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

inflammation, pain were all improved almost at the same level between people that got a real surgery and people that believed that they had a surgery.

But this is where things take a huge turn, because we've heard about placebos.

This is the part that if you walk away from one thing from our conversation together, it's that we live in a world where we feel like the power of belief is on the decline.

With technology and the way that the world is right now, it feels like our beliefs are dwindling in this world.

But scientifically, we're actually getting the complete

opposite message.

So the placebo effect remained constant over time, but I was looking at depression studies and I found that over the past three decades, the placebo effect, the likelihood of a fake intervention that you believe is real to have an effect upon you rose by 7% every decade for three decades.

Why would belief become more predictive of people's lives?

So I got fascinated and I started going deeper into the research.

I read over 100 articles and meta-analyses, and what I found is in all of these conditions, from heart disease to cancer to childhood epilepsy,

to depression, to anxiety, we found that the placebo rate over the past two decades has doubled, if not tripled.

What this means for you is that the power of belief is not dwindling or declining.

Scientifically, the power of belief to heal us is greater now than it was 20 years ago, that the power of belief is actually ascending.

Possibly.

Absolutely.

And there were people that got the real surgery and it didn't work.

Okay.

I went through back surgery myself and have the scar.

And, you know, I was one of the lucky ones that it actually worked.

Yeah.

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