10 years ago, Duke Professor Dan Ariely published a paper that demonstrated two things.

The first, something we already knew, which is that placebos can work as a pain reliever,

that you can take a sugar pill, a pill that does nothing in a double-blind study, and your pain

will go away. But the second thing he demonstrated is that expensive

placebo's work better than cheap ones. Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special

archived episode of Akimbo. For those of you who don't know about my obsession with

placebos, placebos are really important.

Here's the thing.

Plants do not respond to placebos.

They can't tell if you're feeding them bottled water or tap water.

And dogs? Dogs can't tell the difference between expensive

dog food and cheap dog food if they're made out of the same ingredients. Human beings are special.

Human beings are special in one giant way, which is that we tell ourselves stories, and those stories change our physiology.

They actually change the way we interact with ourselves and with the world.

And one story we're able to tell ourselves is the story of the placebo.

That expensive red wine tastes better than cheap red wine.

That what a doctor tells us when she's giving

us medicine changes the way the medicine works. There's a simple way to think about the power

of a placebo. If we give somebody fake malaria medicine, they're not going to get well nearly as quickly as if we give them real

malaria medicine. On the other hand, if we give someone fake rhino horn and they believe we gave

them real rhino horn, they're going to have exactly the same reaction to it. And the same thing goes in the other

direction. If you buy a Birken bag that is a counterfeit, but you can't tell the difference,

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