You get in, press the button for your floor, and press the one with the arrows pointing at each other.
Nothing happens. There’s a pause, two seconds, maybe three, in which the doors sit exactly where they were, and the button you just pressed is lit, and you can see that it’s lit.
You press it again. Then twice more, quickly, with your thumb.
The doors close. You exhale slightly, take out your phone, and the whole thing is over and forgotten within four seconds of it ending.
You’ve done this several thousand times. You’ve done it in buildings where you know the button is decorative, and in front of other people, and while carrying a coffee in the hand that wasn’t required for it.
That looks like a person who can’t tolerate a three-second delay. But what you were doing in that lobby has a name, decades of research behind it, and a Harvard psychologist willing to defend it in print.
What the illusion of control looks like
In 1975, Ellen Langer described a tendency that turned out to be one of the most reliable things in the field: people believe they have influence over outcomes they plainly don’t.
Her demonstration was a lottery. She sold office workers a dollar ticket each, letting some pick their own card from a stack and handing the others one at random. Then, just before the draw, she offered to buy them back.
The people who had picked their own wanted more than four times as much for theirs. Same draw, same odds, same worthless card.
That’s a mind built to look for the connection between what it does and what happens next, running a little fast in a place where there’s no connection to find. Not stupidity, and not superstition in the pointy-hat sense either.
And the effect it produces is worth having. Langer has spent decades on what a sense of control does for people, and her summary is short.
Taking some action makes a person feel a sense of control, and that feels good. Better, at any rate, than standing there as a bystander while something happens to you.
Half those buttons aren’t connected to anything
It comes down to a law about wheelchairs.
In the United States, elevators built or refitted since 1990 have to hold their doors open long enough for someone using a wheelchair or crutches to get in.
That’s federal accessibility law, and it means the close-door button in a great many buildings has been overridden in software. The button lights up. It does nothing.
It isn’t alone. Most pedestrian crossing buttons in New York were disconnected years ago, because the lights run on timers. Some office buildings install thermostats connected to nothing at all, and complaints about the temperature go down.
So if it does nothing, why is it still there?
Nobody forgot to remove it. Removing it would cost almost nothing and would be more truthful.
It stays because the people who design these buildings worked out long ago that a lobby with a button in it is a more tolerable place to stand than a lobby without one.
These get called placebo buttons, which is accurate and slightly unfair, because the implication is that anyone pressing one has been fooled.
What’s happening is that the button is doing a different job than the one printed on it.
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Why the pressing makes the wait feel shorter
The clearest account of this comes from a paper about waiting lines rather than psychology, written by David Maister in 1985, and its first proposition is the one you need.
Occupied time feels shorter than unoccupied time. He quotes William James on why: boredom is what happens when you pay attention to the passage of time itself. The colloquial version is that a watched pot never boils.
His opening example is a hotel chain that kept getting complaints about slow elevators. Somebody suggested putting mirrors in the lobby. The complaints dropped, and the elevators stayed exactly as slow as they had been.
Which is exactly the position you’re in during those three seconds. There is nothing to look at, nothing to do, and one very available action, so time becomes the only thing in the lobby worth attending to.
Press the button, and you’ve stopped watching the pot.
The sharper evidence sits further into the same paper. Maister studied a walk-in medical clinic that added a triage nurse at the front, someone who took your name and symptoms and decided who you’d see.
The step made no difference at all to how long anyone waited for a medical provider. None. The line behind it was identical.
Afterward, surveys showed patients were pleased with their reduced waiting times.
Nothing had been reduced. What had changed was that they’d been entered into the system, and the wait had stopped being a period of standing about wondering whether anyone knew they were there.
Maister’s phrase for this is that people want to get started, and his hypothesis was that waiting before anything begins feels longer than waiting once something has already begun.
The button is your triage nurse. You’ve registered your intention with the building.
You do it with remotes and websites too
The remote pointed harder at the television is the purest version, because nobody believes the angle matters and everybody does it anyway. The tracking number checked at midnight for a package that hasn’t moved in three days.
The email chasing a thing you know isn’t ready is the grown-up one, and it costs more, because a person has to read it.
In every case, you already know. The page will load when it loads, the driver is not consulting your tracking history, and knowing has never once stopped anybody.
The experts say keep pressing
You could take all this as a problem to be fixed. Learn that the button is fake, stop pressing it, become a calmer person.
Langer disagrees, and she’s the one who named the bias.
Her argument is about proportion.
It’s such a small response that even if it does nothing, it hardly has a cost. And she says plainly that it’s a shame to call these placebo buttons, because the name implies the people pressing them are behaving foolishly.
She goes further on the crossing buttons. Pressing one puts your attention on the road in front of you at the moment you’re about to walk into it, which is a safety feature dressed as a habit.
So the accounting is easy. A quarter-second of thumb movement, no cost to anyone, in exchange for a wait that passes more easily and a small sense of having done something about your own situation.
The doors were always going to close when they closed. You just didn’t have to stand there watching them not close.
