Example Of The Placebo Effect

In our experiment we did a psychological method called the placebo effect. First we started off going around the school asking teachers how they felt on average during the week. The next day we took plain water and added lemon lime Kool-Aid and mixed it with the water. But the twist was, we told the teachers it contained dopamine and it would make them feel more positive throughout the day. Some teachers had doubts but some were open minded. As a result, one teacher tried to be open minded but ended up knowing it was fake.

Introduction

“A placebo is a substance or treatment that has no effect apart from a person’s belief in its effect.” (Rathus, 2010) We wanted to see if the placebo effect works and how we can make teachers happier or

When the end of the day came we went to all of our teachers that consumed our drink and asked overall how they felt throughout the day, and all of them said there wasn’t a difference and they had a regular day. One teacher, who had felt a seven when we asked him how he felt on average during the week, he said how some things in his personal life came up throughout the day and wasn’t very happy and said in the amount of time from when he consumed the drink till the end of the day he didn’t feel a difference. When all our teachers said they didn’t feel anything it led us to think “does the placebo effect even work?” but with the time span we had, we thought that had to do with our overall result but also our teachers drink coffee in the morning and that too could have an additional affect to our experiment. One of the teachers had explained “it’s just a regular day, a regular happy day.” He then explained how us talking to him made his morning, so not the drink itself but us being there in the morning and asking him to take the drink made him happy which made us think “could starting your day off with a smile and a laugh make your day better?” We didn’t

We were pretty surprised that all of our teachers said that the drink had no effect because we expected at least one teacher to say they felt different. We are thinking it didn’t have an effect because most of the experiments in our book involve children and we did our experiment with adults, but our time span for the experiment was limited so we didn’t get the proper results we wanted/needed. This has lead further questions such as, “does the placebo effect actually work?” and “could a smile and a laugh at the beginning of the day make your day better?” but with the time we had we couldn’t go into depth with these new questions. Overall this experiment was nothing like we thought it would be, but it was a fun experience and we are glad we got an opportunity to try something