When advertisers and sales-folk try to motivate us to buy products and services, they pay great attention to many issues that we would deny are important to us. We often make lists of the features we want in friends, lovers, homes, and jobs, and then find ourselves drawn to options that don’t score well on these lists. Agreed. Most of our motivations are little-known to us and we make up “just so” stories after the fact to explain why we did something.