I'll buy that

Compared to today's soybean shirts, diet pills and anti-ageing creams, however, they might not seem so bizarre.

Likewise, it would be easy - but wrong - to blame consumers' intellect. In no way, for example, would that explain cerebral, Mother Jones-reading environmentalists who keep buying carbon-offset credits when they know they don't count for beans when it comes to reducing their greenhouse emissions. Nor does it fully account for those of us who pay through the nose for purportedly healthful bottled water, though we know it's as good or worse than the tap-variety; or even Aunt Frieda, who keeps sending away to Peter Popoff for more "Miracle Manna" expecting it to cure her lumbago. Ariely's conclusion: There is something in the human mind that overpowers logic with the immutable desire to believe something true, despite evidence to the contrary.

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