"If you happen to find yourself pressing a non-functional close-door button, and later the doors close, you’ll probably never notice because a little spurt of happiness will cascade through your brain once you see what you believe is a response to your action. Your behavior was just reinforced. You will keep pressing the button in the future.
Non-functioning mechanisms like this that motivate you to fool yourself are called placebo buttons, and they’re everywhere.
Computers and timers now control the lights at many intersections, but at one time little buttons at crosswalks allowed people to trigger the signal change. Those buttons are mostly all disabled now, but the task of replacing or removing all of them was so great most cities just left them up. You still press them though, because the light eventually changes...
In many offices and cubicle farms, the thermostat on the wall isn’t connected to anything."
I listened to ths podcast a bit, it's MUCH too over-smug, but this post is cute.
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