Legal Commentary

I've written here occasionally about the placebo effect, but here's a Reuters news article that indirectly addresses the opposite phenomenon: the nocebo effect.  Much as one can have a positive result from a sham treatment or intervention if one expects it to have a positive result, one can have a negative result from a sham treatment or intervention when one expects it to have a negative result.

Well, that's about the best that I can do to explain this: "Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft. "  Here's some more:

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

The story certainly seems puzzling.  Do people really believe that their genitals have been removed?  Perhaps there is some sort of nocebo effect at play:

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," [Kinshasa's police chief] said.

Is there a nocebo effect, though, on third parties?  Check out the concluding paragraph:

"It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.