The answer depends on how you define you.
If you think you is everything you’re consciously aware of (conscious you aka System 2), then the answer is maybe yes; maybe no. But if you include your unconscious (System 1) in your definition of you, the answer is much more reliably yes.
Prediction is something brains do to enable embodied, environmentally situated agents [you, for example] to carry out various tasks. —Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty
To put it another way:
One purpose of your brain is to anticipate events. You [your brain] decide how to behave largely on the basis of the outcomes you expect, and these expectations alter your experience of yourself and of the world.
The ability to predict the future has survival value. —Irving Kirsch, New Scientist
The fewer prediction errors your brain makes, the likelier you are to respond appropriately—and to stay alive, which is the point of it all.
Sugar Pills and Sham Treatments
The placebo effect and its lesser known companion the nocebo effect are two examples of getting what the unconscious you expects to get.
The placebo effect refers to any situation where body and mind are affected by an intervention to a greater degree than would be expected based on the intervention itself. —Art Markman Ph.D.
In the U.S.—but not in other countries—the placebo effect has been growing to the extent that it now interferes with the results of double-blind trials to determine the effectiveness of new drugs. One possible explanation is that in the U.S. drugs are essentially marketed directly to patients, which isn’t the case elsewhere.
If you’re motivated to find something to relieve painful or unpleasant symptoms you’re experiencing and you’re persuaded by a TV commercial or magazine ad that a particular drug can help, you’re more likely to experience symptom relief whether you are given the actual drug or a placebo. That’s because your brain (the unconscious you) expects the drug to produce certain results that, in many cases, it can produce on its own.
So it predicts what’s going to happen when you take the drug, prepares a response, and goes into action.
What If You Know It’s a Placebo?
We get cues about how we should respond to pain—and medicine—from our environments.
Studies show that post-operative patients whose painkillers are distributed by a hidden robot pump at an undisclosed time need twice as much drug to get the same pain-relieving effect as when the drug is injected by a nurse they could see. So awareness that you’re being given something that’s supposed to relieve pain seems to impact perception of it working. —Brian Resnick, Vox
However, placebo treatments can be just as effective when you know that’s what you’re getting because there’s a difference between belief (primarily conscious) and expectation (primarily unconscious). The conscious you may be a skeptic, while the unconscious you still expects the treatment to work. In any given moment, the unconscious you is likely to prevail.
The brain is an expectancy machine. —Daniel Dennett
The placebo effect can be viewed as another example of our brain—not our mind—making sense of the world outside our conscious awareness. We’re fortunate it can do that, but it’s easy to forget that’s what’s happening. And when we forget that’s what’s happening, we’re easily lulled into believing we have more choice and control in the moment than we actually have.
Note: It’s important to keep in mind that medical and health-related placebos affect our experience of symptoms, but they do not cure their underlying causes.