Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

by Rory Sutherland

While I am sure the ACCC’s chemical facts were accurate, their psychology seems to have been wrong because, for me, Nurofen hadn’t gone far enough. I want to see even more specific variants of pain relief: ‘I Can’t Find My Car Keys Nurofen’ or ‘Nurofen for People Whose Neighbours Like Reggae’. Again, these need contain no additional ingredients: the only distinguishing feature would be the packaging and the promise. I’m not being entirely frivolous: research into the placebo effect shows that branded analgesics are more effective. Furthermore, promoting a drug as a cure for a narrowly defined condition, as Nurofen did, also increases placebo power, as does raising its price or changing the colour: everything the company was doing added to the efficacy of the product. It is impossible to buy expensive aspirin in the UK, yet it is a waste of this wonder drug to sell it for 79p in drab packaging, when you could make it much better by packaging it lavishly, colouring the pills redfn1 and charging more. Sometimes I have a £3.29 headache rather than a 79p one. I try to stockpile the pricier brands I buy in the US, because I find they work better. Yes, I know it’s bullshit but, as we’ve already seen, placebos work even if you tell people they are placebos. Or, to put it another way, a dock leaf might soothe the pain of a nettle sting on even Richard Dawkins’s leg, regardless of any scientific evidence he had of their uselessness. The psychologist Nicholas Humphrey argues that pla...