Placebo buttons will have you pushing them in the hopes of making a difference, but in reality, they don’t do anything at all.
Most buttons are there for a sort of decorative effect but they really are just redundant.
Check out this list and see which ones you love to push. Just don’t push your employer’s buttons so much.
Calorie Count Buttons On Treadmills
Exercise is very important and so is keeping track of your calories. From apps, to coaches, to treadmills, there are so many ways to see how much you’re burning.
Treadmill calorie counters should keep track of progress you’ve made and calories burned.
But the truth is, these machines don’t take into account body fat percentages or general physical fitness.
And with so many different machines in a gym, chances are they’ll read your progress differently.
False Buttons Can Determine The Future Success Of Financial Traders
A research team led by Mark Fenton-O’Creevy carried out a study wherein they told financial traders that pressing keyboard buttons “may have some effect on the value of a financial index they were watching rise and fall.”
The buttons didn’t do anything.
Traders believing in the buttons having an effect on the index were more subject to that illusion of control.
Fenton-O’Creevy discovered the correlation between subjectivity to the illusion of control and work performance. Traders who believed the buttons changed the index outcome likely got lower wages and poor performance reviews.
Fenton-O’Creevy said:
“A skilled trader should be able to reflect critically on their performance. They should be able to tell if they made the right decision and got lucky, or made the right decision and it went badly.”
London Underground Train Door Buttons
You’ve seen these door control buttons found on trains made in the 1990s, but those doors were actually controlled by the driver.
The buttons would allow passengers to open or close the doors, but that’s only if the driver allowed them to have access.
Download Progress Bars
When you hit download, a progress bar appears, and that updates you on the progress of the download.
But it’s a bar that’s often inaccurate. All it does is soothe you and help you to be patient as you wait for real progress.
One of the progress bar’s inventors, Brad A. Myers, says that an early test group “didn’t mind so much if it was inaccurate. They still preferred the progress bar to not having anything.”
Elevator Close Buttons
Those close buttons in elevators were mostly deactivated by the ’90s.
But some do have emergency-activated close buttons which can be accessed by a key or by pushing the button down for longer than the usual one finger hit.
And no, repetitively hitting that button won’t make the doors shut faster when you want a solo ride.
Office Thermostats
Well not all of them but in a 2003 survey, 72% of respondents confessed to actually putting dummy thermostats in offices.
When that office is either freezing or sweltering, believe it even though your boss insists that they’ve adjusted the temperature for everyone.
Most companies keep dummy thermostats to keep employees calm and happier since they give them an illusion of control.
Crosswalk Buttons
There was a time when crosswalks would work when pedestrians pushed a button, but in 2014, a New York spokeswoman shared that only 9% of the city’s buttons worked.
Nowadays, technology allows for algorithmic control signal patterns. That has led to big cities abandoning functional buttons since the ’70s.
Buttons today mainly exist so that they “function essentially as mechanical placebos. Any benefit from them is only imagined.”
As always, look both ways before crossing.
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