
xxii Prologue: Unlearning What’s Untrue
gave the same painkiller to a different group and told them that it had been
discounted to $0.10 per pill. In both cases the researchers used the same pla-
cebo pills, but the people who took the “expensive” medicine felt a lot less
pain than their peers in the “cheap” condition [7].
In another experiment, Dr. Antonio Rangel and his colleagues at CalTech
gave people a taste of ve Cabernet Sauvignon wines ranging in price from
$5 to $90 a bottle. Personal interviews and brain scans conrmed that people
appreciated the taste of expensive wines better than the cheap ones. The
caveat was that the researchers ...