Can a person "self-induce" the placebo effect? Despite a recent dubious claim that placebos don't require deception (critiqued here), placebos appear to function on the basis that a subject believes X will have effect Y. Without knowing too much detail, we say that the subject's mind/body will assist or attempt to achieve Y upon the perception that X causes Y.

Can a person, without self-deception [1] and with knowledge of the placebo effect, induce a placebo response? Or can a person knowledgeable of the placebo effect induce the same "reactions" that a placebo can normally be used to induce?

Consider a silly example.

Persons A and B each have a headache. They are told that balancing a spoon on one's nose eliminates headaches with very high success rates by conducting electricity via the sinuses. Person A believes the claim. Person A balances a spoon on their nose, and their headache is eliminated.

Person B, having a background in medicine, doesn't believe it at all. Person B, to prove the point, balances the spoon on their nose and remains in pain.

At this point, is there any way for Person B to "simply decide" that this ritual, which he knows to be an attempt at a placebo, to start working?

Would there be a difference using a pill instead of something purely ritualistic?

[1] self-deception. [for the purpose of this question,] any mental activity in the general category of suspending one's "participation" in the full body knowledge they normally possess.
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.