Expensive seems better: The price of a non‑effective drug modulates its perceived efficacy Díaz‑Lago, Marcos Blanco Bregón, Fernando Matute, Helena Medical decision making Illusion of causality Price Drug efficacy Alternative medicines Availability of data and materials The materials and data sets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the Open Science Framework repository, https://osf.io/xh8f9/. Funding Support for this research was provided by Grant PID2021-126320NB-I00 from Agencia Estatal de Investigación of the Spanish Government, as well as Grant IT1696-22 from the Basque Government. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or manuscript preparation. Previous studies have shown that the price of a given product impacts the perceived quality of such product. This finding was also observed in medical contexts, showing that expensive drugs increase the placebo effect compared to inexpensive ones. However, addressing a drug’s efficacy requires making causal inferences between the drug and the healing. These inferences rely on the contingency between these two events, a factor that is difficult to control in the placebo research. The present study aimed to test whether the price of a given drug modulates its perceived efficacy using a proper (though fictitious) non-effective drug, so that not only the objective contingency, but also the probability of the cause and the probability of the effect could be adequately controlled for. We expected higher efficacy judgements for the expensive non-effective drug than for the inexpensive one. To test this hypothesis, 60 volunteers participated in a contingency learning task that was programmed so that 72% of the patients healed regardless of whether they took the drug. Approximately one-half of the participants were told that the drug was expensive, whereas the other half were told that it was inexpensive. As expected, the efficacy judgements of participants who saw the expensive drug were significantly higher than those who saw the inexpensive one. Overall, our results showed that the price of a non-effective drug modulates its perceived efficacy, an effect that seems to be mediated by the estimated number of doses administered. This result parallels findings in the placebo literature but using a laboratory methodology that allows stronger control of the variables, suggesting that the illusory overestimation produced by the more expensive treatments might be on the basis of the greater efficacy of the more expensive placebos. 2023-02-22T11:02:55Z 2023-02-22T11:02:55Z 2023-01-26 journal article Díaz-Lago, M., Blanco, F. & Matute, H. Expensive seems better: The price of a non-effective drug modulates its perceived efficacy. Cogn. Research 8, 8 (2023). [https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-023-00463-4] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/80143 10.1186/s41235-023-00463-4 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional Springer Nature