YOU are deciding between two magazines to read. The one you choose just happens to feature photos of women in very small swimsuits. But you do not, you claim, pick that particular magazine for the bathing beauties; it happens to have more interesting articles, or better coverage of copper mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. You will say this even in the midst of a lab experiment that has been set up so that the only possible difference between the two magazines is the presence (or absence) of swimsuits.

Such was the finding of Zoë Chance, a doctoral student, and Michael Norton, a marketing professor, both at Harvard Business School. The pair were investigating how people justify “questionable” behaviour (Mr Norton’s word) to themselves after the fact. They asked 23 male students to choose between two sports magazines, one with broader coverage and one with more feature articles. The magazine which also happened to contain a special swimsuit issue was picked three-quarters of the time, regardless of the other content. But asked why they chose that particular magazine, the subjects pointed to either the sports coverage or the greater number of features—whichever happened to accompany the bikinis.

This may not seem surprising: the joke about reading Playboy for the articles is so old Ms Chance and Mr Norton borrowed it for the title of their working paper. But it is the latest in a series of experiments exploring how people behave in ways they think might be frowned upon, and then explain how their motives are actually squeaky clean.

Managers, for example, have been found to favour male applicants at hypothetical job interviews by claiming that they were searching for a candidate with either greater education or greater experience, depending on the attribute with which the man could trump the woman. In another experiment, people chose to watch a movie in a room already occupied by a person in a wheelchair when an adjoining room was showing the same film, but decamped when the movie in the next room was different (thus being able to claim that they were not avoiding the disabled person but just choosing a different film to watch). As Ms Chance puts it: “People will do what they want to do, and then find reasons to support it.”

HBO announced Friday that it has ordered a third season of the drama “In Treatment”, which stars Gabriel Byrne as therapist Paul Weston.

A third season had been in some doubt, as Byrne has said in interviews that he finds the role (which he plays very well) quite challenging. That’s understandable; his character is in almost every scene and much of his work involves reacting to and working through thorny issues with the sometimes challenging patients in his care.

The show is changing head writers again, as it has done every season so far. Anya Epstein of HBO’s “Tell Me You Love Me” and Danny Futterman (“Capote”) will take over from Season 2 showrunner Warren Leight.

The show goes into production early next year in New York.

An ongoing study by a well-respected Baptist university has found that local churches may not be the best place to receive counseling or support for mental illness.

Baylor University researchers built upon a 2008 study that found nearly a third of those who approached their local church in response to a personal or family member’s previously-diagnosed mental illness were told they really did not have mental illness.

In the new study, investigators discovered individuals experiencing anxiety and depression were dismissed the most often.

The finding is important as research consistently shows that clergy — not psychologists or other mental health experts — are the most common source of help sought in times of psychological distress. Furthermore, authorities believe 50 percent of individuals suffering from depression or anxiety go undiagnosed.

The Baylor researchers surveyed 168 pastors affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT). As a whole, the sample consisted of large, affluent congregations in suburban settings with senior pastors who were highly educated, predominantly Caucasian and theologically conservative.

The Baylor study found that despite recognizing a biological basis to all mental illness, the views of the BGCT pastors surveyed vary across disorders in how much they believe environmental or spiritual factors, such as personal sin, lack of faith or demonic involvement, play a role.

Major depressive disorders and anxiety disorders were viewed by pastors as having greater environmental and spiritual involvement and were more often dismissed than the more “severe” mental illnesses like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

The study also found that pastors viewed inconsistent parenting as the main driving force behind ADHD.

Pastors viewed medication as more effective in disorders seen as predominantly biological, compared to those with greater environmental or spiritual involvement.

“The results are troubling because the demographic of this sample is considered to have the most and easiest access to mental health care, but yet, by their admission, they seem unwilling to access mental health care that is available to their congregants,” said Dr. Matthew Stanford, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor, who led the study.

“A majority of them also do not believe they come into contact with very many congregants that have a legitimate mental illness, however we know roughly one in four Americans will be diagnosed with a mental illness this year, making it likely that they will come in contact with it.”

In addition, the study found for those congregants with mental illness, the BGCT pastors surveyed were reluctant to refer to mental health professionals who the pastors perceived or knew not to be Christian. When a mental health professional was known to be a Christian, the likelihood of referral by pastors was much higher.

Have we forgotten how to forget? Viktor Mayer-Schönberger worries about this. In September, the associate professor of public policy at Singapore University, who is affiliated with Harvard, published a fascinating book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. In it, he argues that technology has inverted our millennia-old relationship with memory.

For most of history, almost everything people did was forgotten because it was so hard to record and retrieve things. But this had a benefit: “social forgetting” allowed us to move on from embarrassing moments. Digital tools have eliminated this: Google caches copies of blog posts; networking sites thrive by archiving our daily dish. Society defaults to a relentless Proustian remembrance of all things past.

We live with a fear that what we do online may return to haunt us. “We’ve become so cautious in what we say or do,” says Mayer- Schönberger. As society suffers when people stop taking risks, Mayer-Schönberger argues that we need to stop creating tools that automatically remember everything. Instead,we need to design them to forget.

And software developers are doing just that. A good example is drop.io. It’s a “private sharing” service where users upload files and receive a URL to give to who they like. Photographers, for instance, can use it to notify clients of photos they want kept secret. But drop.io is unique in that you assign expiration dates to what you upload. It could be in a few hours, a month, or “after five people have seen it”. If no date is set, the default is a year. When it expires, the file is gone. Of the millions of files uploaded in the past 18 months, two-thirds no longer exist. As CEO Sam Lessin says, drop.io files are “like wormholes that pop in and out of existence for a specific purpose”.

Another good example of intentional forgetting is the Guest Pass feature on Flickr. Like drop.io, it lets you share specified photo streams by creating dedicated URLs you can email to those you want to see them. According to senior engineer Kellan Elliott- McCrea, about 11 percent of Flickr members use Guest Pass, mostly for snapshots of kids, homes, weddings and parties, the kind of stuff you want to show off, while being able to make it go poof. There are no guarantees - someone could take a file they’ve been granted temporary access to and repost it for all to see, forever. But users tend to respect the system that’s engineered for forgetting.

Mayer-Schönberger thinks that all social software should be designed this way as we’d be more inclined to ask if something ought to live forever. Data storage is so cheap that if we’re not prompted to delete, we won’t. There is another benefit: we just might pay closer attention - in real time - to our experiences. If you decide that a sunset or a conversation should live on only in your mind instead of on your hard drive, then you will probably savour it all the more. Just ask Marcel Proust.

…According to Brock University psychologist Anthony Bogaert, there may be more genuine asexuals out there than we realize. In 2004 Bogaert analyzed survey data from more than 18,000 British residents and found that the number of people (185, or about 1 percent) in this population who described themselves as “never having a sexual attraction to anymore” was just slightly lower than those who identified as being attracted to the same sex (3 percent). Since this discovery, a handful of academic researchers have been trying to determine whether asexuality is a true biological phenomenon or, alternatively, a slippery social label that for various reasons some people may prefer to adopt and embrace.

Sexual desire may wax and wane over the life course or—as many people on antidepressants have experienced—become virtually nonexistent due to medications or disease. There are also chromosomal abnormalities, such as Turner’s syndrome, often associated with an absence of sexual desire. Traumatic events in childhood, such as sexual abuse, can also factor into an aversion to sex. But if it exists as a fourth orientation, true asexuality would be due neither to genetic anomaly or environmental assault; although little is known about its etiology (Bogaert believes it may be traced to prenatal alterations of the hypothalamus), by all appearances most asexual people are normal, healthy, hormonally balanced and sexually mature adults who, for still uncertain reasons, have always found sex to be one big, bland yawn. Asexuality would therefore be like other sexual orientations in the sense that it is not “acquired” or “situational,” but rather an essential part of one’s biological makeup. Just like a straight man or a lesbian can’t wake up one day and decide to become attracted to men, neither could a person—in principle, anyway—“become” asexual.

If it remains a “secret” today, I’m convinced that’s only because far too many of us don’t want to accept its truth. Doing so means accepting that, when it comes to confronting the discomfort of our uncertainty, there are no shortcuts, no substitutes for the hard work involved in sitting with our fears. The reality is, philosophers and scholars have been touting this secret for millennia, and today’s brain imaging technology offers scientific evidence of its efficacy.