The student typically assures me that the material was intelligible and that the student understood the answers to the study questions. The student hesitated. I studied that. But equating placebo effects with sugar pills is not enough to answer a decent test item about the placebo effect. More importantly, it misses an essential point about placebo effects.
Placebo effects can occur any time subjects believe in a treatment or experimental manipulation .
For example, placebo effects occur in educational research, if subjects believe they are testing out a great new form of learning. The chapter explained this, but the student had not digested the information. Because of that, the student had missed the quiz item about placebo effects. I suspect that even a student who has a hard time with reading comprehension can recognize a vague or insufficient answer. Self-testing is not difficult, but it does not occur automatically.