You Know It's a Placebo. So Why Does It Still Work?

Two brilliant points:

"When you venture outside the scientific literature into the world of contemporary consumer marketing, most of the placebos you’ll find are still the deceptive kind. You know how it works: People given samples of chocolate or wine rate the supposedly expensive ones as better even though the samples are identical."

"Placebos also haunt what the political scientist Murray Edelman famously termed the 'symbolic uses of politics.' In voters’ 'anxious search for direction,' Edelman argued, they might be drawn to leaders who can 'dramatize confidence in a world many of them find alien'—regardless of whether that performance achieves anything for the voter."