Placebo Effects Prove the Value of Suggestion
by Charles E. Henderson, Ph.D.
—Wolman, Dictionary of Behavioral Science
Could a little bit of sugar keep you from catching colds, cure a skin disease, or even make a cancer disappear? Make you drunk? All of these (and much, much more) have been reported as "placebo" effects in the scientific literature. In fact, there is hardly any human characteristic or problem that has not been shown to be affected by placebos in one research or other.
A placebo, as used in research, is an inactive substance or procedure used as a control in an experiment. A placebo effect occurs when the placebo, which cannot on its own merit have any affect, does in fact have the same or similar affect as the experimental substance or procedure.
For example, consider the body of research that has been conducted on human response times as affected by alcohol. Subjects are given measured doses of alcohol at certain time intervals and their responses are tested following each "drink." But to make sure nothing else is causing any of the changes that may occur, it is necessary to have a "control" group. This is a group of subjects for whom everything is identical except one thing: in this case, they get no alcohol. They are treated the same way and they are given a beverage which they believe to be alcohol under the same conditions and with the same schedule.
In other words you take a group of subjects and do the same thing for all of them, except half of the group (unbeknown to anyone except the researchers) get a non-alcoholic beverage.
As you might expect, those subjects who receive alcohol begin, at some point, to show a change in their responses. And of course given enough of the alcoholic beverage many of them get plastered.
What you might find surprising, though, if you are not familiar with this research, is that some of the placebo-drinking subjects—those receiving shots of a liquid prepared to taste and kick like alcohol, but which in fact is basically just water—acted tipsy and sometimes even drunk. These subjects for whom the suggestion of drinking alcohol produced inebriated-like behavior were exhibiting a placebo effect.
Placebo effects are of particular interest to us here because
they are another phenomenon that illustrates the strength
of suggestion. These placebo effects frequently demonstrate a potency
of suggestion which we normally think of as residing only in drugs.
The placebo effect has been reported in just about every research situation in which placebos were used, and in many circumstances where the use of placebos was not intended but the effect was the same anyway.
As in situations where saline solution (simple salt water) injections stop the pain in patients who believe they are receiving a potent pain killer. Simple salt and water have no analgesic or anesthetic qualities, yet the subjects' minds responded and controlled the pain just as if they had received a narcotic or other potent pain killer.
Or subjects who catch fewer colds because they believe they are receiving huge doses of vitamin C, when in fact they are getting only small amounts of powdered sugar. When the research ends and they no longer receive the placebo, the number of colds caught has been shown to go back up.
For some people warts may prove resistant to every conventional treatment, but then promptly go away when the patients are told to apply "this new and amazingly potent drug" which is nothing more than hand cream. (Indeed, skin conditions of all sorts have proved to be extremely responsive to suggestions.)
The list of demonstrated placebo effects goes on and on. None of these effects appear in every or all circumstances, and some people do not show any changes at all, regardless of what they believe, when they receive placebos. But the fact that they do occur in some people some of the time shows that we humans are capable of some pretty amazing things under the right conditions.
Placebo effects are not restricted to drugs or chemical substances. Back in the mid-1970s there was a lot of interest in subliminals imbedded in advertisements. The purpose of certain words and animal figures subliminally placed in advertising (according to Wilson Bryan Key, whose 1972 book Subliminal Seduction created a great interest in subliminals) was to buy the products or follow the suggestions in the ads.
I decided to try to measure the effects of subliminals on people's faces. It was the beginning of summer and I had a subject pool of volunteer students at the college where I was teaching. They came over to my place one sunny Saturday and I wrote on their faces the kinds of words and symbols Key alleged were used in ads by Madison Avenue advertising agencies. I used sun screen as paint and had the subjects sun their faces just long enough to have an effect, but not long enough for it to be obvious. Thus the words and symbols I had written on their faces were just slightly lighter than the rest of their faces. The effect was truly subliminal and could only be found if you knew what to look for. A few days later I could look closely at a subject's face and see there was something there, but I could not make it out. (Of course I had complete records of who had what written on his or her face.)
This was a "soft" sort-of double-blind experiment in which I did not remember which subjects had which words (or gibberish) written on their faces. I did of course know when I did the writing so this could not technically be called a truly "double-blind" experiment. However, it was a double-blind experiment for all practical purposes.
All of the volunteers kept a daily diary for a week in which they reported the experiences they thought were related to the subliminals on their faces. At the end of the week each completed a written questionnaire when they turned in their diaries to me. We also met later as a debriefing group so I could share the results with them.
The results were very interesting, to say the least. Almost three-quarters of the subjects were absolutely convinced they had had several experiences that were novel, and that were the result of the subliminals on their faces. For instance one woman, an older student, claimed that her husband had been far more attentive and sexually attracted to her than he had been in years. Others told stories of getting more and better attention from sales clerks and other people, including other students, with whom they interacted during the week. And there were several stories from both males and females about getting dates (and more) with people whom they would normally have considered to be out of their league.
Now, here is a really fascinating aspect of the Face Project: Only one-third of the subjects had anything meaningful written on their faces, yet the positive reports were equally distributed across all subjects!
Unknown to them I had divided the original group into three groups. Group I got the straightforward treatment; they had subliminals written on their faces in sun screen. But Group II had nothing but gibberish written on their faces (with sun screen) and Group III had gibberish written on their faces with water, thus there was no sunning differential effect whatsoever.
The positive results reported by volunteers in Groups II and III were clear cases of placebo effect.
I wanted to conduct further research along these lines, with tighter controls, a larger sample and some other improvements. However, I changed colleges a few months later, my interests took a different turn, and the right conditions never presented themselves again. Careers are like that. But I would still like to conduct further investigation along these lines.
A double-blind experiment in which the subjects did not know what to expect and the researchers did not know which Ss had the genuine subliminals would be very interesting. However, I have not been able to think of a way to introduce the double-blind aspect without anesthetizing the subjects and having a third party do the writing. Perhaps subliminals on clothing or some other piece of apparel might work. But I still like the mystique of putting the subliminals in the skin.
A note about the above paragraph: I was just kidding about anesthetizing the Ss, of course (I think), but even that might not work in light of the findings that anesthetized surgery patients sometimes report what was said by medical people during the operation. Or like the documented case of a patient who could not get over her anxiety about her operation after it was over until, it was discovered later, she was assured by the surgeon that his comment during the operation about "leaving a sponge in there" had only been a joke.)
[See also More Scientific Proof of the Power of Suggestion by this author.]
Copyright © Charles E. Henderson, Ph.D.
All Rights Reserved.
