10. My advisor ran out of grant money and coerced me into finishing his/her research.
	9. Theory.
	8. At first it seemed like a trivial project, but having devoted 2750 excruciating, maddening hours to it, I came to realize how profoundly important a piece of work it must be since only a fool would have squandered his youth on anything less, and I'm cert ainly no fool. Right?
	7. Making hundreds of college sophomores do scores of boring and meaningless tasks paradoxically seemed to lift my own pervasive depression, sometimes causing me to feel almost alive for minutes at a time.
	6. I can't stand teaching classes or interacting with students; I needed an autistic and time intensive alternative, and this was it -- in spades.
	5. This was a way to be with laboratory animals whenever I want without having to explain myself to every Tom, Dick, and Harry.
	4. Equipment my department paid a lot of money for was going unused.
	3. It's an exact replication of the only article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published during the past decade that I actually understood.
	2. I didn't actually do the study. I plagiarized the report from an obscure foreign journal that I know nobody around here ever looks at.
	1. My dissertation committee subliminally shaped me into coming up with the idea.