Something You Should Know
Our Fascination With Pushing Buttons & How Games Have Shaped Our World-SYSK Choice
06 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: How can romantic music influence attraction?
Today on Something You Should Know, can romantic music really make you be romantic? Then, pushing buttons. There's a button for everything and we love to push them.
We often are very invested in placebo buttons, which is a button that doesn't actually do anything, but it remains in place because people like the idea of pushing a button. Two quintessential examples of this might be the crosswalk button in a city or the door close button on an elevator.
Also, how much do product reviews influence what people buy? And games. People love to play games.
Chapter 2: Why are we so drawn to pushing buttons?
Maybe we need to play games.
It turns out that uncertainty is really, really compelling to the brain, and games are all about uncertainty. Games are in what ads were served, how we're paired on dating apps, how we're matched with jobs. So it's really important to understand how this impacts us, because games kind of play us as well.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health.
Chapter 3: What role do placebo buttons play in our behavior?
We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and, of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, The Longest Shortest Time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at LongestShortestTime.com.
something you should know fascinating intel the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carruthers hi welcome to something you should know and want to start this episode by helping you get a date if that's your goal there's research out of france that shows that the right kind of music can really help you get a date
A group of women were put in one of two waiting rooms prior to an unrelated focus group discussion on food products. In one waiting room, a very popular romantic French love song played on the speakers. In the other waiting room, a very neutral, unemotional song was played.
After the focus group was over, the leader of the focus group, whose name was Antoine, met with each woman alone and asked each of them for their phone number, saying he would like to give them a call to get together for a drink. 52% of the women who had heard the love song gave Antoine their phone number. Only 28% of the ones who heard the neutral song gave out their phone number.
The conclusion, according to the researchers, is that music can have a powerful impact on our emotions. And a romantic song seems to make people more romantic. And that is something you should know. With just the push of a button, you can do almost anything. There is a button for everything, and there is no shortage of people who love to push those buttons. Watch a kid in an elevator.
He wants to push the buttons for every floor. Or watch that impatient guy at the crosswalk who keeps pushing that button in hopes that it will change the light faster. There's just something about a button that makes you want to push it. It didn't used to be this way, but we now live in a push-button world.
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Chapter 4: How do games shape human behavior and culture?
And here to take a look at the interesting implications of that is Rachel Plotnick. She's an assistant professor of cinema and media studies at Indiana University in Bloomington and author of the book Power Button, a history of pleasure, panic, and the politics of pushing. Hi, Rachel. Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thanks so much for having me.
Well, I didn't know that this was a thing, that this was a topic to talk about, pushing buttons. But then I started to think about, you know, all the buttons that I push every day in the studio or in my car or in the kitchen. I push a lot of buttons and so does everybody else. But why are we talking about it?
I think exactly what you alluded to is that there's this kind of ubiquity of push buttons.
Chapter 5: What psychological effects do games have on decision-making?
They truly are everywhere. And because of that, they're part of the experience of everyday life, but they're also extremely invisible. And I think when something is stitched into the fabric of everyday life that much, we want to kind of stop and pause and think about what is this doing to our interactions, to the experiences that we have every day and how we kind of function as a society.
Is there any sense of like when somebody first came up with this idea of, you know, we could have this thing where you just push it and the thing turns on. Any idea where that began?
I spent a really long time trying to answer that question. It sent me down all these funny wormholes trying to learn about belly buttons and clothing buttons. And, you know, when did that idea of really pushing a button come to be? And I can't say that I ever found the exact first instance of pushing a button, but I think it came from a few different locations.
One, in terms of thinking about keys and Pushing a key on a keyboard or a musical instrument or a telegraph in the late 1800s, that started to be something that was thought of as pushing that thing to activate something. And also the French word bouton means to push or something that pushes out or thrusts forward.
So the very idea of the button is kind of that thing that sort of thrusts or pushes forward. But it really was the late 1800s around industrialization and electrification, particularly in the US and the UK, where we begin to see this idea of pushing a button becoming commonplace.
Well, it's interesting that we have that word button, but it has multiple meanings. I mean, there's a button on my shirt, which I can push it all day long.
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Chapter 6: How do online reviews impact consumer choices?
It doesn't do anything. But then there's the button that you push and that does something, but it wouldn't look good on my shirt.
Yeah, exactly. There are these multiple senses of the meaning. And I think that that also points to the ways that a button, while it seems very simplistic, is also kind of this versatile technology. So I don't know what came first, the clothing button, the belly button, the push button.
I think in some ways the push button was later in that sort of history, even though now it's hard to imagine ever not pushing a button.
Well, there's something very powerful, it seems, about pushing a button. I mean, pushing buttons can do anything. It can probably launch a missile. It can call an elevator. I mean, watch a kid get in an elevator without his parents. He'll push every button that's in there because there's something about every button that isn't being pushed is begging to be pushed.
I love that about buttons. And I think children are the best case study for this because they do have this fascination and this kind of feeling of magic around button pushing. What will happen if I push this thing? And one of the most interesting things to me was that even children in the early 1900s were bothering their parents by pushing buttons that they shouldn't have.
They were ringing elevator buttons and running away and honking horns and doing all the kinds of things that we tell our kids not to do today. So I think there's been that persistent fascination with buttons for as long as there have been buttons.
And is there a sense of when buttons really became, like the first doorbell and the first elevator button, when they really became a thing? And was it a thing or was it just, well, how are we going to make this thing ring? Oh, I know. Let's put a button in there. How does that all work?
Yeah, what I began to find out was that, you know, around the late 1800s, 1870s, 1880s, there were other ways to activate things. You know, there were levers and various switches and poles. Bells were one of the most common things that people wanted to activate, especially if you had a servant in your home and you were kind of well-to-do and you could
call to activate a person, right, rather than just a thing. So people would pull these really heavy bells using ropes or strings or various ties, and it was very exhausting to do that. So people started to think about, okay, what's an easier way that we can activate this bell as a form of communication? That was one of the early uses of push buttons.
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Chapter 7: What are the addictive qualities of modern gaming?
And I think that that's one of the subtleties about buttons is thinking about the various kinds of feedback that they give us when we push them. You could have visual feedback in an elevator, for example, where it lights up when you push it. Some buttons, I think the fact that it makes a sound is a way to tell us, hey, you actually pushed that button. It's going to do something.
And that gives you not only satisfaction, but that feeling of confirmation that the button is working. On the other hand, as you said,
Sometimes there's an advantage to quiet, and that's a desirable thing because you're in a situation where we want the interface to be as invisible as possible, because that kind of maintains this idea of magic that the machine is working without us really knowing that it's working. So I think it's very context specific.
And this then relates not only to usability, but also accessibility and thinking about how people get different kinds of information. If you're deaf, for example, you're really going to want a light on that button to give you that cue.
We're talking about buttons and why we like to push them. My guest is Rachel Plotnick. She's author of the book, Power Button, A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing. So Rachel, I have no idea, but I would imagine that there are people, for whatever reason, who don't like buttons, that buttons, they're button-phobic or something.
I'm sure that's definitely the case, and probably for different reasons. There might be some people who are germophobes. Even 100 years ago, people were worried about contact with public buttons and didn't want to touch a button that other people had touched. And other people, I think, just have kind of interface preferences, what they would prefer to use.
Well, what about that germ thing? Because I think that's still a concern people have. If you touch that same button, up button on the elevator in the lobby that 50 million other people have touched over the last 24 hours, might not it just be covered in gross germs?
Absolutely. And obviously, the COVID pandemic really drew attention to touching, I think, in a way that many of us took for granted that all of a sudden these surfaces became very fraught. We had to think a little bit more about what should we touch, what shouldn't we touch.
And I've been fascinated to see the ways in which a lot of companies have moved toward touch-free, contactless, touchless, all these various kinds of interfaces and gestures to move away from touching. And I think there are multiple reasons for that that aren't strictly about germs. Often there are business reasons as well.
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Chapter 8: How do games reflect our social interactions and personalities?
And, you know, it seems fun to create these newer technologies that are trying to reinvent the way we interact with each other and with our devices. And I don't think that's a bad thing on its face. But we do want to be careful not to sort of treat one technology as more natural than another. They all come with kind of their own politics and their own positives and negatives.
And a button is just one tool of many. But I wouldn't say that it's, you know, more organically useful or, on the other hand, that it's the problem in the way that we interact with technology either.
We have in our house, I don't know where it is, but I saw it within the last year, we have one of those staples, that was easy button. Yeah. I don't know why we have it or where it came from, but that's an example of what you were talking about before, a placebo button that doesn't do anything other than makes the guy say, that was easy.
But when you put it in front of people, they can't not push it. They just can't.
There does seem to be a psychology to that, you know, and I think that that's the interesting thing about the big red button or put a red button in front of someone that looks really dangerous and they don't know what it's going to do. This is often a kind of social experiment. Will the person push the button?
And there does seem to be this kind of itch inside of people that they just want to know what it's going to do. And the less they know about it, the more it's hidden in this kind of mystique, the more they want to push it. And I think that gets to a very essential kind of human quality of just curiosity about what machines are going to do. What effects will they have?
Well, think about think about advertising for things over the years. How often the phrase and with just the push of a button. I mean, it's like, oh, God, that's easy. Look at that. I could have that, and all I have to do is push that button. Like people reduce it down to, and with just the push of a button, you too can do whatever this thing is.
Oh, yeah. And the Eastman Kodak company, long time ago, their phrase was, you press the button, we do the rest. They were one of the first companies to really kind of embrace that logic of consumption and capitalism. Look how easy button pressing is. Anyone can do it. You don't need any skill. You don't need any experience.
And I think, as you said, over the last 100, 120 years, people have tried to sell buttons over and over again as a way to consume because of that pleasurable quality, that simplicity. Yeah.
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