Desperate conditions make people receptive to faith-based remedies they might otherwise reject

Evidence

For three nights Dora would visit her. She would come with a cup of water. “I’ve prayed over this water. Drink it,” she would say. Rasha wondered what her mother would do, but in prison, or in any desperate moment in your life, you are going to hang on to anything, she realized. Her mother drank the water, and Dora then gave some to her and her sister. They all drank the water, and for whatever unknown reason the pain subsided. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 127

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to ideas about placebo, belief, and communal ritual from reading on Deep Listening and the psychology of attention. — connects to: Early advertising borrowed the Bible’s structure for promising cures to the despairing — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 92