Ig Nobel — a dream come true
Last Friday I was honored with the Ig Nobel award in Medicine for a paper that Rebecca Waber, Ziv Carmon, Baba Shiv and I wrote on the effects of discounts on the efficacy of placebo pain medications. We basically showed that when drugs are discounted they just don’t work as well. We also tried to make the point that this basic effect of expectations might also be the reason that people just don’t experience generic drugs to be as effective as brand name medications.
The ceremony, and the whole Ig Nobel experience itself, was great. I first attended this event 12 years ago during my last year as a PhD student and I loved it. That year Robert Matthews won the award in physics for showing why bread always falls with the butter side down. It was a very sophisticated paper on the way objects with uneven weight distribution fall, but the fact that he phrased it in this odd and familiar way was inspiring to me. After seeing this paper, I hoped that one day I would be able to do research that was worthy of this award, and finally after many years of trying I made it!
The funny guy who handed me the award was Francis Fesmire who won the Ig Nobel award in Medicine a few years ago. I am posting an interview with him but be warned—it is almost Rated R.
My latest book, The Upside of Irrationality, explores some positive and some negative ways that irrationality plays out in our lives.
The hyperlink is wrong. Should be:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2008/10/ig_nobel_prizes.html
Congratulations, Mr. Ariely. Last monday I was talking to a friend of mine who occupies responsabilities in the government of my region, whose universitary studies were in the fields of economics, and her first reaction was to associate the idea of the results of your research with the why people don’t feel comfortable with generic drugs and ask for the brand name medication even if they must pay the difference of prize ( prescripted drugs in the public health system of Spain are paid 60% by the health system, 40% by the patient, except if you decide that you want a more expensive brand named variety, in which case you must pay the 100% of the difference of the prize).
Congratulations again for your prize, your interesting book and your blog.
I use a variant of this in my personal life. If I have a cold, I take extra Vitamin C (generally around 2000 to 3000mg). I am well aware that the studies since 1980 show no effect. But I have sufficient residual respect for Linus Pauling that I think of it as my personal placebo. I even remark on this to people – “Yeah, I know that it has no effect, but I think it might, so at least I’m getting a placebo effect out of it.” It would be really interesting to do a study that attempted to verify if I was getting any effect (hard to find additional subjects with the same mental state, though).
Congratulations Dr. Ariely.
Much nachas to you and yours.
Cool video. Funny guy indeed.