rationality. Please visit our About page for more information. The Anti-Placebo Effect 39 Post author: ShannonFriedman 28 September 2013 05:44AM Just about everyone is familiar with the placebo effect at this point. What I've discovered through my personal studies working with people suffering from anxiety and depression is that there is actually a significant related effect, which I have dubbed the anti-placebo effect. -- 1. a beneficial effect, produced by a placebo drug or treatment, that cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient's belief in that treatment. -- its easy to miss how their vocabulary is growing, but for someone who doesn't seem them every day, it may be immediately obvious "my how they're talking more!" In other words, an anti-placebo effect is what happens when someone is having an intervention that is causing their life to improve, but the person does not believe that they are -- The reason that this is important is that those recovering from anxiety and depression have a tendency to believe that they are not doing as well as they are - due to this cognitive bias creating an anti-placebo effect for them, which results in their giving up too soon on interventions which are effective and thus not getting better and -- The good news about this for people suffering from anxiety and depression at large: If you are aware of the negative cognitive bias and anti-placebo effect, you can take steps to account for and correct this bias. One of the best ways to do this is by taking metrics along with notes that you can look at later. When you look back, look at -- Comment author: Shield 28 September 2013 11:22:18AM 6 points [-] Are you sure that "anti placebo effect" is a good name though? The placebo effect refers exclusively to medical treatment if I'm not entirely mistaken, and this seems to have much broader implications in basically any sort of training. It's still basically the same effect if -- Comment author: timtyler 29 September 2013 08:59:16AM * 4 points [-] Are you sure that "anti placebo effect" is a good name though? It may be that nocebo has a better claim to being an "anti-placebo effect". * Vote up -- Comment author: Vaniver 28 September 2013 05:26:59PM * 3 points [-] The placebo effect refers exclusively to medical treatment if I'm not entirely mistaken, and this seems to have much broader implications in basically any sort of training. While the placebo effect is generally defined in a medical context, people rarely throw type errors when you talk about placebos outside of medicine. The Hawthorne Effect is the name that productivity boosts due to observation / novelty / active treatment go by, but it's seen as similar to if not the same as the placebo effect. * Vote up * Vote down -- Comment author: Zaine 29 September 2013 02:04:31PM 0 points [-] In the placebo effect, you try something, see results, and believe those results derived from what you tried, when in fact what you tried could not possibly have had any effect whatsoever; the observed results -- in fact what they tried did have results. In the placebo effect, one's beliefs effect change. In the phenomenon Shannon refers to, change occurs regardless of one's beliefs. Interestingly, when I presented the above description of the placebo effect to someone and asked for what they would expect of the opposite, they replied, "Change happens and they don't believe it." I would think the term, "Opposite-Placebo Effect" or "Opposite of the Placebo Effect" a better descriptor, as 'anti-' implies simple negation rather than a flipping of observed effects. -- Comment author: kalium 29 September 2013 08:44:54PM 4 points [-] Actually the placebo effect is a statistical term covering the entire improvement seen in the placebo branch of a trial. Part of the effect comes from beliefs, yes. But there are other causes. For instance, people tend to enroll in clinical trials when their health is at a -- EDIT: In my case the improvement with medication was dramatic, so it wasn't just a case of not noticing slow progress. My point was the anti-placebo effect probably consists of many different kinds of known cognitive failure modes, and it might be helpful to recognize them. In the problem that I describe, the difficulty is in retrieving memories -- points [-] What you're describing sounds like the results from the anti-placebo effect, although I didn't go so far as naming that. Basically, you don't realize its working (anti-placebo effect), and then you stop and regress (what you're pointing to). Since you've figured this out, you should have a much easier time avoiding it with the next intervention -- objectivity is a good thing. I agree anti-placebo isn't a a good name. It's more like a distorted or cloudy mirror (don't see yourself clearly). but that doesn't capture the difficulty of remembering precisely how you were a long time -- The way that I came up with the name, was that someone was suggesting that my taking metrics might create a placebo effect, where people would believe that they were doing better than they actually were. So, my response to this was that I was not trying to create a placebo effect, but rather, to avoid a placebo effect in the opposite direction. -- referred to it as related instead of reverse), I do think that it is the opposite of what a lot of people fear - that they are experiencing a placebo effect. In short, people being afraid of having a placebo effect is often how this effect comes to be - they don't want to create false hope and then have it dissipate, so instead they refuse to believe or acknowledge -- So, I would say that the title is reasonable regarding people's expectations, but not in the precise using of the term placebo sense. Personally, I think that expectations are more important for titling. Fewer people will pay attention to a precisely named definition that they know nothing about, whereas calling it the anti-placebo effect grabs attention - specifically the attention of people who have this bias. -- Comment author: CronoDAS 30 September 2013 07:03:27AM * 0 points [-] When I saw "anti-placebo effect" I thought of this instead... Edit: Beaten to it.