Every time I’m standing at an intersection, waiting to cross the street, I find myself in an existential crisis as I eye the button that supposedly tells my red light to turn green just because I’m in a hurry to get to the other side. Sometimes the cynic in me lashes out, scolding, You fool—pressing that button isn’t going to accomplish anything besides exposing your fingertip to harmful bacteria. Other days, I try to be optimistic: What the heck—maybe this will be the moment my hand finally trips that magic signal.
In all my years of waffling, I’ve never known which approach is truly the more effective one—until now. Apparently, my internal naysayer wins this particular battle: otherwise known as placebo buttons, some of the most common devices around are actually little more than ploys to give people a sense of control over their environment, when in fact the joke’s on them.
The Walk Button
In the 1960s and ’70s, many U.S. cities installed semi-actuated signals, designed to change traffic lights’ timing in response to the presence of both people on foot and cars at major intersections. Lights on busy streets would remain green, allowing for optimum traffic flow, until a pedestrian pressed a button, indicating his need to cross, or a car approaching the thoroughfare from a side street activated a sensor in the road, at which point the traffic light would turn red after a short delay.
However, as more and more people and cars populated these areas over the next two decades, the semi-actuated signals became ineffective because traffic could no longer stop for a single pedestrian or vehicle. As a result, many cities that used the signals overhauled their traffic-control systems by the 1980s. In a 2004 New York Times exposé on the subject, writer Michael Luo described how the New York City Department of Transportation, for one, “deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on.” Of the city’s 3,250 total walk buttons that year, more than 2,500 were inoperable “mechanical placebos.” As Luo concluded, “Any benefit from them is only imagined.”
All the way across the country, people in Hawaii have a similar experience when they press the walk buttons at certain intersections in Honolulu, according to a 2004 Honolulu Advertiser article by Mike Leidemann, who noted that “pushing the button at 35 percent of all intersections (especially in Waikiki and other high-pedestrian areas) doesn’t do anything. The lights will change and the walk signs will come on at predetermined intervals, no matter what.”
Still, these statistics don’t stop pedestrians from continuing to lay on the button. Ed Chronicle, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Hawai‘i-Manoa whom Leidemann interviewed, explained why: “The buttons provide an expectation that something will happen, so you keep pressing even if you have a suspicion they don’t work. Besides, the cost to you is minimal, so you might as well do it.” He also stated, “It’s part of our evolution to do something and expect a result.”
The Door-Close Button
When someone enters an elevator and is in a hurry, the door-close button can seem like an irresistible shortcut to a quicker ride, but it’s an exercise in futility more often than not. In an eloquent April 2008 New Yorker article about elevators, Nick Paumgarten wrote that “elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they’re driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works … Elevator design is rooted in deception—to disguise not only the bare fact of the box hanging by ropes but also the tethering of tenants to a system over which they have no command.”
As Paumgarten indicates, it would appear that the primary function of the door-close button is not to act as a mechanical instrument, but rather to soothe its users psychologically. This graph from GraphJam attests to the mental shift that occurs as an elevator rider presses the button repeatedly: the more he does so, the shorter the time he believes it takes the doors to open—even though the actual door-close time remains constant.
Only firemen and other authorities with keys are able to effectuate the closing of most modern-day elevator doors, yet many passengers can’t help themselves from trying to take matters into their own hands, so insistent are they on maintaining a sense of control over their surroundings.
The Dummy Thermostat
Alternately freezing and overheated employees vying for jurisdiction over their office thermostats are a common sight in workplaces across the United States. But the truth is, most buildings’ real heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) controls are nowhere the average worker can access—they’re usually monitored by tightly regulated computer systems and hidden away inside ducts that only HVAC experts know about, while the plastic cases on office walls are simply decoys to keep the peace and convince people that they can adjust their climate.
In a 2003 Wall Street Journal piece, Jared Sandberg reported, “Fed up with complaints from sweaty men and shivering women, HVAC technicians install dummy thermostats to give workers the illusion of control … [Sometimes] it’s the companies themselves, barraged with calls from workers, who ask the landlord’s HVAC technician to ‘fix’ things.” He went on to mention that this trend may have begun as early as the 1960s, when some businesses even used white-noise machines to deceive employees into thinking inoperable fans were turned on. If these tactics facilitate greater workplace harmony, proponents argue, what’s the harm in continuing to employ them?
Illusion of Control
Placebo buttons may appear ill-intentioned, but really, they’re just tapping into a widespread psychological phenomenon called illusion of control, which Science Daily defines as “the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they demonstrably have no influence over.” Harvard University psychology professor Ellen Langer explored the concept at length in 1975, when she conducted a study that highlighted the societal prevalence of the phenomenon.
In her research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Langer “predicted that factors from skill situations (competition, choice, familiarity, involvement) introduced into chance situations would cause [subjects] to feel inappropriately confident.” A series of six experiments—in which, for example, subjects cut a deck of cards against a nervous or confident competitor, or were either assigned or given a choice of lottery tickets—confirmed Langer’s suspicions: the more confident the participants in the study were, the greater the influence they believed they had over each scenario, even when they were unknowingly powerless over the outcomes of these tests.
Now consider placebo buttons from Langer’s perspective. In other words, picture how a guy for whom a traffic light happens to turn green the moment he presses the button might walk a little taller across the street because he believes he’s the master of his own destiny. Viewed in this context, the button seems less like a twisted mind game and more like an innocuous way to instill a small measure of self-assurance in people, doesn’t it?
Press, Don’t Stress
If you’re a trigger-happy type and simply can’t resist, go ahead and fiddle with the fake thermostat in your office or pound on the door-close button in your building’s elevator (as long as you don’t do the latter just because you don’t feel like waiting an extra three seconds for the woman you can see rushing through the front door right now—that’s just mean). The good news about placebo devices is that they’re harmless. On the other hand, they simply don’t work in any tangible, mechanical way. So the next time you’re stalled at a crosswalk, I dare you not to push the walk button next to you. Instead, while you wait, do a little soul searching and repeat these words over and over to yourself: illusion of control, illusion of control, illusion of … See? The light’s already green.