![]() ![]() And although the frequency of concealment didn’t seem to have much effect on well-being, the more people’s minds wandered to their secrets, the worse off they were. The same paper showed that people’s minds wander to their secrets far more often than they actively try to conceal their secrets from others. It’s hard for people to get those secrets off their minds. “About 97% of people have a secret in at least one of those categories, and the average person is currently keeping secrets in 13 of those categories.” “We all keep the same kinds of secrets,” Slepian says. And those categories held up across study populations, which included participants drawn from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and random picnickers recruited from New York City’s Central Park. They identified 38 common categories of secrets that people keep about themselves, ranging from infidelity and illegal behavior to pregnancy and planned surprises for others. ![]() They took a broad view, defining secrecy not just as the moment of actively withholding information, but also having the intention to keep something secret from another person-even when that other person isn’t physically present. Slepian and his colleagues started with a series of studies to sketch the basic outlines of secrecy, focusing first on secrets people keep from others (versus secrets that others confide in them) ( Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. “So, we started at the beginning, with the most basic questions we could ask.” Secrecy basics But I couldn’t find any studies that systematically looked at what secrets people keep, how they keep them or how they experience secrets on a day-to-day basis,” he says. “For decades, secrecy research focused on the effects of concealment. But he couldn’t find much research on how people thought about secrets outside those conversations. Typical studies looked at interactions between two people while one of them tried to hide something from the other. “I wondered if it was just a linguistic thing that people do, or if it reflected something deeper,” he says.ĭigging into the secrecy literature, he found that most existing research focused on the effort involved in keeping a secret. He had been researching metaphor-looking at the ways people use language about physical experiences to describe abstract concepts-and he became intrigued by the metaphor of being “weighed down” by a secret. Slepian got his start studying secrets indirectly. Yet until recently, psychological scientists hadn’t spent much time exploring how keeping secrets affects us. Almost everyone has something to hide (though, of course, not all secrets are of the deep, dark variety). Secrets are a universal human phenomenon. “When people confide in us, we take it as an act of intimacy that can bring us closer,” he adds. On the bright side, those shared confidences can be a boon to bonding, he’s found ( Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. The more people are preoccupied by that secret, or feel they have to hide it on behalf of the confidant, the more burdensome it is,” he says. “The bad news is that when people share their secrets with us, we feel like we have to guard them. ![]() Being confided in is a double-edged sword, says social psychologist Michael Slepian, PhD, an associate professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School who studies the psychology of secrets. Can I tell you a secret?” The next time someone asks you that question, you may not want to say yes. ![]()
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