The Disclosure Dilemma: Oversharing (With Leslie John)

Harvard Business School's Leslie John explains why we misjudge the risks of self-disclosure and how openness can improve relationships.

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

• 0:06Katy Milkman?

  It's tax season in New Zealand, and Rebecca Stiles is running late. She's about to head out the door to teach a creative writing class when she remembers one last thing she was supposed to do: check her Inland Revenue account. Inland Revenue, or IR, is New Zealand's government agency responsible for collecting taxes. So Rebecca Googles "my IR login" and clicks a familiar-looking link, the one right at the top of her search. She enters her username, password, and up pops a message saying she's owed a refund. The site prompts her to enter her credit card details so the money can be processed.

• 0:49Katy Milkman?

  Now, in this moment, a small part of Rebecca feels something is off. Inland Revenue normally deposits refunds straight into her bank account, not to a credit card. But she's distracted and in a hurry, and the refund amount seems right, so she quickly types in the 16-digit number, the expiration date, the CVV, and realizes her mistake. She hasn't logged into Inland Revenue, but instead, she's just handed over her financial information directly to bad actors. This was a phishing scam, a beautifully designed trap built to exploit the exact tax season rush Rebecca was caught up in.

• 1:34Katy Milkman?

  She immediately calls the tax agency to reset her password. She stops her credit card on her banking app and then calls the bank to cancel it altogether. The practical crisis is at least contained, but psychologically, the blow hits harder because Rebecca isn't just a regular taxpayer caught off guard. Rebecca is the research lead for Consumer NZ, New Zealand's leading consumer protection magazine. Part of her job is warning people about scams like this one, and yet, in a matter of minutes, she disclosed some of her most sensitive personal information to strangers. Rebecca's mistake highlights the acute danger of oversharing.

• 2:18Katy Milkman?

  But disclosure can be a double-edged sword. Why is it that people over-disclose online in ways we would never dream of in a face-to-face interaction? And why, on the flip side, do we sometimes not share enough with other people when it can build trust and authenticity? In this episode, we'll look at how disclosing too much information can be a dangerous liability, but also when holding back can cost us. I'm Dr. Katie Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab.

• 3:01Katy Milkman?

  It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true and surprising stories about high-stakes choices, and then we examine how these stories connect to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgments and avoid costly mistakes. My guest today is Leslie John, a professor of negotiations, organizations, and markets at Harvard Business School, and the author of a fantastic new book called Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing. Our conversation is both about our susceptibility to scam artists online who know just how

• 3:45Katy Milkman?

  to get us to over-disclose, but also, and more centrally, it's about the surprising dividends of thoughtful vulnerability. Lesley's recent research highlights the importance of sharing, even when the information we disclose is unflattering, and the relational risks we take when we choose not to share. But first, Lesley's own story. As a scholar who built her early career studying digital privacy paradoxes, she had to learn firsthand that another real risk can be undersharing, and that there are costs associated with staying silent. In the spirit of her book, and with her family's, and specifically, her mother's full blessing,

• 4:27Katy Milkman?

  Lesley shares a deeply personal chapter from her own life about the messy, beautiful reality of opening up.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  It was a month before I was about to get married, and I was 28 years old, and I was having second thoughts. And I didn't know if it was just like, kind of, normal, whatever "normal" is, wedding, pre-wedding jitters, or if it was something that I really should pay attention to. So I called up my mom. She said, "Hello," and I said, "It's me," and she said, "What's up, my chick?" And I was kind of immediately transported back to my childhood home. I could envision my mother in our super cozy family room with its faux wood paneling

• 5:19Speaker 01

  and shag carpet, and I imagined her nuzzled into the couch and listening attentively to what I was about to say. And I said that I was having second thoughts about the marriage. So she listened, and she said, "That's interesting, because, you know, the month before I married your father, I had second thoughts too. And I am so, so glad that I went through with it, because look at how happy we are." And that made me feel so calmed, so assuaged, to think like, "Oh, it's normal to have second thoughts, and like, it doesn't mean I shouldn't go through with it. Look at my mom, look at how happy they are." I'd always kind of looked to their relationship as a model one.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  I thought, "Well, for sure, I should go through with this." And so, so I did, and then it was not happily ever after for me. Fairly quickly into the marriage, I was extremely dissatisfied, and I felt very ashamed of it because the reason why I felt so dissatisfied was because I didn't feel super attracted to him, but he was such a wonderful person and my best friend. And I just, you know, I always thought of that phone call back when my mom had said, "You know, that kind of physical, that wears off, and all that really matters is the mature

• 6:46Speaker 01

  love of really appreciating and knowing each other." But this dissatisfaction only grew, and grew, and grew, until five years later, five messy years later, I was divorced. It was a really, really hard, hard thing to go through, even when it is something that you know is the right thing for you. It's just completely heartbreaking for everyone. A few years later, I was in my bachelorette pad, drinking my coffee in the morning, and I opened my inbox, and I get an email from my brother. He says, "Les, look what's at the bottom of this email chain." So of course, I scroll right down. The email was between my parents, initially, just the two of them, a private communication.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  But they added my brother on because the topic changed to their finances, and my brother does their finances. So you can see where I'm going. This was like a classic boomer era, where you get added on to an email chain that you're not supposed to be added on to, or they forget what's at the beginning. So it was super clear, not at all ambiguous, that my parents had somewhat of an open marriage. When I read the email, my body immediately filled with anger and rage. My mind immediately was transported back to that phone call, that fateful phone call I had the month before my wedding many years ago, and I thought, "Wow." My mother told me part of the truth, but not the whole truth, and it was worse for

• 8:14Speaker 01

  her to have shared what she did, which was only part of the story, that they're happily married, than nothing at all, right? It would have been better for her to have shared nothing, because it was incredibly misleading, I felt. And I was, you know, this was this moment in my life where I was very impressionable, and I really sought to her for advice, and I felt that she withheld this really important thing that changed the course of my life. If she had only told me, then that's great, but I would have had the information at least because I knew that that's not what I wanted, that I would have potentially made a different choice. That's how I felt at the moment. I realized that even I, the person who studies the benefits of self-disclosure and who is

• 8:53Speaker 01

  literally writing a book about it, actually was holding back this thing from my mother that I knew, the nature of their marriage. She did not know that I knew this, right? So I saw this in the email. My brother and I had kept it secret. Maybe 10 years, we knew this, and we never told my mother. And then, as soon as I realized I was doing it, I thought, "Well, I can't put this book into the world and not confront this myself." But I knew that I had to, as an exercise, if I believed the science, I had to talk to her about it. So I found a way to do it. It was just my mom and I. I poured ourselves a solid scotch each, and I just started the convo.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  I said, "Do you, do you remember that phone call the month before I got married?" And she said, "Yes," and, you know, I'm getting goosebumps just for counting this. I often think about it, and I often wondered if I said the right thing. It was an hour and a half convo. We talked about that, we talked about our feelings, all of that, but then we moved past that and to this deeper level of understanding of each other, and that is probably the most meaningful conversation, certainly, that I've ever had with my mother, but possibly that I've ever had with anyone. And it really was proof in the pudding, all this research that I had read about, and some of which I'd done, about how revealing can be really therapeutic, the feeling of

• 10:18Speaker 01

  being known, and when you understand others, that increases intimacy, there's all these benefits. But it wasn't until I started doing it as my own guinea pig that I actually really internalized how powerful this stuff is. That experience has made me much more cognizant of how the default is so often silence, and to question that, to at least consider opening up, which is, I think, a fundamental error that we make.

• 10:52Katy Milkman?

  Hi, Lesley. Thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 10:56Katy Milkman?

  I think it's really brave that you just chose to share that story, Lesley. And it's certainly an example of you living the lessons from your work on the power of revealing. I would love to transition from talking about that experience to talking about your terrific research on disclosure. So you ran this really important and interesting set of experiments with Kate Baras and Mike Norton, examining when people choose to hide versus disclose information about themselves and the mistakes we make about disclosure. Could you describe what that work shows about people's willingness to disclose?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yes. So the first half of my career, I basically studied the errors that people make in sharing, how people overshare. And on social media, people share so much venting about their bosses, then they get fired. So there's all these examples of people screwing up. But then, over time, there were a few studies that really changed my mind, such that I've done a complete 180. And this is one of those studies. So in one experiment, we asked people which of two people they would rather date. And to help them make this decision, we said, OK, imagine you had interviewed each of these prospective dates, and you had asked them about their health history.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  And one of them was very forthcoming and said they had had some really serious communicable diseases. The other person just didn't answer your question, refused to talk about their health issues, or whether they even had had any, for that matter. And again and again, it surprised us, but people tend to prefer the reveal or the person who is upfront about even really kind of unsavory things about themselves relative to the person who abstains, who says, I'm not answering. It made me appreciate just how important revealing is, because it showed me that we are predisposed to like people who open up, even if the things that they say are like pretty bad. And we found this not just in dating, but in all kinds of other contexts, like job

• 12:59Speaker 01

  applications. You know, imagine there's a candidate who's applying, and one of the questions is, what's your worst grade you've ever gotten on an exam? And one of the candidates comes clean and says, yeah, I failed an exam before. And the other says, I'm not answering. Again, we prefer the person who just says the thing than someone who withholds. And that was really, really shocking at the time to me, to the privacy world. And what we since came to understand about it is that it's driven by this global inference about trustworthiness. So the person who opens up, we can trust. Put differently, the person who conceals, who doesn't share, cannot be trusted. Why? Because when you think about it, revealing sensitive information, opening up, is showing that you trust someone.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  So if I'm revealing to you, if I say something a little sensitive, I'm taking a social risk, and I'm implicitly saying, I trust you to not make a fool out of me, otherwise I wouldn't be sharing it, right? So by modeling that I trust you, it causes you to trust me back. And that mutual trust is like the spark of human relationships. And it's so important that when someone abstains from this trust-building activity of self-disclosure, we view them with contempt. So much so that we'd rather date someone higher than someone that says something really bad.

• 14:14Katy Milkman?

  I find it fascinating. But one of the things that I also can't help but wonder is the extent to which the job applicant who declines to tell you if they've ever performed poorly on an exam, do they have a sense of the hit that their trustworthiness takes when they fail to disclose even that unsavory information to others in your research? Are they self-aware? Or they think that they're optimizing by withholding?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Totally. That's the super important question, right? Is it an error? Is it a self-presentation error? When given the opportunity to share more, do we decline? Or do we accept even when it's something unsavory? And so we did studies where we asked people to suppose they were posed these questions. And your goal is to make a good impression, obviously. Sometimes we even incented them, like paid them more based on how other people rated them. And people, on average, make the wrong decision. They think that it's better to opt out of answering. So when you're put in this situation of either revealing something not so great about

• 15:21Speaker 01

  yourself, or in a very salient way abstaining, we tend to think it's better to abstain, to say, I'm not answering, than to say the negative thing, when in reality, we'd make a better impression if we just came clean. Now, of course, this doesn't mean that if you're asked a sensitive question, that you should always come clean with the most goriest of details. There's lots of ways of handling sensitive questions in job interviews and so on that don't entail really putting yourself out there in a minimizing way. But for example, like imagine in this paradigm, like I'm on a job application, and suppose I failed an exam, and I'm asked, like, what's the worst grade you've gotten? Forced response, or opt out of answering.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  So I wouldn't lie, I would say the thing. But I would also, if there was a text box, I would say, and the reason was because, you know, I was helping my sick cousin or whatever. So I would try to give more context to help explain in a truthful way. So basically, yeah, it's a self-presentation error. People do not anticipate that it's often better to say the thing than it is to conspicuously withhold. We just don't like hiders.

• 16:33Katy Milkman?

  I want to move away from the work you've done on how we judge potential romantic partners and job candidates who fail to disclose information, to the implications of disclosure for leaders who are open about their weaknesses. Could you talk a little bit about what you found in that context?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Yes. So we found that when leaders reveal some of their weaknesses, it causes employees to be more motivated to work for them, it causes their employees to trust them more, to view them as more real, as more authentic. And it doesn't seem to occur at the expense of perceived competence, within moderation. So what I mean by that is, for example, suppose you're a leader, and you say to your team something you're working on, or like, I sometimes get nervous public speaking, or I'm working on my organizational skills. Typically, when left to our own devices, when we're in leadership positions, the thought of revealing doesn't even cross our mind to share our weaknesses. But when we, by the powers vested in us as professors, when we force people to do

• 17:33Speaker 01

  it, it has these benefits that are not anticipated from the leader's perspective, or probably from the employee's perspective either, for that matter. It's not saying, I'm a complete pathological mess. You know, we've tested kind of the point at which, where does it tip into TMI, too much information in the sense of like undermining your competence? And it's further than you think, again and again. Like, you can say a little bit more than you think you should, and not be perceived as incompetent, and yet get all these benefits of having more motivated employees and colleagues and so on. And then it also jives with our colleague, Adam Grant, in a project led by Konstantin Kudifaris. They have a study where, it's one of my favorite papers, where they randomized leaders in

• 18:18Speaker 01

  companies to either say the usual thing when trying to get 360 feedback from their employees, like, I want honest input, you can trust me, I can take it, versus they randomized the leaders to reveal, to model openness, and say some of the things that they're working on in a metered way. And what they found, again, consistent with our work, is that when the leaders shared a little bit of something that they were working on, they got more honest feedback, more constructive, more useful feedback from their employees. So I don't even think it's a stretch to say that not only does it not undermine you, but it can actually make you more competent, because we all know, it's really hard as

• 19:00Speaker 01

  a leader to get honest feedback, and you really need that to get better. And you can't just say, oh, I can take it. You know, like, think of your, if I think of like my boss, or bosses I've worked with, and they say, oh, I can take it, that's like alarm warning bell that they really can't take it. But if they show they can take it by saying what they're working on, then that's compelling.

• 19:20Katy Milkman?

  Yeah, I really love these findings about the trustworthiness that it builds, the authenticity it builds, when we disclose more than we think maybe it's wise to disclose, that it has these unexpected benefits, and that we make a mistake.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 19:35Katy Milkman?

  I, of course, know of your other work that preceded this, that shows sometimes we can be preyed upon by bad actors who want us to reveal more than we should. Or, you know, even worse, use it to trick us into parting with our money and our passwords. And I'm curious if our tendency to under-disclose with other people at least means we're decent at avoiding over-disclosure when it's risky.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  So it's tricky, because there is such a thing as oversharing. It's alive and well. And I don't want people to put themselves out there, so to speak, and then have their identities stolen, or be sold products that they don't want, because some marketer has some info on them. To me, in my mind, a lot of these problems are in the realm of digital media. And we make all kinds of mistakes online, because it's such a weird context. Like, the norms that dictate sharing online are totally different than the norms offline. So back in the day, with my two fond collaborators, George Lowenstein and Alessandra Aquisti, what we found was that people share sensitive information about themselves.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  They reveal a lot precisely in the online context in which it is actually dangerous for them to do so. So what we did was, we asked people a bunch of really sensitive, personal questions, and we just varied the look and feel of the survey interface. And one looked pretty...

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Quote, "normal," professional, ordinary. The other looked ridiculous. We called it "How Bad Are You?" And it had like pixelated graphics and comic sans and like weird color combos. So we designed it to mimic unprofessional websites, which human computer interaction has shown that there's basically design factors of websites that are more dangerous versus ones that are more safe. And so we designed a website that was representative of these dangerous websites, called "How Bad Are You?" And people revealed more, not less. In fact, they revealed about twice as more sensitive personal information, along with a lot of times their .edu email address. So, super identifiable.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  And so that was an example, and still is, of people making the wrong choice. And I think in the online world, we're quite susceptible to being kind of influenced by these contextual cues that we think indicate safety. They feel psychologically safe. It feels safe, revealing on a site that looks fun, but it's actually dangerous. And it's really hard, for lots of reasons, including very sophisticated entities that know the tricks of how to get us to reveal more. Not for our interests, but for theirs.

• 22:16Katy Milkman?

  A big theme of all of your work seems to be that people are really poorly calibrated to understanding when disclosure will be helpful versus hurtful. And I realize, you just pointed out, one of the reasons, which is, you know, bad actors that are sophisticated can make it hard for us to be well-calibrated. But do you have a sense of what else is generally driving this overall miscalibration about when to share and when to hold back?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, there's lots of reasons, I'm sure. To me, a really fundamental one is omission bias, right? Which is that we really beat ourselves up for sins of omission, for regrettable actions we took. We overpenalize ourselves for these things, and we underblame ourselves for sins of omission, for good things we should have done, but we did not do. So our minds really coding omissions, missed opportunities, and the downsides of missed opportunities is really hard for us cognitively, and we massively underweight them. The same is true when we think about what to reveal and what not to reveal. We've shown this in study after study. We're working on a paper where we ask people to think of a disclosure dilemma.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Think of something that's on your mind, like, do you tell your crush you're into them? Do you tell your boss that you are overstretched? Whatever it is, these are real dilemmas. There's real upside, real downside. And we ask people to think them through, and people almost never spontaneously come up with the risks of not saying anything. And they immediately think of the risks of saying the thing, right? So the costs and benefits associated with inaction of not saying the thing, we don't think about them. And then the costs associated with the action of saying the thing, that's super on top of our mind, and that's valid, but it's not the only thing to consider.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  We really want to think about not just the risks of revealing, but also the risks of not revealing. I think also that present bias factors in too, because there's a pattern whereby the costs of revealing, the sins of omission, the negative feedback you get when you say something a little edgy, is immediate and super viscerally felt. By contrast, the benefits of a TMI moment, the benefits of those are often delayed and not as salient. And as I was writing the book, I was realizing this about myself. And so in the book, I reveal lots of my TMI moments. I realized that like, these times when I said embarrassing things and people were like,

• 24:53Speaker 01

  like you could see in their faces that it was a visceral, negative reaction. It was TMI. I beat myself up for them. But then also, those people that cringe, they also really admired me and respected me because they became my closest mentors. Even in our most outrageous TMI moments, there was often redemption. It's just that the pattern is that we see the badness of it, we get immediate visceral negative feedback, and we overweight that relative to the benefits, which are down the road and hard to tie directly to an episode. So all those things make learning really hard.

• 25:25Katy Milkman?

  What would your advice be for our listeners on how they can make better choices about when to disclose more and when to disclose less? In other words, how can they overcome this kind of omission bias in the disclosure space?

• 25:38Speaker 01

  So, number one is awareness. Do the tally, become aware of the opportunities, and then think about sharing more. Doesn't mean you have to share all of the things, just think about it more. So what I do, because I'm a nerd, I have them like around my house, these tally sheets. I call them disclosure audits. Essentially, I started keeping track of the things that I didn't say. And that made me realize how many more opportunities there are to share than you actually ordinarily think. Step two is, take a disclosure decision that you're grappling with and think it through. They could be big, like, do I tell my boss I have ADHD? Or a smaller one, like, do I tell my husband that I had a really bad day? The thing you're going to naturally do is think about the risks of revealing.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Your mind is going to go to those immediately. Great, but don't stop there. You want to then think of, okay, well, what are the risks of not saying the thing? And what are the benefits of revealing? And what are the benefits of not saying the thing? And you'll find that if you expand your aperture like that, you may make different decisions. And then I think the third is really practice. And what I have found is that to get to feel the benefits of revealing, which are immense, you know, there are relationship benefits, you can even become more influential at work, who knew, by sharing some of your weaknesses, you have to practice, you have to do it. And what I advise is to be a little bit more open a lot of the time. It's not like dumping something inappropriate on someone, but it's like, for example, praising them.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Say you love the brooch they're wearing, say it. We normally hold back. But I think praise is a really low-hanging fruit way to practice, because it's not too risky. People appreciate it, and it actually makes you feel good to give praise as well. So try it. Try it a little bit more. Do it. Force yourself to do it.

• 27:25Katy Milkman?

  I love that. That's an amazing lesson, and I think that's an amazing place to wrap. I hope our listeners will make sure that they try to find the line, not when they're in an online space and being asked by a potentially nefarious actor to disclose, but when they're in a personal relationship or with a coworker who they're trying to build trust and rapport and an authentic relationship with, make sure that they find their way to a little uncomfortable a little more often. I love this work, and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me about it, Leslie. Thank you so much.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Katie. It's a joy to get to talk to you.

• 28:07Katy Milkman?

  Leslie John is a professor of negotiations, organizations, and markets at Harvard Business School. And she's the author of the excellent book, Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing. You can find links to her research and book in the show notes and at schwab.com/choyseology. Today, we talked about how hard it is to calibrate when to share and when to hold back. And one place where that judgment really matters is online. If you're interested in that side of the equation, there's an episode of Financial Decoder called "What Steps Can You Take to Avoid Cyber Fraud?" It explores why we sometimes disclose sensitive information in digital environments and offers

• 28:52Katy Milkman?

  simple steps that can help you slow down and make safer decisions. You can listen by visiting schwab.com/financialdecoder or in your favorite podcast app. Leslie's research reveals something counterintuitive. Our widespread fear of oversharing is often less costly than the opposite error, undersharing. We default to withholding because the risks of saying something feel vivid and immediate. While the costs of staying quiet, the trust never built, or the relationship that stays surface level, they're invisible until much later, if we notice them at all.

• 29:35Katy Milkman?

  The good news is that awareness is the first fix. Whether it's a vulnerable moment with a friend, or a conversation with your doctor or financial advisor about the full picture of what you're worried about, the question worth asking isn't just, "What could go wrong if I share this?" It's also, "What am I giving up by staying quiet?" Leslie's research shows that more often than you'd expect, the answer to that second question is what should guide you.

• 30:16Katy Milkman?

  That's all for this episode of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. For more insights on how to improve your decisions and reach your goals, grab a copy of my book, How to Change, or join our community over at Milkman Delivers on Substack. If you got value out of today's episode, we'd be so grateful if you could drop us a quick review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify. It helps the show grow and connects us with new listeners. I'm Dr. Katie Milkman. Talk to you soon. For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/choyseology.