The Power of the Placebo

When I read “Write It in Garmond” by R.E. Hawley in February (at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/magazine/garamond.html), I couldn’t help but think about the power of design placebos.

Hawley writes “a few months ago, while I was looking at a long-term project I’d been working on in fits and starts, my cursor meandered toward the word processor’s font menu, and with one click the text reappeared in Garamond. I nearly gasped. Dressed in gentle serifs and subtle ornamentation, my words swelled with new life, and I saw hidden in the screen behind them the reflection of someone else, someone whose presence commanded respect. It’s a little ridiculous to have to trick myself into believing in my own work, and even more ridiculous that I can be tricked so simply, like a child enraptured at a magic act. . . .  Mind-set is blessedly malleable. . . . So I continue to “select all” in my word documents and, for a moment, let myself believe that my words are as beautiful as the typeface in which they appear.”

This description of the power of the Garamond type face for Hawley is not a placebo effect as we generally think of one, a little sugar pill that glides easily down our throat after we’re told it will cure whatever ails us and, miraculously, it does, but it indicates the power of design to of particular design acts to cure psychological blocks, etc., when we anticipate that they will.

Study after study details how expectations of design expectations can lead to anticipated outcomes, but, in the way of all these sorts of things, there is a clear limit to what design can accomplish alone.  If your boss is a tyrant making unreasonable demands, thinking that a particular paint colour or furniture arrangement or something similar will cure all that’s not right is unlikely to result in what we could call “positive” outcomes.

Research has shown, however that:

• Physical experiences can produce placebo effects even when we know that we are experiencing a placebo.
• More specifically, when told that looking at a surface colour can have a placebo effect for psychological wellbeing.
• Scents can have placebo effects related to creativity; i.e., when people are told that a particular odour will cause them to think more creatively, they do. Smelling coffee, even without eating/drinking any caffeine, improves our analytical reasoning because we expect it to.
• Furnishings promoted as enhancing physical and cognitive performance are likely to do so through a placebo effect (the study this conclusion is drawn from related to products with performance enhancing claims, such as ear plugs). This effect was strongest when people were not expert in whatever the task-at-hand was.

Placebos can go the “other way” also, and when they do they’re called “nocebos”—expectations of negative outcomes after an experience can be linked to negative outcomes.

The bottom line:  if all else fails with trying to get your kids to study or your partner writing that novel they’ve always planned on penning, or some other similar quest, try a placebo.