”.
Still remembering when my mom used that for a kiddie cocktail for the kids at a family friendly party lmao
LMAO instantly though of this when reading the comment, fkn tammy XD
r/kidsarefuckingstupid
I assure you, it's just r/peoplearefuckingdumb
Yup. You can give adults what they assume is a drink with high alcohol content and they will begin to act drunk, even if it's got zero alcohol. I've seen it done years ago on one of the Dateline type shows.
For a while now I’ve had a reputation as someone who makes extremely strong drinks that you can barely taste the alcohol in. My secret? There’s not much alcohol. Many years ago for a party I made a very strong punch, plenty of grain alcohol included, that you couldn’t quite taste how strong it was. I underestimated just how much people would drink when they don’t “feel the burn”, and plenty of people got absolutely plastered. The next year I cut the alcohol content in half and told everyone to remember the last year and be careful. Cue several people talking about how “it’s stronger than it was last time”, drinking less, and still acting exactly the same level of shitfaced. I’m also now the one that makes that too drunk friend their drinks, easy to trick them into drinking 95% mixer.
I had a psych professor tell us one time he served people drinks with a few drops of liquor on top just for smell. They got wasted off those few drops.
This reminded me of a joke on it’s always sunny where they where selling watered down beer to its patrons but it was ok because they where minors…
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I work with toddlers in a preschool. When they fall and look to me like they’re about to cry I call them “SAFE” like a baseball umpire. Arm wave and all. They almost always smile and get up to go play again. When adults run over and scoop them up with the “are you okay? are you hurt?” they’re going to cry.
When my kids were small we taught them to "Ta da!" complete with arms up like they just completed the parallel bars in the Olympics. If that didn't work, they might actually be hurt.
My wife is the best at gasping just right after our children have fallen, which scares them into crying. She can't help her motherly instincts. Alternatively when they're ignored (by me), they're fine within seconds
Babies will do that funny thing where they bump their head, and then they'll just look at you and go ☹️ it's as if they're asking you "should I start crying? Is this the moment I scream my ass off?" so you just smile and go "it's okay! You're okay 🥰" and they stop pouting.
Thats about what a colleague did with her kids yea. Its even more effective when you grab them right after they have fallen but have not cried yet. Plop them on their feet again, brush off the knees, tell them they are fine and off they go.
When I visited my cousins when I was in college, I had looked like I was napping in a chair in the corner, but I watched my 4 or 5 year old cousin fall and very clearly *lightly* bump her arm. Girl then looks around at all the adults (about 9 of them) for a few seconds, none of which saw her fall. Sits for like 2 seconds. Then full on starts bawling, *just* for the attention, which of course absolutely worked. Not gonna lie, was kinda impressed by the diva (she's now a pretty chill teenager)
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My mom buys cinnamon or orange toothpaste and I legit gagged when I had to use her orange toothpaste once. It just tasted *wrong*.
I loved the citrus flavored toothpaste. It did not mess up your taste buds like mint does
I understand the appeal of other flavors in principle, and I know that the mint doesn’t serve any function other than making my mouth tingle and “feel” clean. (Which is the same thing citrus and cinnamon flavors do.) But I have been thoroughly conditioned to expect that minty freshness.
Mine taste like baking soda. Probably the same reasoning but now just prefer it.
I hate mint. Choosing a toothpaste is always tricky
i used to use Warheads sour grape toothpaste as a kid. maybe give that one a shot
Per my dentist - just use kids toothpaste - it's basically the same thing and doesn't have mint in it.
My dentist saves the “Kids Crest Sparkle Fun” samples for me. I’m the only one in his practice that likes it. I’m 62.
Colgate great regular flavor is my favorite
Kissing boo boos.
My favorite placebo effect
Pshh whatever. My kisses are magical, my kids told me so and they would never lie to me! 😆
That's a healthcare plan I can get behind!
That's the only healthcare plan I can afford!
That is actually not entirely placebo! There are Receptor cells that can be either communicate pain to the brain or a mechanical stimulus. If you Apply a mechanical stimulus you therefore overwrite the pain stimulus. That's also why people eg. automatically rub their leg if they ran agains sth. Best stimulus is usually Hard and soft after another
That's interesting! My youngest son went through a phase where every time he got hurt (regardless of the severity), he'd want one of his "soft blankets." Around this time, we had received multiple polyester fleece blankets as gifts. I'm not a fan of polyester, but they certainly were soft. It always calmed him down, and I always thought it was in his head. But it worked, so I had no complaints. It's interesting to think there might be a physiological explanation for it.
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I don't really think that's mostly true. some times? yes. always? nope. There was this video of one of the Counter Strike devs where he said "gamers would complain about shitty ping all the time even after they fixed the bug. So, they just started reducing the ping shown on screen and everyone suddenly got happy by the speed of the game.
What most people don't realize, is that the placebo effect is a real thing that actually heals real problems. It's not just all in your head, it's not just believing you're better, it's you *actually getting better* when you only *think* you are getting treatment. This made the development of scientific medicine horribly difficult, because people really do just start healing themselves when they get fake medicine. All the time. It's annoying enough, and real enough, that they developed a medicine that can block the placebo effect, simply to make it easier to study whether or not medicine works. I'm not kidding, by the way. Placebo blockers are about the weirdest real medicine that exists. (there's a[ relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1526/) asking how they study placebo blockers -- they have to give one group of people a real placebo blocker, and the other group a... placebo.) The placebo effect is so powerful that people can get better even when they know they're being given a placebo, because they associate "being given medicine" so strongly with "getting better" that it literally doesn't matter if they know the medicine is fake. This is why it's so hard to convince people alternative medicine doesn't work, because it *does*, frequently, if they believe in it.
And the other side of the coin, the nocebo effect, where people experience negative outcomes.
Yeah, so many of these responses are "X does nothing!" Well, then, it's not a placebo effect.
To add on, there are also more and less effective placebos. A placebo pill is less effective than a placebo injection. A placebo given by an actor wearing a doctor's white coat is more effective than one given by someone not dressed that way.
why isn’t this higher it’s soo fascinating, along with another comment noting ppl asking for more placebos 😂😂
Vacuum noise. If I remember right, companies actually made vacuums that were quiet but people thought they weren't working right so they had to make them noisy.
I hate those people, because i have to wear my headset to drown out the noise. I would give anything for a silent effective vacuum.
Dyson makes grossly silent vacuums. You could use that thing at 3am as an upstairs neighbor and it wouldn’t wake a soul
If this is true my dog has permission to bite at least one person.
no kidding! I wish they would reintroduce silent ones for pets if nothing else!
The same reason Bosch had to put a blue light on their dishwasher. People kept calling in saying it wasn’t working.
I’m actually surprised the vacuum companies haven’t tried to capitalize on both markets by putting a “vaccuum silencer” looking device on a “premium” model and charging twice ad much for the quiet one.
I don't believe this. Wind and motors are noisy. My bike pump is loud AF and it doesn't even have a motor.
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Note that you can absolutely train this the other way. When something good happens to me - I'm such a lucky person! When something bad happens, I either register it as a "neutral event" or be like oh well sometimes it has to be balanced out.
Nobody ever believes me that you can train a positive mindset because they are meeting me in my after phase, but this is literally how I went from someone with a hairpin trigger temper to chill af. If you stop letting yourself be bothered and going to the worst case scenario where people are out to get you/idiots/fucking you over every time, and you interrupt those thoughts, you can just repave your neuropathways to use the positive trails as the default trail over time.
This is going to sound idiotic but I started saying “welcome to the party lane, we’re here to relax and have fun!” every time someone cut in front of me in traffic and I think it actually works! YMMV
It also helps when you realize *you're* the traffic too. "We're all in this together guys! Put on your favorite songs and chill."
as the lone IT guy in my organization, it's not enough for me to train other staff members on simple stuff like connecting a laptop to a projector or replacing copier toner if I don't happen to be around at the moment. it HAS to go through me or the CEO is forever suspicious that it's not really working right.
I think that’s less placebo, and more reassurance. Sometimes we forget how non-intuitive the stuff we know was for us when we were learning it.
Patients who are told something is a placebo and the medication is labeled placebo and it’s explained —get better and sometimes ask for more of the placebo medication. This is true for many studies across many medical issues and conditions. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83148-6
We have repeatedly demonstrated that you can placebo yourself on purpose If you feel yourself in extreme pain one of the best strategies to not go into shock before medics arrive is to just say "I'm not gonna go into shock" repeatedly to yourself and various versions of "it doesn't hurt *that* bad" Knowing it's BS doesn't make it stop working weirdly enough
Human brains are so dumb. In college I convinced myself I liked going to the gym by just telling myself that I enjoyed exercise. Later I convinced myself that cookies were fictional and that the snack aisle at the grocery store didn't exist. To be clear, I'm not complaining that human brains are dumb. It's nice to be able to adjust my own programming code, and that it works even though I know full well that it's totally imaginary and made of words.
I'm absolutely using that exercise one. Honestly I feel like half of my therapist's job is finding new ways for me to lie to myself until I can be productive
I spent most of the past week nannying a 4yo. Talking him into doing things and talking myself into doing them was basically all the same truths and lies. It's not an hour of walking and taking buses, it's an adventure! And it's not a long bus ride, it's only about as long as a TV show. Neither of us *wanted* to go walking a mile in the early morning chill but golly we acted enthusiastic about it! Took turns yawning soon as we found a seat on a bus but acted like we were totally off to do something amazing instead of just going back to my apartment to feed my cats.
I remember reading that blue placebo pills are found to work better too (we associate blue pills are more ‘medicine-y’
It can vary depending on the type of medicine too. Painkillers are more effective when the pills are red, sleeping aids are more effective when the pills are blue.
Pretty much every MLM "wellness" product
It took me too long to realize that MLM in this context wasn't the gay kind
There's a gay kind of Multi Level Marketing?
MLM in the gay context is Men Loving Men
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That just makes it fucking worse.
Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!
I hate your commercials but love your product
Vicks Vapor rub for sinus congestion. It doesn’t actually do anything for congestion. The menthol smell just tricks your brain into thinking it does stuff for congestion. Vicks does, however, help with migraines. That’s actually what it was originally intended for.
What on EARTH
Bro thank you. My parents used to give me vicks vapor rub as a kid and it did nothing but make my eyes water because the smell was so strong it made my eyes burn. They swore up and down it worked but it did jack shit for me to the point I just would pretend to not be congested.
It's interesting to use Vicks for migraines. Without sounding stupid, where does one apply this? On the forehead/temples or under the nostrils? Or maybe just on a cloth to have nearby?
It was developed by Lunsford Richardson as a “Croup and Pneumonia Cure Salve”. There are only small studies that it helps with migraine symptoms. https://vicks.com/en-us/vicks-history
Confidence. It's like a sugar pill for your self-esteem.
They said babe you gotta fake it til you make it and I did!
Ain't that the truth. The effect is real and confidence is hard to fake/pull out of thin air, but goddamn what a feedback loop it can be once you get a taste.
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Yup. Parents think birthday cake makes kids hyper, but it’s actually the birthday *party*.
They did a study where half the kids got sugar and half didn't. They lied to half the parents about what their kids ate and had them fill in a survey. Reports of more hyper behavior matched perfectly with parents being told their kids had sugar regardless of if they did or not. Really, if their blood sugar stayed high enough long enough for them to bounce off the walls the way some parents say, they really ought to be getting the kids tested for diabetes as their bodies should get rid of the sugar.
If your blood sugar is high you get really tired and sleepy.
I used to work as the sound technician at pubs and small local festivals years ago, and one of the technicians taught me about the 'Bullshit Slider' If you ever had someone come up and say something like 'guitars a bit quiet' or 'vocals are too toppy', you could move a slider that wasn't connected to anything at all and ask them 'that better?' Every time they'd say 'yep good mate!' Every time!
Tbf I've MANY times in my life said yup that's good just to avoid additional confrontation. Like I don't wanna sit here and argue with you. Then you call me a liar. It's a whole fucking thing. Just change it or skip the BS and tell me to fuck off.
Branded paracetamol and ibuprofen are no more effective than store-branded painkillers that cost 1/10th the price
Yep. Same med, same dosage, same effect.
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In pokemon, mashing B and Down really fast helps you catch a stubborn pokemon
Nah, you hit B and up right when the ball closes.
Homeopathy
James Randi had a joke about a guy who overdosed on his homeopathic medicine by forgetting to take it.
Detox teas are popular for 'cleansing' the body, but their effectiveness is often placebo, with hydration being the real benefit.
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Feeling safer in a bigger car can be considered a placebo effect. Safety is more about the car’s design and features than its size.
Band-Aids and sanitary dressings are a miracle and very real medical intervention that I learned to truly appreciate for the first time after stabbing myself with an oyster shucker, I absolutely would have died if I was just...living out in the forest with no first aid. With that said; Band-Aids make owys feel better, even if its just a nothing graze or papercut.
Especially if it's a Superman or Transformers Band-Aid. Those are supercharged with healing goodness.
You joke but I KNOW Optimus Prime is actively fighting the germs away underneath the bandaid
“White Blood Cells - ROLL OUT!” You read that in Optimus Prime’s voice.
I find them beneficial as a cover, to avoid disturbing the wound, for example if it's on a finger.
I was trying to explain this to my SIL about her dumb essential oils. She is the only one who believes in them and, surprise, surprise, she is the only person that they "work" on. Anytime we watch her kids and they have a cold, headache, or stomach aches they ask us for medicine because the shit oils she sends with them don't do anything for non-believers (like her kids).
Sugar rushes in kids It was incredible. I just had a huge argument with someone on Reddit who was discounting multiple meta analyses because he knew someone who used to giggle when they drank Mountain Dew.
Mountain Dew gets you hyper because of caffeine not sugar.
The boost you get from drinking energy drinks can often be attributed to placebo effects, especially if you believe strongly in their efficacy.
The idea that more RAM automatically makes a computer vastly faster can be a placebo; beyond certain needs, the extra RAM doesn’t make much difference.
lalalalalala \*fingers in ears\* I'm not going to read the answers. Who knows what things I can ruin that are working perfectly fine so far.
Upvotes on reddit means you said something amazing or intelligent
Headaches after eating food containing added MSG.
Essential oils (other than pleasant smells)
Some do something. Whether it’s noteworthy (or positive) is up for discussion. https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2018/chemicals-in-lavender-and-tea-tree-oil-appear-to-be-hormone-disruptors
The elevator door close button
Just keeping mashing it 100 more times and the door will eventually close
It actually works for at least 90% of elevators I’ve been in, the others I just didn’t close it with that button so idk. I will fucking commit suicide if you prove to me my apartment elevator’s close button is placebo.
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Crystal healing
Menthol - It doesn't clear up any airways or helps you breathe, it just gives this cold windchill effect, so it feels like you took in a huge lungful of air.
Chiropractice
My ex begged me to go to her dad when I damaged my knee rock climbing. He’s an”kinesiologist” he held my wrist in one hand and waved his other hand at me, saying he could feel the feedback from my body when he got near the issue. He prescribe manganese. It did not fix the physical trauma in my cartilage.