556: How Expectations Impact Outcomes with David Robson
Age Less / Live More
Lucas Rockwood
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 February 2023
⏱️ 39 minutes
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Summary
Have you ever noticed that many cold and flu remedies contain little more than honey and water? Have you ever gone to the doctor feeling ill and felt significantly better almost straight away? The placebo effect is a long observed phenomenon in medicine, but the same expectation effect also impacts most other areas of life.
If you read five-star reviews before visiting a restaurant, it primes you for a great experience. If you’re watching a film that everyone you know loves, you’re also far more likely to react positively to it. My guest on this week’s podcast is an expert in the effect of expectation.
Listen and learn:
- Why the placebo-pain connection is so strong
- How “open label” placebos can be just as effective
- The lesser-known nocebo effect and its risks
- How to ethically leverage the expectation effect in your life
Links
ABOUT OUR GUEST
David Robson is a science writer who explores the human brain, body, and behavior. He graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in mathematics. He wrote extensively about misinformation during the COVID pandemic and mental health. He is the author of The Intelligence Trap, and his newest book, The Expectation Effect.
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- Check out our YouTube channel
- Visit www.yogabody.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you look at the history of placebo effect research, most people point back to 1955 with |
| 0:07.8 | Dr. Henry Beecher, who did a bunch of, he was an anesthesiologist and did a bunch of studies, |
| 0:13.5 | specifically looking at pain and effective outcomes of treatments and they would use things like |
| 0:17.6 | sugar pills in lieu of medicine, saline solution in lieu of morphine, sham surgeries in lieu of |
| 0:23.6 | real surgeries, and consistently 30-35% of the time people would get just as good results, |
| 0:30.2 | sometimes even better, from nothing. And this type of placebo research has been repeated time |
| 0:36.4 | and time again, and it's so powerful that pharmaceutical manufacturers actually create certain |
| 0:42.0 | sizes of pills, certain colors of pills, and even adding ingredients, for example, something like |
| 0:48.6 | niacin, which kind of gives you a red flush tear face, to increase the efficacy of known |
| 0:54.9 | effective compounds. It's really hard for most of us to wrap our head around this. We feel like |
| 1:00.6 | we've been duped or tricked at the same time if it works, who cares? So is that person who's |
| 1:06.0 | lying to us, a sham, or do they have our best interest at heart? And we're just talking about medicine |
| 1:11.2 | here. This expectation effect, when you take a pill or get a surgery, applies to just about everything, |
| 1:16.8 | whether you go on a holiday, how you feel about it, whether you go to a restaurant, and you've |
| 1:20.9 | already read good reviews, or you've already read bad reviews, when you enter a relationship, |
| 1:25.2 | whatever you think about that person going into it, or whatever you think about yourself, |
| 1:28.8 | our expectations in and around pretty much everything have a massive impact, not just on our |
| 1:35.4 | experience, but quite literally on how we feel. On this week's podcast, we will be talking about a |
| 1:41.4 | talking to a researcher of the author of a book called the expectation effect, talking about |
| 1:46.3 | the placebo, no sebo effect, and how expectations affect so much of what we do, and how hopefully |
| 1:52.4 | you can utilize that for your own good. If you're new here, it's the Lucas Rockwood show. I'm a yoga |
| 1:56.8 | teacher and trainer. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I'm the father of three kids. Firstly, I'm a student. |
... |
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