Encore: How living with secrets can harm you, with Michael Slepian, PhD

We all keep secrets—on average, people have about 13 secrets at any one time, five of which they have never told another person. Psychologist Michael Slepian, PhD, of Columbia Business School, talks about what types of secrets people keep, why keeping a secret bottled up inside can harm us, how keeping secrets—or sharing them—affects people’s relationships with each other, how we decide whom we can trust with our secrets, and whether other people can tell when we’re holding something back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 0:31Kim Mills?

  Speaking of psychology is taking a summer break, so we're rerunning some of our favorite episodes from the past. In 2022, I talked to psychologist Michael Sleppian about why people keep secrets, why keeping a secret bottled up inside can be harmful, and how keeping secrets and sharing them affect people's relationships with each other. I hope you enjoy this episode from the archives. We'll be back with new episodes beginning August 26.

• 0:58Kim Mills?

  Do you have secrets? Maybe you're looking to leave your job and don't want your coworkers or your boss to know. Maybe you still feel shame about cheating on an exam in high school. Maybe you haven't told anyone whom you voted for in the last election. Or perhaps a friend told you about an extramarital affair and swore you to secrecy. We keep our own secrets, and sometimes we keep those of others. Research has shown that, on average, people have about 13 secrets at any one time, five of which they have never told another person. How does this secret keeping affect us? People often describe secrets as burdens that weigh them down or eat away at them. Do these metaphors reflect a deeper truth?

• 1:41Kim Mills?

  Does keeping a secret bottled up inside harm us, and if so, how? How does keeping secrets or sharing them affect people's relationships with each other? How do we decide whom we can trust with our secrets? And can other people tell when we're holding something back? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

• 2:11Kim Mills?

  Our guest today is Dr. Michael Slepian, the Sanford C. Bernstein and Company Associate Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. He's a research psychologist who studies the psychology of secrets. He examines the intersection of secrecy, trust, and motivation, including the consequences of secrecy, and how we judge and develop trust. His new book, The Secret Life of Secrets: How Our Inner Worlds Shape Well-Being, Relationships, and Who We Are, is being released in June by Penguin Random House. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Slepian.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:46Kim Mills?

  So let's start with the number I quoted in the introduction, that people keep about 13 secrets at any one time on average, and five of them they've never told anyone. Those numbers come from your research. Can you tell us about that study? How did you arrive at those numbers?

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, so when we first started this research, we didn't know, we didn't have the most basic questions yet answered, like, what secrets do people keep? How often did they keep them? And so we went to find out. We asked a couple thousand people, what is a secret you're currently keeping right now? And then we looked at the responses and looked at the themes and the common instances listed. And we saw 38 categories could really well capture what those folks said that they were keeping secret. And then when we gave this list to another group of participants, sure enough, 97% of them say they have at least one of the secrets from the list right now. And the average person has 13 of the secrets from that list at a given time, five of which they've never told anyone. So, and so these categories that we're talking about,

• 3:45Speaker 03

  they really comprehensively cover what people keep secret. When we ask people open-ended, what is a secret that you're keeping? 92% of the time, it fits one of these categories.

• 3:54Kim Mills?

  So what are some of the most common secrets that people keep?

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the most common secrets include having told a lie, and you don't want that to become known. Romantic desire, while you're not in a relationship, is a very common secret. Money is another common secret. Things related to sex.

• 4:16Kim Mills?

  So how do you define a secret? Is there a difference, for instance, between a secret and something that we just consider private?

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, and in fact, it could be, there can be some gray area between, but there's a way to draw a line between the two, which is that privacy tends to sort of focus on, you know, you don't broadcast personal information very, very widely if you're a private person. And if there's something that people don't know, it may be because these aren't the kinds of things we tend to talk about. So for a lot of folks, they don't talk about money, or they don't talk about sex. And so that might be why people don't know those things about you. But when it becomes a secret, it's not just that someone doesn't know this thing about you, but it's that you intend for them to not learn this information. That's when we arrive at a secret.

• 5:03Kim Mills?

  So let's talk for a minute about the intersection between lying and keeping a secret. For instance, I recently watched the movie Dear Evan Hansen, where Evan creates this whole complicated fiction about having been friends with a schoolmate who has killed himself. The lies that Evan tells about the relationship are, they're very much like secrets, and they appear to be a heavy burden on him, much like secrets tend to be, only maybe more so because he never was friends with the other boy. So are lies just a different type of secret?

• 5:35Speaker 03

  So no, I would say that lying is one way you could keep a secret, but it's not the only way. There's plenty of secrets you can keep without telling lies. So a lie is one way out of many to keep a secret. And then, of course, you can keep a lie a secret. But there, there's sort of different constructs, but they're kind of intersecting in this way.

• 5:55Kim Mills?

  So a lot of your work has to do with how secrets affect us, often in harmful ways. There's a line in an essay you wrote that said, "The real problem with having secrets is not that we have to hide them, but rather that we have to live with them." So why is living with secrets so difficult?

• 6:13Speaker 03

  What's so difficult about just simply having a secret? A secret that you might not ever have to hide in conversation. If it's something you care about, or if it's something that's bothering you, to choose to be alone with that thing tends to not help. We tend to not develop the healthiest ways of thinking about these struggles we keep entirely to ourselves. And so even whether you're hiding it frequently or not, your mind is going to return to this thing time and time again, and you're not going to know what to do with it.

• 6:43Kim Mills?

  Are there some types of secrets that are harder to live with at others? For example, you've looked at the difference between secrets that people consider shameful and those they feel guilty about. Is one worse than the other?

• 6:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in one sense, if we sort of ignored what our secrets are about, we could see that the secrets that return to our minds more frequently are the ones that are also related to lower well-being, not the ones that we say we can conceal more frequently. But when we look to what the secrets are about, we see this distinction that you mentioned between shame and guilt. And shame, we can consider, someone, when someone feels ashamed, they feel like, I'm a bad person to some degree. When someone feels guilty, they think, I've done a bad thing. And so instead of thinking, I'm a bad person, I've done a bad thing, is actually much more healthy. And it's when people feel like I'm a bad person that they find their minds returning to the secret time and time again.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  And those are the secrets we say sort of hurt our well-being the most.

• 7:44Kim Mills?

  And how does keeping secrets harm us? Was there research that ties secrecy directly to poor physical or mental health?

• 7:53Speaker 03

  So this is where things get tricky. Trying to link a specific secret to lower physical health is tough. And so, you know, there was a well-known study in the 90s that looked at men who were keeping their sexual orientation secret, who were also diagnosed with AIDS. And they found that the men who concealed their sexual orientation more often had a more rapid progression of disease and even died sooner. And so that's sort of a sobering idea. But it doesn't mean it was the part, the hiding part, that was so bothering, so troubling. That is, when you, there's, there's the moment at which you sort of conceal a secret during conversation,

• 8:37Speaker 03

  that turns out to be easier than we've made it out to be. But the real problem with this situation is not feeling comfortable enough to be yourself. And that's really very reliably related to lower well-being, feeling unsupported. And so it's having your mind return to ideas like that. I can't be who I am. I'm not supported for who I am. That seems to be where the trouble or where the harm really begins.

• 9:02Kim Mills?

  So is there a difference between keeping our own secrets and keeping a secret for someone else? Such as one example I gave in the introduction about a friend who confesses an affair. Does keeping someone else's secrets feel as burdensome as keeping our own?

• 9:18Speaker 03

  It can. So if someone confides a secret in you, and you have totally overlapping social networks, you're now essentially keeping the secret for them too. Or if only certain people are allowed to know, it can get burdensome really quickly. But if it's something that's not directly relevant to some folks in your shared social network, it's not as difficult. When another person's secret becomes burdensome is when it becomes something we find our minds returning to time and time again. But there's a good side to you. We feel glad that other people feel comfortable confiding in us. We see that as an act of intimacy that brings us closer together.

• 9:59Kim Mills?

  So sharing a secret then can bring people closer together? Or does it depend on the nature of the secret, or even the person to whom you've told it?

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I mean, I'm imagining you're telling someone that you're already close to. If it's someone you're not already close to, it would be quite intimate, perhaps, to reveal something that you wouldn't tell just anyone. But again, it's a really great way to, like, jumpstart a relationship. Anyone who's, you know, trying to form a relationship quickly realizes that sort of revealing sensitive things, making yourself vulnerable, is, is a way to connect with each other.

• 10:36Kim Mills?

  What advice do you have for people who are living with secrets that are weighing on them? How can they think about whether the risk of telling the secrets are worth the relief of being able to unburden themselves?

• 10:49Speaker 03

  So this is a question that is just so hard to answer on your own. And the good news is you don't have to. So you can still keep the secret you're from the person you're keeping it from. But you can talk to a third party and say like, what do you think I should do with this? It's so helpful to just have one more perspective than your own because it's really hard to step outside of your perspective, especially when you're not sure what to do. Talking to a third party is definitely what I would recommend in that situation.

• 11:17Kim Mills?

  So you participated in a kind of public art project a few years ago where people could tell their secrets anonymously in a public phone installed in a park. Does that kind of anonymous sharing have the same effect? Will it make people feel better if you have a secret that you aren't ready to share with your friends or family? Is it helpful to tell it to a stranger or even write it in a diary or a journal?

• 11:41Speaker 03

  If you're truly not ready to tell anyone that you know, or you just can't find yourself ready to talk about it, then something like this is a good start. I wouldn't say it's everything, but it's a good start. Sometimes it just takes saying it out loud to feel like, okay, this is something I can deal with or work on. So whether you're doing that on the secret telephone, if you happen to stumble that stumble upon it in New York City, or journaling, but journaling, you want to be careful because in theory, it could be this great space to work through something on your own without involving another person. But if you're using the space to simply rehash the past, it can essentially become a written record of harmful rumination.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  And that's when it actually harms more than it helps. And so to get journaling to work, you really want to use it as a space to step outside of your usual perspective, the thing that's extremely hard to do on your own, really easy to do in conversation with another person.

• 12:40Kim Mills?

  So what did you find from that phone project? What were you asking people after they told their secrets? I assume there was some kind of follow up?

• 12:47Speaker 03

  This is, this is what it becomes. I wanted it to become a research project, but it's so far, it's an art project. We haven't, we haven't, you know, the idea was that we would program the phone so people could answer a few questions. That hasn't happened yet, but just, we've just been looking at the things people keep secret. And they're just, they're quite interesting to listen to, you know, and I've been doing this research for 10 years and hearing the person's voice describe the secret is, is a really interesting experience.

• 13:13Kim Mills?

  I think they do something like that at Burning Man, don't they? Or they have in the past? The phone, the phone in the desert?

• 13:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:20Kim Mills?

  So what about telling your secrets to a therapist? Is that sharing part of what makes therapy work for people?

• 13:28Speaker 03

  It's certainly one of the ingredients for sure. And if that's something that you feel you'd be comfortable doing, if that, if that might work for you, it's a great, it's a great way to talk about these things without any of the risks that normally come with talking about these things to friends or family or your romantic partner even. But if that's not something you're interested in, really anyone can do this, like anyone can sort of hear you out and say, that sucks, or I'm here for you. Any, most folks can offer just a little bit of advice that you hadn't considered because they have this unique perspective that is not your own. So any person you would feel comfortable talking to, our research shows that the typical

• 14:11Speaker 03

  response to being confided in is a positive response. And someone has to respond very negatively for you to regret doing so. So even a lukewarm response, people find helpful.

• 14:22Kim Mills?

  What about people whose jobs require them to keep secrets? And I don't mean the proprietary information, but like people who are spies, for example, or journalists who agree to protect their sources, you know, on pain of going to jail, or lawyers who might represent somebody they know is guilty. Is keeping a secret because of your job, the same as keeping a more personal secret?

• 14:46Speaker 03

  They can converge. When it's something that is on your mind a lot, but you're not allowed to tell your spouse, that becomes a difficult situation and it can feel isolating. We see in our research, it can feel isolating to not be able to talk about your work with other people. But there are some differences, as you might imagine, to if the nature of the secret you keep for work is, it's not something you have to think about a lot. It seems not to be very burdensome, but if it's something big and you can't talk about it with other folks, your mind may return to it time and time again. And then it starts looking like that, the harm starts looking like a personal secret's harm.

• 15:24Kim Mills?

  Is there something in the psychological makeup of somebody who can be a spy, for example, and can keep secrets and, and still perform every day? I mean, has anybody looked at that?

• 15:34Speaker 03

  I would say that someone who speaks their mind as soon as they have a thought would probably have a harder time in that job, or maybe you never even make it close enough to find out. Normally, when we have thoughts, there's people around with, we share them. And it's not just because we want people to know what's inside our head. It's just how we connect with people and it's also how we learn about the world. You know, you share your thought and you see what someone says in response. But if you have no trouble not sharing the thoughts that you're having, maybe, maybe you could be a spy.

• 16:09Kim Mills?

  Can, can we tell when people are keeping secrets? I know there's been research into whether somebody is lying, but are there giveaways when somebody is, is, you know, keeping some information from you? How would you know?

• 16:24Speaker 03

  So in most situations, there's not any clues because people can't read your mind. They, they, they can understand if something's upsetting you or bothering you, but you, they can't literally see a secret on your face. And so, you know, in some ways that's great. That's quite helpful that people can just read your secrets on your face. That would be really frustrating. And so this, what the studies show is that when we bring two people together in a room and have one person hide something from the other, the other person can't tell that they're hiding something often. And people who watch the video recordings can't tell that they're hiding something. And so why, why is that the case? Intuitively, we'd think that maybe we would, people would somehow tell, people would somehow be able to tell.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  And I think when we think about that picture in our mind, we're sort of imagining the most difficult secrecy situation we can imagine. Someone asks you a question directly related to your secret. It turns out in real life, that doesn't happen very often. People don't go around asking people so much, have you ever cheated on your partner? Were you ever abused during childhood? These are just not questions we ask. You know, these aren't topics that necessarily come up in conversation so much, experiences of trauma.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  And so those kinds of secrets, it's really hard to imagine how someone could somehow know that you're keeping them. Now, if it's your romantic partner, however, here's where things become different. If there's a conversation topic that you're avoiding, which is one way, one frequent way folks try to keep secrets from their romantic partners, your partner's going to be able to tell. If there's just a conversation topic you'd ever seem to touch or sort of dodge whenever it comes up, they're going to notice that. And that is not going to be good, as you might imagine. When we believe our partners are keeping secrets from us, one of the reasons that's so hurtful is we feel not included in their lives.

• 18:19Kim Mills?

  So you start your new book with a personal story about how you learned a significant family secret that your parents had kept from you on, until well into your adulthood, when you were already doing research on the psychology of secrets. Can you tell that story and how has that affected the work that you're doing now?

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. So when I first started researching secrecy, I was doing it in a sort of strange way because I wasn't trying to learn about secrecy. I was trying to learn about metaphor, which you mentioned earlier. And secrecy was just one example, this idea that people describe secrets as heavy or weighty or burdensome. I was sort of interested in what secrets people associate with a sense of burden. And so I had been doing that research for a couple of years. And in fact, there was one particular day when I was giving my job talk to Columbia. So I'm on my interview at Columbia for my position. And I feel like it goes while I present my research on secrecy to them. And then later that night, when I'm actually still with people from the interview, getting drinks at a bar, I got a call from my dad.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  And, you know, he never calls so, so late at night. And so I became really concerned, something, something bad has happened and he called again and I'm like, oh no. You know, maybe there's been a death in the family or something. And so I finally get in touch with him after the interview was officially over, said goodbye to everyone. And he says, Michael, I need to tell you something. Are you sitting down? And then he goes on to tell me, I didn't sit down. He goes on to tell me that he's not biologically able to have children. He's, is telling me that he's not my biological father. And this is after a day of presenting my research on secrecy as part of this interview. And as you can imagine, that's very shocking to learn about.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  But much later, I realized essentially at the same time that my research was coming to this conclusion that it's not the act of hiding in conversation that's very difficult, but it's having to think about a secret and live with it alone in your thoughts. And I realized my parents' situation was, was really a perfect illustration of that because I had asked my parents much later, when did you decide to keep this secret? I assumed it was either after I was born, shortly after I was born, or shortly after my younger brother was born. And my mom said, neither. We had decided that we would never tell our children and we could tell anyone else, but we would never tell our children. And they decided that before we were ever born.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  And this is why secrecy, we really need to define it as an intention, because the moment you intend to keep the secret, you have it. And they were keeping, they had this secret well before they could even hide it. They could, it could already cast doubts and worries. What if we looked different from my father or what they needed to know about our genetics? And so they told me that a lot of what was difficult about having that secret was not that they once in a while had to hide it in conversation, that in fact was very rare, but they just had this once in a while, think about it. And certain things would bring it back to the top of their minds and. That is where the burden would come from.

• 21:31Kim Mills?

  And what precipitated your father's telling you when he told you? And did he know that this was an important day for you and that you had just finished an interview for a job?

• 21:39Speaker 03

  Yes. So I learned that they very considerately waited for the interview to be over. They wanted to tell me that day, though, because maybe the day or two days before, my brother had found out about the secret. And the way he found out about it was he was on a phone, on a phone call with my mom. They were chatting. She mentioned offhandedly that she recently got in an argument with her father, our grandfather. My brother was like, that's so weird. I've never heard of you two arguing ever. What were you arguing about? And she said, I can't tell you. It's a secret. And he was like, well, now you have to tell me. And she was like, no, I promised I would never tell you. And so, as you can imagine, that's a great way to get someone to keep pushing and pushing until they, until they learned the secret. And he did.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  And once he learned it, they had to let me know, but they, they wanted to wait until the interview was over before they told me.

• 22:30Kim Mills?

  Wow. So what, what next? What do we need to know about secrets? What are you looking into going forward?

• 22:38Speaker 03

  So in thinking about what it means to have a secret and what you should do with it, you know, one thing that we've sort of alluded to already is talk to a third party because they have a unique perspective that they can offer you. That's really hard to find on your own, and that's part of the problem when you're living alone with a secret. You're sort of stuck with your one way of thinking about it. What we're doing now is starting to consider what the secrets are about. And when I say there's 30 categories of secrets, that's too many categories for, for understanding like which secrets hurt you more than others. And so what we're doing now is understanding how people perceive their secrets as sort of compared to each other. And it turns out that people see their secrets as having three primary dimensions, whether

• 23:23Speaker 03

  it's a secret to moral, whether a secret's related to our relationships, and whether a secret's related to our goals. And trying to understand the unique qualities of those three different dimensions or experiences we can have with our secrets.

• 23:38Kim Mills?

  Well, thank you for joining me today, Dr. Slepian. This has been really interesting, and I promise I won't tell anyone what we talked about.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 23:47Kim Mills?

  You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at [email protected]. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Our sound editor is Chris Kandian. Thank you for listening to the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills.