Placebo Buttons Serve No Purpose

By Heather Bacon
Editor In Chief

It is only natural- as you are waiting to cross the street, you push the crosswalk button expecting to cross the street sooner. However buttons such as these are actually just placebo buttons, giving you a false sense of control.

As for crosswalks buttons, there was a time when pedestrians needed to press the button to get the signal to walk. However in 2004, the New York Times reported that more than 2,500 or 3,250 cross walk buttons had been deactivated with the emergence of computer controlled traffic signals. As cities have become more congested, a signal button for pedestrians to walk appears, regardless, because the system assumes that there are always pedestrians looking to cross. For these crosswalk buttons to work, they would actually have to change the functioning of the traffic light systems, allowing the pedestrians to walk at the time when the button is pressed. Especially in highly populated cities, it is just impossible for the cycle to be manipulated by one pedestrian. This means that pushing that crosswalk button really has no effect on when you will get to walk.

Another button that remains to be useless are elevator “close door” buttons. This is because when the Americans With Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, it was mandated that elevators stay open long enough for someone with a physical disability. This is obviously a righteous necessity, allowing someone on crutches or utilizing a wheelchair to make it in the elevator on time. But in this sense, all of the times you have pushed the elevator close buttons have been for nothing.

Although it may seem frustrating that these buttons serve no purpose, pushing them gives us a sense of control. These buttons act as placebos, having no effect but being psychologically fulfilling for the user to push. Yale psychology professor Ellen Langer explains this illusion of control saying “feeling you have control over your world is a desirable state.”

So you may ask what is the point of having all of these buttons that no longer serve a purpose? The answer is simple, it would be too costly to remove all of these buttons. It just isn’t worth the hassle, money, and construction time of removing an elevator close door or crosswalk button.

Next time you go to push an elevator “close door” or a crosswalk button think twice about if what you are doing is just a squandered action.

The U.S. Government Is Doomed

By Mike Setzler
Staff Writer
Every government is corrupt. Period. Whether it is a Democracy or Dictatorship, the man in power will want to stay in power as long as he can.
The main reason for corruption is money. According to Karl Marx, the economy is what truly governs us. Everything the government does, it does for the money. But here is where things get odd; if what we need is money, why do we impulsively spend billions of dollars, which we don’t have, on military engagements around the world? What good could these possibly bring? Being that the US is extremely dependent on oil, which is an economic must-have, anyone could see that as a reason to get involved. According to Major Matthew Robert Bockholt of SOCOM Public Affairs, elite US forces, as of 2013, are engaged in 134 countries. The US alone spent nearly $682 billion dollars on defense in 2012. That is more than the next 10 countries, including China, combined.
Before WWII, the US was an isolationist. We didn’t want to get involved in European affairs because we felt it wasn’t our fight. But when we got attacked at Pearl Harbor, we gathered great resolve to go and fight the axis powers. What some people don’t realize is that our ability to win both wars wasn’t because of our military or technological might, but because we were isolated from the war for the first two years. We weren’t involved from the very beginning, we weren’t throwing our money in a fight we weren’t fully in. and when the Japanese attacked us, and we built up, we had an enormous amount of supplies to back us. That’s how we won; we waited until we really needed to get involved. Take the Vietnam war for example. The United States 1956, military superpower of the world, goes to war with a small country (Vietnam) for 18 years and loses. We gained nothing from losing and would have gained nothing from winning. We only got involved because we were trying to oppose Russia.
Bottom line is that our ignorance in our power will lead to our downfall; all it takes is for a dangerous person to see this pattern, and act on it.