Expensive Wine and the Placebo Effect

Volunteers tasted and rated five wines, each individually priced, although in fact there were only three different wines, and two were tasted twice: once labeled at $90 a bottle, and once at $10 a bottle. The results were very clear: the wine tasted better simply because people were told it was expensive.

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March subjected 82 healthy subjects to painful electric shocks, offering them pain relief in the form of a pill which was described as being similar to codeine, but with a faster onset, in a lengthy and authoritative leaflet. In fact it was just a placebo, a pill with no medicine, a sugar pill, like a homeopathy pill. The pain relief was significantly stronger when subjects were told the tablet cost $2.50 than when they were told it cost 10c.