Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog is a favorite of mine as it is very good at debunking nonsense, but today he has a post that claims that magic works:
Alia Crum and Ellen Langer from Harvard psychology department took 84 female hotel attendants in 7 hotels. They were cleaning an average of 15 rooms a day, each requiring half an hour of walking, bending, pushing, lifting, and carrying. These women were clearly getting a lot of good exercise, but they didn’t believe it: 66.6% of them reported not exercising regularly, and 36.8% said they didn’t get any exercise at all.
Their health, measured by things like weight, body fat, body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio and blood pressure, was related to their perceived amount of exercise, rather than the actual amount of exercise they got
And it gets better. The researchers then divided the subjects into two groups. One of them got a series of lectures explaining to them how healthy their lifestyles were, and the other group did not. After four weeks the group that had received the lectures showed a marked increase in health.
I’m sold from now on I am having Kevin tell me three times a day* how healthy my lifestyle is.
(* As every good magician knows, you have to tell people things three times before they become true.)
Hee hee.
I’ve blogged about the Placebo Effect before. It’s wunnerful.
That is just fantastic. Maybe I need to tell my self that my three sessions of gym a week, including two of personal training, are actually causing me to be really healthy and lose weight, and then it will happen. We will see. Now all I need to be able to do is convince myself that I can afford a trip to Philadelphia for Christmas, and that too will happen.