A man buys a car he cannot quite afford. Ask the dashboards why and they will tell you the ad that reached him was viewable, that it held his attention for a respectable number of seconds, that his face registered a flicker of positive emotion. All true, and all beside the point. He bought the car because of what it says about him; prestige was doing the buying, and he could not have told you so himself. Cognitive psychology and neuroscience have firmly established that the cause of all behavior is motivation, and that most of it operates below the level of consciousness.
The Smoke and the Fire
