Can a person "self-induce" the placebo effect?
Not an answer, because I couldn't find any studies, but too long for a comment:


Placebos aren't arbitrary. You are not given chocolate chips as a placebo treatment for a cold. The placebeo has the form of a "real" treatment for the illness or disorder, e.g. a pill without an agent.

This means that in your experiment your subjects must treat themselves with what looks like a real treatment but isn't. It must look like it could work.
Placebos are not administered without the knowledge of the sick person, e.g. while that person sleeps. Placebos are administered in what is effectively a ritual: you go visit an expert, the expert speaks some magic words (the latin names of your organs and illness), the expert gives you a magic potion (the sugar pill), and touches you and transfers some of his or her power to you. Well, of course he doesn't, but the similarity between religious and magic rituals and what a doctor does are striking and have been studied by ethnologists.

This means that in your experiment your subjects must explicitly treat themselves and not just eat breakfast and decide after the fact that one of those chocolate chips was the placebo. They need to plan how, with what, and when they want to treat themselves, and then administer the treatment in the way it was designed.


If, in this way, you consider what a placebo actually is – a ritualised administration of a faux treatment – it becomes immediatly apparent that this treament contains several psychologically powerful elements that must certainly have some kind of effect.