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.”
