The Ignorant Investor

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Most single Americans are playing hard to get and are happy to dodge Cupid's arrow, new research says, despite the annual Valentine's Day splurge on chocolates and flowers.

Forty-three percent of adult Americans, or 87 million people, describe themselves as single -- but only 16 percent are looking for love, the survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found. . .

This is an excellent illustration of why polls are so useless at measuring elements of human behavior. Everybody wants to fall in love. It's instinctive. Built into your brain when you were born. You can't help wanting to fall in love, any more than you could decide that you weren't interested in going to the bathroom or that you wouldn't mind being eaten by a tiger. So when people say they aren't interested in falling in love, you know that something else is going on upstairs in the big, complex mechanism we all use for thinking. What better way to rationalize the irritation of not being in love by saying that it's not something that you're interested in at the moment?

So that's what Valentine's Day poll teaches us about investing: people lie to themeselves when considering the alternative is unbearable. So that might explain why, when polled, a huge majority of homeowners say that they believe their homes will increase substantially in value in 2006....