@article {Haug:2011:0951-5089:679,
title = "Explaining the placebo effect: Aliefs, beliefs, and conditioning",
journal = "Philosophical Psychology",
parent_itemid = "infobike://routledg/cphp",
publishercode ="routledg",
year = "2011",
volume = "24",
number = "5",
publication date ="2011-10-01T00:00:00",
pages = "679-698",
itemtype = "ARTICLE",
issn = "0951-5089",
eissn = "1465-394X",
url = "https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/cphp/2011/00000024/00000005/art00006",
doi = "doi:10.1080/09515089.2011.559624",
keyword = "Alief, Conditioning, Belief, Placebo Effect",
author = "Haug, Matthew",
abstract = "There are a number of competing psychological accounts of the placebo effect, and much of the recent debate centers on the relative importance of classical conditioning and conscious beliefs. In this paper, I discuss apparent problems with these accounts and with disjunctive
accounts that deny that placebo effects can be given a unified psychological explanation. The fact that some placebo effects seem to be mediated by cognitive states with content that is consciously inaccessible and inferentially isolated from a subject's beliefs motivates an account of the
placebo effect in terms of subdoxastic cognitive states. I propose that aliefs, subdoxastic cognitive states that are associative, automatic, and arational, can provide a unified psychological account of the placebo effect. This account also has the potential to illuminate interesting connections
to other psychological phenomena.",
}