Abstract
Some alternative medicines enjoy widespread use, and in certain situations are preferred over conventional, validated treatments in spite of the fact that they fail to prove effective when tested scientifically. We propose that the causal illusion, a basic cognitive bias, underlies the belief in the effectiveness of bogus treatments. Therefore, the variables that modulate the former might affect the latter. For example, it is well known that the illusion is boosted when a potential cause occurs with high probability. In this study, we examined the effect of this variable in a fictitious medical scenario. First, we showed that people used a fictitious medicine (i.e., a potential cause of remission) more often when they thought it caused no side effects. Second, the more often they used the medicine, the more likely they were to develop an illusory belief in its effectiveness, despite the fact that it was actually useless. This behavior may be parallel to actual pseudomedicine usage; that because a treatment is thought to be harmless, it is used with high frequency, hence the overestimation of its effectiveness in treating diseases with a high rate of spontaneous relief. This study helps shed light on the motivations spurring the widespread preference of pseudomedicines over scientific medicines. This is a valuable first step toward the development of scientifically validated strategies to counteract the impact of pseudomedicine on society.
Highlights
In today’s knowledge-based society, the wide-spread use and popularity of certain alternative medicines, such as homeopathy, continues to be increasingly troublesome for health authorities worldwide
Previous work in the more general domain of causal illusions made use of a procedure similar to the one we employed in the nocost group in that, they did not mention any side effect of the medicine
They found a spontaneous tendency to use the treatment with relatively high frequency [7], [9], and, a strong overestimation of the effectiveness of the medicine
Summary
In today’s knowledge-based society, the wide-spread use and popularity of certain alternative medicines, such as homeopathy, continues to be increasingly troublesome for health authorities worldwide. While rigorous scientific studies have repeatedly shown that homeopathy is completely ineffective (no more effective than placebo [1]), many patients still choose to use it or other pseudomedicines in place of conventional treatments that have been proven effective. This decision results in important consequences, sometimes death [2]. One may ask why people prefer to use homeopathy and other alternative medicines over scientifically tested medicines. While most would agree that people frequently resort to those treatments they believe are more effective, we propose that the reverse holds: frequent use of a treatment, because of the lack of side effects or other considerations, fuels the belief that it is effective, even when it is not
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