Have You Heard of this Miracle Cold Buster?
The Centre for Science in the Public Interest has a nice story about Airborne Agrees to Pay $23.3 Million to Settle Lawsuit Over False Advertising of its "Miracle Cold Buster"
"The makers of Airborne-a multivitamin and herbal supplement whose labels and ads falsely claimed that the product cures and prevents colds-will refund money to consumers who bought the product, as part of a $23.3 million class action settlement agreement.The company will pay for ads in Better Homes & Gardens, Parade, People, Newsweek, and many other magazines and newspapers instructing consumers how to get refunds.
Concocted by second-grade teacher Victoria Knight McDowell and her screenwriter husband Thomas Rider McDowell, Airborne promised to 'boost your immune system to help your body combat germs' and instructed users to 'take it at the first sign of a cold symptom or before entering crowded, potentially germ-infested environments.'
The company's folksy 'created by a school teacher!' slogan and insistence that the product be stocked with real cold, cough, and flu medicines instead of with dietary supplements, helped turn the company into an overnight success, as did an appearance by Victoria Knight McDowell on the Oprah Winfrey Show."
Ok, yet another over-priced vitamin hoax.
Is that all there is?
Well not quite, according to Dan Airely.
According to his review of the research on placebos:
"Voluminous research on placebo effects has shown that successfully conveying the false belief that patients received a particular treatment can bestow some of the benefits of the genuine treatment (for a review, see Stewart-Williams and Podd 2004).Credible placebos can help relieve and sometimes even cure physical and mental illness, such as pain (e.g., Montgomery and Kirsch 1996), cardiovascular disease
(e.g., Bienenfeld, Frishman, and Glasser 1996), and depression (Kirsch and Sapirstein 1999).Placebo effects have also been detected with functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI; Wager et al. 2004)."
So, here is my question: how do we know that buying this over priced piece of crap didn't actually cause a placebo effect?
And if it did, how are our laws of misleading advertising coming to grips with false beliefs which bestow good benefits?
This is an area of misleading advertising that confounds our usual intuitions, which are based upon the rational actor model.
Suppose we knew that there were false beliefs that if held by a number of people became true - a reasonable definition of a placebo effect.
How would we regulate such sentences or representations to the public when by definition banning them harms the public - despite their falsity, or perhaps their falsity it is relevant, these "placebo representations" appear to call forth desirable behavior.
It is of course unfortunate that most the case law in this area is developed by dealing with scummy scammers who couldn't spell "placebo" if you spotted them the "c" and the "a".
