Shawn Achor

speaker

398 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 14 Jul

Shawn Achor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Oprah Podcast · Your Life Changes When Your Beliefs Do with Shawn Achor and Oprah · 14 Jul 2026 podcast

we give them credit for.

And I think one of the most exciting things... You wrote a whole book, so you give them a lot of credit.

I'm a big fan of beliefs.

But here's something amazing that I didn't know until I started working on the book that changed, I think, everything for me.

So I would love to share this because I think it's both of what you're saying is that we've heard of something called the placebo effect.

The placebo effect is the belief that if I give you a fake pill or fake intervention, but you believe that it's real, you show real health outcome benefits.

In fact, every drug that the Federal Drug Administration has to test, we compare it to the power of beliefs.

We've known this for a while.

In fact, one of the

Well, we've known this, but we underestimate the power of beliefs because there is a study back in 2001 called the sham knee surgery, which is a famous one because what they did is they invited 300 gentlemen in and they had terrible knee pain that would not get better.

They don't know what's coming because two thirds of them, so they got a free, they were offered a free knee surgery.

I don't know how they got this.

Two thirds of them did get a free knee surgery.

The doctor came in at the Baylor College of Medicine, created an incision, fixed the ligaments, fixed the cartilage and sutured them back up, leaving a scar.

For the other third,

The doctor comes in, gives them an incision, goes, has a coffee, and then comes back and sutures them back up, giving them a scar but no surgery.

But when they wake up from anesthesia, they have a scar, so they don't know if they got a real surgery or not.

Here's what happened.

At the six-month mark, the healing effects for both groups were almost identical between the real surgery and the sham surgery.

Two years later, mobility

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