There is this very common thing called a placebo effect, which mainly works with medicine. You make the patient believe that a medicine works and even though it doesn’t in reality, the patient seems to get better. There are things just like this in our everyday lives that we think are useful but in reality they don’t work at all. We are constantly using these objects and delude ourselves into thinking that these are effective in our lives. This is exactly like taking the sugar pill called Advil and curing your headache on your own.
5. Elevator “Close Doors” Button
It is a dummy button in most cases and it can only be activated by certain people and it requires a key to be activated. It is mainly there to create the illusion that by pressing the button you are closing the door faster than usual. Since the Americans with Disabilities Act, the close doors button has been there as a prop mainly in most elevators in the United States and only workers and emergency personnel can use the button to its full potential. Even if the authorities thought of putting up a sig explaining everything, people would probably keep pushing it anyway hoping it would work this time. So, they just choose not to bother doing that wasting their time and money and let people convince themselves that these buttons actually work.