Let me tell one interesting story from Turkey.
Gripin is an old medicine company which was established in 1930 in Turkey and it became known as “the cure for all ills”. Actually I do not know it works or not but when I was child it was easy to find everywhere.
It is a bit different from other medicines because it is really big pill. While drinking gripin, you are afraid because of sticking in your throat. Sometimes later, they decide to change the size of the medicine and they started to produce a normal size pill. You cannot believe the result. Sales began to decrease rapidly because people thought that ‘how this small pill cure their ill’ and they stopped to buy this medicine. After that they gave up and decided to continue with big size.
WHY? People compared the cure power of a medicine with the size of pills. If the pill is big, it can cure; if the pill is small, it cannot cure!
Sometimes psychological effect is bigger than real effect.
Burcin
Hi Burcin,
YanıtlaSilActually even a book has been written about Meaning, Medicine and the 'Placebo Effect' by Daniel Moerman, professor of Anthropology in USA, one of the pioneers in placebo research. In his book he made an investigation on how design of the pills may influence people's minds and provoke the Placebo Effect: size, color, branding, clever names, inscription on the pill, even quantity of pills to be taken (“more is better”), etc. – all these factors can make us healing through psychological means.
So I totally agree with you, "Sometimes psychological effect is bigger than real effect".
Sincerely,
Tatiana
Beautiful story. It truly explains people irrational behavior and no one can escape it as even the more rational people can be triggered to act irrationally. That why it is something to be taken in consideration and that why all those books and studies have been made for such topic.
YanıtlaSilFLO