Afford Anything - The Psychology of Secrets, with Dr. Michael Slepian

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

#386: We all have our secrets. We keep some secrets from bosses, colleagues and clients, like the fact that we hope to retire early, change careers, or start a business. We keep other secrets from friends and family, like our income, net worth, spending habits and investing mistakes. Research from around the world shows that we tend to keep the same types of secrets – around 38 common varieties, including secrets about finances, ambitions, beliefs, habits, unpopular opinions, mental health, trauma, addiction, and drug use. These 38 common types of secrets fall into three categories: (1) moral secrets, which we fear will either cast judgment on us or will cause harm to another; (2) relational secrets, which we fear will harm our relationships; and (3) goal and ambition secrets, related to career, business and finances. In today’s episode, Columbia University professor Dr. Michael Slepian discusses the secret life of secrets. Dr. Slepian is the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Associate Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. Prior to that, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University. His research focuses on the social costs of secrecy. What impact do secrets have on our lives and health? What are the hidden costs of keeping quiet? Are there certain things that are better left unsaid? What should we share, with whom, and when … especially when there are career, social and financial repercussions to revealing information? Dr. Slepian joins us today to share his insight. Enjoy! For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode386 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to any limited resource that you need to manage, like your time, your focus, your energy, your attention. Saying yes to something implicitly means turning away other options. We have limited cognition, limited resources, and we can only give so much

of our money, our time, our effort. So what do we want to dedicate that towards? What truly matters? And once we figure out what matters, how do we make decisions that align with that? Answering those two questions is a lifetime practice. And that's what this podcast is here to explore from all angles and to facilitate.

My name is Paula Pan. I am the host of the Afford Anything podcast. And today we're going to discuss the psychology of secrets. Certainly, many people keep financial secrets. According to a 2017 survey done by TD Bank, approximately 27% of respondents admitted to keeping a financial secret from their spouse or partner. Examples of this include having a secret bank account or spending a large sum of money and then keeping that expense hidden. Beyond financial secrets, people often have secrets at work, at school. Maybe you secretly hope to retire early, or you're looking for

another job. But how do these secrets impact our health, our well-being, our mental states, and how can we manage these secrets, both internally and externally? With whom should we share this information and when and why? To shed light on these questions, Columbia University Professor Dr. Michael Slepian joins us today. Michael Slepian teaches in the management division of Columbia University Business School, where he is the Sanford C. Bernstein and Co. Associate Professor of Leadership and Ethics.

He received the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science, and he is known as a leading expert in the Psychology of Secrets. He was educated at Stanford and Tufts, and he recently published his first book, The Secret Life of Secrets. Before we jump into today's episode, a couple quick announcements. Number one, we have a free guide to understanding the inflation and potential for a recession

that's happening right now. You can download that guide for free at afford anything.com slash inflation guide. That's afford anything.com slash inflation guide. Number two, we have a course on rental property investing. It's called Your First Rental Property. this year, we are only offering it once. In previous years, we have offered this course twice a year. We've done a spring semester and a fall semester.

But this year, we're doing something different. We are only opening our doors for enrollment once and only once. And those doors open next week. So if you want a chance to learn from an incredibly robust course about how to invest in rental properties, go to afford anything.com slash VIP list. That's afford anything.com slash VIP list. That will put you on our email list. Well, you will get a ton of information,

not just about the course, but about real estate investing in general. This is your only chance this year. Affordanything.com slash VIP list. And if you want to read online more about the course, you can read a bunch at afford anything.com slash enroll. All right, with those announcements out of the way, here's our guest, Columbia University professor Dr. Michael Slepian, discussing the psychology of secrets. Hi, Michael.

Hey, thanks for having me. It's great to talk to you. Michael, this is a podcast about how to make smarter decisions about allocating limited resources, whether that limited resource is money, time, energy, attention. In that context, how does the topic of secrets or secrecy apply? I think it was the very last item in your list attention. We can only attend to one thing at a time. You know, sometimes that's the work you're trying to do. And then your mind wanders away and you have to pull it back. It turns out that the way our secrets hurt us is very much like this. And sort of the old story, the wrong story about secrecy is that it hurts our health and well-being because it's difficult to hide things in conversation and that's stressful. but we now know that's actually not the full story or not even how it actually goes.

In fact, the most common experience people have with a secret is simply having their mind return to that secret when there's no need to conceal it. And so often the time, what it means to have a secret is a secret is on your mind. And it turns out that that tends to be a problem when we're alone with something. And so our mind will often go to unhelpful places that are distracting, that take away from other tasks at hand. And that rumination pulls us off of our best game.

Yeah. I want to dive more into that, but before we do, I'd also like to ask specifically how secrecy shows up in the context of money, since money is often, it's a taboo topic and it's a topic that people intentionally withhold certain information. And there's also other information that is not volunteered, but also not intentionally withheld. Money is the type of topic in which there are elements of our financial lives that fall into both categories.

Can you talk about that for a while? Right. So what makes something a secret as opposed to other things about yourself that other people don't know is you specifically intend to hold the information back? And what's so interesting about money is it plays both games. Like there are things about finances and financial decisions that we intentionally withholds. from other people that we don't want other people to learn about. And then there's a bunch of other stuff around money that it's not that we are trying to keep it a secret.

It's just we don't talk about it. People tend to not talk about what their paycheck looks like because it might not be polite or whatever it is. And so privacy is essentially a reflection of how much closeness you need with someone to reveal something like a detail about your finances, whereas keeping a secret as you're specifically intending to hold information back from one or more people. and that's why it's a secret. That's why other people don't know about it. You're intentionally holding it back. So the distinction between secrecy and privacy is that privacy, you're just

not volunteering it, whereas secrecy has intent. Exactly. In that vein, what is a secret? How would one define the word secret? Yes, it's the information which you intentionally hold back. And it's an intention and not an action? Secrecy is an intention, not an action. And the reason for that, the reason we can't define a secret by the actions we take to keep a secret is some secrets we don't need to hold back in conversation, but that doesn't mean they're not secret. You know, imagine something from your childhood that is something you intentionally withhold from other people. That just never comes up in conversation. Even if you don't have to conceal a secret or hide it in a conversation, it doesn't mean you don't have that secret. Going back to the first thing you said, you talked about how secrecy can draw.

on our attention because oftentimes when we keep something secret, we ruminate on it. And that rumination carries an attention cost or carries a cognitive cost. But if something took place a long time ago, go to something from your childhood that never comes up in conversation example, wouldn't that be buried so far back that it doesn't come up in conscious thought? You don't ruminate about it. And if that's the case, then does it have a cognitive cost? Is it damaging to our mental health? So a secret like this that is from a long time ago that's not really relevant to your today. Absolutely. It is a secret that is much less likely to return to mind. And therefore, it's a secret that's less burdensome. It doesn't mean you won't be reminded of the secret ever.

And so something could bring that secret back to the forefront of your mind and could bring that burden back. And then it might leave again when it's no longer relevant. The secrets that are relevant to our daily lives, though. Those are the secrets we think about again and again, and that's where the problem tends to be. Is there any correlation between people who have either a large volume of secrets or a large, of course, there's a distinction between the number of secrets you hold versus the weight, the severity of those secrets, right? The weight that they have on you. Is there a correlation between people who have either a high volume of secrets or a high severity of secrets and other negative life consequences, such as worse performance at work,

lower incomes, any type of quantifiable life circumstance. Yeah. I can tell you, and it's true, that people who have more secrets have lower health and well-being, but what's not very useful about knowing that correlation is it doesn't get at why. And so there's two issues at hand here. in one case, if you have a habit for secrecy, you're going to have a lot of secrets. That is if your default way of dealing with something difficult or something that you're embarrassed by is to just make sure nobody ever finds out, the kind of person who has that strategy tends to not actually address the problem.

Keeping something entirely to yourself may help that no one learns it, but you're preventing yourself from making any progress on it. And so someone whose default way of dealing with problems is to not deal with them, is to just try to bury them. They don't tend to be healthy, as you might imagine. And that's because they have poor coping strategies and they're not confronting problems. They're letting them pile up. But then there's another way to have multiple secrets. And that's to get yourself involved in situations that people more often keep secret, you know, whether that involves drugs or sex or, you know, things. For example, you can't have a secret that you don't keep a secret you don't have.

So, for example, if you've never had a drug experience, you can't have a secret about a drug experience, right? And so people who are really open to new experiences tend to find themselves in the kinds of situations people more often keep secret. That kind of way of finding yourself into secrets is not nearly as problematic as the sort of default way of dealing with problems is to just keep them secret. And so in the former example, circumstance might lead to a greater number of secrets, whereas in the latter example, your internal response is what leads to that greater volume of secrets. Right. Your research found that there are three dimensions of secrecy. Can you discuss these three dimensions? Yes. So in my research, we. have this list of common secrets that people keep 38 items long. And that list really does a good

job of comprehensively covering the kinds of things people tend to keep secret. We know this because when we show people this list, 97% of people say they have at least one secret from the list. The average person says they have 13 secrets from the list. And when we ask open-ended, what is the secret you're keeping? 92% of the time, what the person says fits one of the items on the list. So it really covers what people keep secret very well. What's nice about that is I can give people that list and per each secret that they have from the list and they'll have multiple, we can ask these follow-up questions. So we can look at sort of across a person's whole set of secrets, which ones are the ones

that are harmful? And this is moving us far beyond the question of secrets, are they good or bad, is keeping more secrets worse? Instead, we're asking, among the secrets you have, which ones are more harmful to your health and well-being and why? if you're interested in the content of the secret, knowing that there's 38 kinds of categories of secrets is a little too many. And so what psychologists do when content is so diverse and that nature is they try to reduce that complexity down to the sort of primary ways in which the secrets are differing from each other.

And so using this thing that's called multidimensional scaling, what you can do essentially is have participants indicate how similar each common secret is to other secrets, the other secrets on the list, and we can look at how they clumped together, essentially, and which ones are far apart. Through an iterative process of doing that, you can start to understand which are the primary ways in which people are seeing secrets as being similar to each other

or different from another. It turns out there's three. And so three ways in which people can think about their secrets as compared to their other secrets, or three ways by which people think about their secrets, are whether the secret is immoral, whether they believe the secret is about something that's wrong or is causing harm. The second one is the extent to which a secret is relational, the extent to which a secret is related to our relationships and social connections. And the third one is the one that's, is the dimension related to you, how much the secret involves our goals and aspirations, which often comes, means our professions as well.

What would be an example of a secret related to goals, aspirations, professions? performing poorly at work, cheating at work or school, discontent with your profession, finances shows up really high on this dimension. And some of these would also have a moral overlay as well, yes? Yes, and so the dimensions are independent, but you can be high or low on all of them. So, for example, cheating at work is a secret people would consider immoral and highly goal-oriented. Could there be moral secret? highly moral or at least not immoral secrets related to goals, ambition workplace?

Yeah, and a secret ambition is a good example. It turns out that it's very common to keep ambitions secret. Maybe people are a little embarrassed about their ambitions. Maybe they worry about telling people about ambitions that they'll never be able to realize. But for whatever reason, ambitions is the kind of thing that people tend to keep secret. and those are very much related to our goals and aspirations, but most people don't consider it immoral to have a secret ambition. When it comes to money, people often feel shame, and even if their financial decisions have

hurt no one other than themselves, they often still feel as though that is a moral failing. So even if it is, I guess, not relational, it still feels moral. Do you have any insight as to why? Finance in particular seems to be the type of topic that people often moralize even when that moralization is unwarranted. I think part of the problem here, because it's the kind of thing that we tend to not talk about or consider that it's not even polite to talk about, we're not really well practiced on having these conversations, which means we're not really well practiced in thinking about these situations. we just haven't had as many conversations that would sort of tamp down some of those negative reflexes. Now, you mentioned that oftentimes people who have either many secrets or weighty secrets tend to ruminate about this.

And one of the observations that you make in your book is that when we are ruminating and our only way of processing through an issue is by thinking about it, we often lead ourselves astray and therefore do a worse job. Can you elaborate on that idea? Yeah, and this picks up on what we were just talking about. It's really hard to find all the answers on your own, or you can be sure you're not going to find all the answers on your own because you just have a single perspective and it's going to have its biases and it's going to have its flaws. And it's going to lead you down one particular way of thinking about an issue. And it's not going to be the most healthy way. It just, That comes from conversation with others.

And so when you choose to be alone with something, you're more likely to find these really unhelpful ways of thinking about it that other people can really correct and make you think differently about it. Really hard to do on your own. In addition to the three dimensions of secrets that you found in your research, the dimension of morality, the dimension of relationships, and the dimension of goals, professions, aspirations. right? In addition to those three dimensions, you've also found three ways in which secrets can hurt a person, shame, isolation, and lack of insight. Can you discuss the three dimensions of harm? Because our secrets are related to lower well-being, on average, it means there's three ways in which a secret can hurt us. And the more we consider a secret to be immoral, the more that secret tends to evoke shame. The less we consider a secret related to our relationships and social connections. the more it feels isolating to keep.

And the less of a secret feels goal-oriented and therefore is based not in logic or reason, but in feeling and emotion, the less insight we feel we have into those secrets. And so that's why our secrets will hurt us in one of these three primary ways, shame, isolation, or uncertainty. I'd like to dig into each of those a little bit more. Let's start with shame. One thing that you described was the ice-cold water bucket. challenge. Can you describe that? Yeah, so what's happening here is there was this study conducted

by Brock Bastion in Australia and Melbourne. Maybe who was at Queensland at the time? And he was interested in this idea, a very old idea, that people will engage in self-punishment as a way to sort of pay off their moral debt as a way to answer to their sentence, if you will. And of course, you can look back in history and see people physically hurting themselves for this reason, religious reasons and so on. And he had people come into the lab and recall, in one condition, one group of participants recalled something, a time when they socially excluded someone. You know, you can usually dredge up an example of that, and it doesn't feel good to be reminded of that. And he asked another group of participants to think about something mundane

instead. Then they had participants as part of a totally unrelated study. They walked to the other side of lab and said, we're doing this thing where we're interested in perception and we're going to ask you to pick up these small things in this tank of water and move it to the other side. Just so you know, it's completely ice cold. It will be painful, but without any long-lasting consequences. It'll just be painful in the moment and there's no harm beyond that. And so it turned out that when participants had just reminded themselves of something they felt guilty about, they kept their hands in the ice cold water for longer. And if you've ever kept your hand in ice cold water, you know it eventually starts really hurting. They kept it in there for longer. And the longer they kept their hands

in the ice water, the better they felt afterward about the social exclusion of this person about this guilty act. And so it seems just experience. experiencing this unpleasantness, this self-enforced punishment made people feel like they were sort of doing their time and sort of making up for this wrongdoing. In terms of how something like that would play out in our daily lives in the real world, could it be the case? Or is there any evidence or research to back the idea that if we feel a sense of shame around some, events that have happened in our past, whether it's something we've done or something that was done to us. Could it be the case that we self-sabotage in order to, at a subconscious level, make things right in the world? Particularly in the world of money and investing, so often we are our own

worst enemy. We know what we should do. We know how to not get into credit card debt or how to not blow up our retirement accounts, but time after time, despite the fact that we know better, we act in self-sabotaging ways. So that's exactly right. Once I learned about this study, I then spoke to Brock, the one who ran the original study, and we talked about sort of essentially combining our research interests, you know, this one where he's interested in self-punishment and I'm interested in secrecy. And we thought about, you know, what does it mean to have a secret that you feel guilty about,

but you've not revealed it. You've not confessed this. You know, how could you hold yourself accountable for something you feel wrong about if you're not going to reveal the secret? What else could you do? And, you know, what you're calling self-sabotage or what we call self-punishment? The idea was that if people are reminded of something they felt guilty about but you have not confessed, the only way to sort of show that you're correcting the scales of justice you're paying off your moral debt is to inflict some kind of punishment on yourself. And so we had people think about secrets they felt guilty about and had either confessed to their partner or continue to keep secret from their partner. And when participants thought about things that they continue to keep secret from their

partner, they were more interested in self-punishing behaviors. That includes denying themselves of nice things, whether it's going out to dinner with friends or having their partner buy them a nice gift. And they were also interested in engaging in somewhat painful activities, you know, doing something physically strenuous, like cleaning the house and even were interested in, in present of this option and engaging in sort of this idea of temporary risk pain in the same way in the original series or temporary temperature pain. And so people were interested in these sort of self-punishing behaviors. And with this idea that, you know, they owe someone something. And if you're not going to reveal it to that person, you have to take the punishment into your own hands.

And I notice in the response that you just gave you, you talked specifically about the participant revealing a secret to their partner. So was this research only involving couples in which the secret involved specifically the partner? So most of my research is not like that. We're talking about secrets from anybody and everybody and specific people, whoever those people are. sometimes though when we're running a study like this when we want to sort of constrain the universe of what people are thinking about you know when you think about the current the things you are currently keeping secret that you felt guilty about that could be a lot of different things and we we wanted to specifically think of like they're all kind of thinking about the same person that they're keeping the secret from otherwise we can't ask them the sort of same questions essentially and say do I think think this only applies a romantic relationships. I think it applies more broadly, but I do think it makes intuitive sense that this is sort of where you'd see most of the action and having something you feel guilty about, but having confessed and trying to show yourself

that you're paying your dues. Right. So the lesson presumably could apply to anybody. Yeah. If that is the case, so if there are people who are listening to this podcast episode right now who are thinking, wow, you know, I notice all of these self-sabotaging, or self-punishing behaviors in my own life. I see all of the ways in which I get in my own way, and that probably stems from some internalized sense of shame, sense of guilt, sense of feelings of unworthiness. Are there any specific things that a person can do

to start to climb out of that, to get to get over the internalized subconscious self-punishment that they're inflicting on themselves? Yes, and it goes back to something you said earlier. We're our own worst critics. It's really hard to get out of that kind of line of thinking without introducing another voice into the conversation. And so, you know, maybe there's something you feel guilty about that you're keeping secret from your partner or anybody else. You don't have to tell that person, you don't have to talk about this thing with that person.

But if you talk about it with a third party, it's going to disrupt these negative patterns of, thinking that are really, really hard to get out of once you're in them. And if you're in them, then you're caught in this negative thinking loop that you're going to be stuck in if you can't find a way out. And it's really hard to find that on your own because you just have your one perspective. You just have your one way of thinking about it. But other people will have different ways of thinking about it that people often find helpful. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient, not just fast and efficient. They're also powered by the latest in payments technology, built to

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To zoom out, we got to this portion of the conversation by discussing the three ways in which secrets can harm a person. And those three ways are shame, isolation, and lack of insight. At this point, we've discussed shame. Let's talk about isolation. Isolation, can you remind us again of how secrecy, and I guess even as I ask the question, the answer almost sounds intuitively obvious, how is it that secrecy can feel isolating? Yep. So when we keep a secret, when we choose to be alone with something, naturally that can feel isolating. There's a whole class of secrets that feel less isolating, though. And those are the secrets that involve another person. And so for the secrets that are not related to our social connections, that are not related to our relationships that feel deeply solitary and individual, those are the secrets feel especially isolated with. So secrets in general are isolating and that sort of the volume on that isolation that's turned up when there's fewer people involved, when you're more alone with it, so to speak. Can you give an example of a type of secret that would reflect lack of insight? So the secrets that we feel we have less insight into are these secrets that are sort of not about goals and aspirations. You know, the things that are highly related to goals and aspirations are, you know, things around work, finances and, you know, things are things about

getting ahead in life. Whereas on the other side of the spectrum, we had to be a lot of the spectrum, these more deeply emotional topics. So for example, you know, that are not based in reason or logic. And a good example of this, I think, is sexual orientation. You know, we don't know where preferences come from and they're not based in logic or anything of the sort. We just know how we feel. But when there isn't sort of logic defining that, we can feel like we don't have good insight into these things that we're keeping secret in the book I talk about. It's a movie. Love Simon. It's about this teenager who's gay, but he hasn't come out to anyone yet. And he knows his close friends would immediately accept him on learning this. He knows his family would be totally supportive if he were to reveal this. But he thinks to himself, well, why am I still keeping this a secret? And there's this uncertainty of like, why am I keeping this a secret? What is making me hold it back? He briefly wonders, like, is this just a phase he's going through? And would it be better to not tell anyone? for that reason. So when we have these secrets that are just like based in feeling, it's really

hard to know, what do I do with this and how did I get here? So in, and I haven't seen the movie, but in the movie, it sounds as though based on your description of it, he's keeping it secret in part because he's still trying to figure it out himself. Exactly. And of course, we know that the best way to figure out something is to talk about it with other people. Of course, easier said than done. Right. Right. Would that be an example of the type of secret that has the characteristics of lack of insight as well as isolation, the previous dimension that we talked about? A secret can hurt you on multiple of these dimensions. Lucky for us, it's very rare that you're hurt on all three dimensions.

And so understanding, you know, where the hurt is helps you identify where the hurt is and where that might be a path forward. How does this conversation apply when a person has certain secrets that they want to keep for the sake of preserving group harmony or preserving group dynamics? So for example, if we'll go back to the world of money, let's say that someone will use this community as an example. The majority of people who are listening to this podcast are super pro index funds. most people who are listening to this are really into passively managed index funds as an investment strategy. Let's say that there's someone listening who is a day trader, you know, and they just, they love day trading. They love, you know, they have an investment philosophy that's completely, I'll go so far as to use the phrase antithetical to the ethos of the broader

afford anything community. I could imagine a case in which at Amita, of people in this community, that day trader might stay quiet for the sake of not revealing that they have a perspective that would, if revealed, cause some level of social ostracision. And that example is very specific to afford anything listeners, but of course you can see how that same type of example would play out when people are discussing politics at the Thanksgiving dinner table. or when people are discussing controversial topics like drug use with their friends, how do these concepts apply in those arenas? So I immediately thought of the politics example, and we've done research on this back in 2016. If you can remember what life was like back then,

before the election results came in, we were asking people about whether they were keeping their very, vote secret. At the time, we thought those participants were going to be on one side of the political spectrum. They were on the other. And a lot of folks kept their vote secret because they wanted to maintain group harmony, like you mentioned. And so in some ways, we know that in those same studies, we know that if that's your reason, people find a secret as less burdensome. If you feel like you're doing this for the good of the group or for the good of another person, that does reduce the burden of secrecy. The question, though, is, but should you be having those conversations?

Should you be talking with the other people about the meetup and see where that conversation goes? Should you tell your spouse who you voted for? And I think the answer is yes. I think that if secrecy is preventing us from having the kinds of conversations we need to be having, the kinds of conversations that can change minds and hearts, we have to have those conversations and avoiding them. maybe makes the moment smoother, but it's not going to help in the long term. On one hand, you don't want to be so conflict avoidant that you end up presenting an unduly false sense of self. On the other hand, you also don't want to be aggressively confrontational.

Where is that fine line? Particularly when it's a context in which you simply stating your opinion might be perceived. perceived as baiting others? It's a great question. I think if I had the answer, we could solve all Thanksgiving problems at once. I don't know where when the line gets crossed. I mean, I think intention matters. And I think if you're trying to be a provocateur, that's going to have that result. But if you're trying to have a difficult conversation, and if you acknowledge, I know this is difficult to talk about and you mean it, I think that will make it possible.

to have a conversation get started and not sort of immediately set off alarm balance. In this conversation that we're having about secrets, is there a distinction between the type of secrets that a person is keeping or intends to keep temporarily but eventually reveal versus the type of secrets that a person plans to keep forever? And for the purpose of this question, I'm referring specifically to negative secrets. So I'm not talking about positive secrets like I'm throwing you a surprise birthday party or, you know, a happy pregnancy announcement. You know, talking specifically about negative or, you know, shameful secrets. This is sort of, again, we're like at the forefront of what we know here on this kind of topic.

And so you can imagine situations where if your plan is to keep this thing a secret for all of time, that might not be so difficult if it's not the kind of thing that comes up in conversation. But if it is the kind of thing that comes up in conversation, that's going to be a really hard secret to keep for the rest of time. I do think having a clear expiration date for even negative secrets takes away some of that threat and kind of takes away some of that burden. We know well, like outside of the context of secrecy, when you spend effort on something that seems undesirable or that seems to take you nowhere, that effort is felt as fatiguing. but if you're pushing effort on something and you're making progress and you see the end in sight, that could even be energizing. Imagine you're working on some project and you're getting so close to the end.

That can feel quite good. And so we haven't shown it yet. Our idea here on this topic is that for the secrets that you believe to be temporary, that they should be secrets you feel that you have greater control over, and that should reduce some of their burden. This is an idea based off what we know about positive secrets, which you rightfully pointed out often do have these expiration dates. We do often feel more in control of our positive secrets,

partly because they are positive and we feel more in control of positive things than negative things in life, but also because often of that expiration date. And so I think knowing that it's temporary will make you feel in control and that will have these positive effects that will probably trickle out. And so as I'm thinking about how this applies to people's daily lives, something like a financial secret, right? Or maybe there's someone who's listening who has credit card debt, but they've never confessed that to then and look at my choice of my choice of the word confess as though there's something to be shameful about it, right? Like, which there isn't. But like, let's say that a person has credit card debt, but they have never told that to their siblings. You know, it's not the type of secret that they want to unnecessarily hold for. forever, but it's not something they're really enthusiastic about proclaiming tonight. So in terms of how they can emotionally deal with that, it sounds as though, from what I'm hearing you say,

choosing a date, a milestone, making a plan around when they will talk about it is one way that they can regain a sense of control. That sounds exactly right to me. You know, I'm also imagining a situation where you're in a new relationship and new relationships are so interesting because immediately all these things you haven't thought about in a while are kind of like new secrets again because you're like, oh, I guess I have to tell this person this thing and this thing and this thing, but not on the first date, right? And so you're like, okay, as you mentioned, like once it gets more serious, I can start revealing these things. And I think when that happens, everything's good and running smoothly. But we can imagine other situations where you're like, I'm going to reveal this

thing. And then a year passes and then another year passes and then another year passes. And then another year passes. and you still haven't revealed it. And now it's awkward how long you've waited. Because now you'll have to say, like, oh, I've been keeping this thing a secret from you for years. And I know all too easily from my personal life and from my research that it's really easy for those years to just keep piling on making the revelation even harder. And I think so you're absolutely right.

Trying to commit to a point at which, here's the point at which I reveal this secret would help avoid that. because there's a point where it gets really difficult because time has stacked. From your personal life, you have an incredible story about that, something that you discovered. You were in your mid-20s, I believe. Yep. 26, am I right in saying that? That sounds pretty right.

Can you share with us what you discovered one night when you were 26 years old? So on this fateful night, it was the night after this very long day of job interview that I had where I was interviewing at Columbia, And I spent the whole day talking about my research on secrecy, which I had only been doing for a year or two of this research at the time, it was very new. The day goes pretty well. It's pretty exhausting as those days tend to be. And we go out for dinner afterwards, and then we go out for drinks after the dinner. And now it's like midnight, and I'm getting a call for my dad. I'm like, that's so weird.

He never calls me, especially at midnight. And then he called us second time. And so at this point, I knew whatever he wanted to talk about was something. urgent. And so I went back to my hotel room and I called him. I was like, what's going on? And he said, Michael, I have something to tell you. I am not biologically able to have children. He was telling me that he's not my biological father and that, you know, this secret has been kept for me for my whole adult life and that my younger brother, who I'm very close with, but born five years, years later, born by a different donor, is in fact my half-brother. And as you can imagine,

that's very surprising to hear that kind of thing. And, you know, the first thing I thought, I had a pretty calm response to it. The first thing I thought to myself was like, well, my best friends, who I feel so close to, I don't have any genetics in common with them. So, you know, what does this matter? In some ways, it doesn't. And it made me think about his parents, my grandparents, who I was also very close to you and how those relationships, it even made them deeper or more meaningful. They weren't just based in, like, sharing genes or anything of this sort. The first question I had, though, was, well, why are you telling me about this?

Why are you telling me now? But also, who else knew? And it turned out my entire family, everyone apart from me and my brother, had known this secret and they planned to tell us never. And how did you? Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, not that phone call with my dad, but a different one. He, you know, this is what we're talking about. He was saying, you know, well, when you kids were younger, we thought, well, of course, we're not going to tell you when you're younger. There's an age at which you're too young to understand. Then there's a point when we were old enough to understand. And then it was a year after that and a year after that. And

my dad said like, whoops, you kids became adults and we never told you. And what was so interesting about learning about what it was like to keep that kind of secret is it sounded like they were like reading one of my research papers. They're like, well, it was never hard to hide in conversation. It's not like we go around asking each other whether we're genetically related. And so like that question doesn't come up in conversation. But even if it was a secret that was easy to keep in conversation, it didn't mean it was a secret that was easy to live with. And they told me sometimes that secret would come back and they'd get reminded of it.

And that would make it more difficult to have. And then as we got even older, there was a point at which my mom started considering maybe it's time to tell them. And she started considering it, but she didn't. So what had happened was that the reason why I was getting that call at midnight is that my brother learned the secret the day. before or two days before. And everyone had the good sense of not telling me until after that interview was over. And the way my brother had learned it was that he was on the phone with my mom. She was describing, just like just chatting, just catching up.

And she mentioned that she was an argument with or she got in an argument with her father, our grandfather. And my brother was like, what? You two don't ever fight. That's so weird. What were you fighting about? And she was like, oh, I can't tell you. And I was like, what?

It was like, oh, it's a secret. It's a secret I promised I would never tell you. That's a good way to make that secret eventually get out. Because, of course, my brother was like, you have to tell me now. And he eventually found out. And how did you feel when you heard the news? I took it a lot better than my brother did. You know, I don't know if that was just like personality or whether that was because I'm five years older and, you know, he was just younger at the time.

Not at first, but eventually. I became more interested in learning about what it was like to have that kind of secret. And I had asked my mother, when did you first start considering to reveal the secret? You know, she mentioned as the years went on, she became interested in revealing the secret. She had an argument about this, about whether to reveal the secret with her father. And I was really surprised what she said when I asked her, what led you. you to start considering revealing the secret. And she asked me, when did your first paper on secrecy come out?

It was my own research that had started to change her mind. Do you think that you subconsciously sensed that your parents were keeping a secret from you? Could that have been in any way? Never. It's just not the kind of thing. Maybe if one of us had like blue eyes and they all had brown eyes or something, but there was no clues like that or anything of this sort. Yeah.

Thank you. sharing that. I had a very similar experience. On my ninth birthday, I discovered that I was adopted. And I had no idea. My entire family knew, like my uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, everybody but me knew this information. And no one ever planned on telling me. I learned it from the INS. when I went into the INS for my citizenship hearing, and an INS official told me. Wow. I think when I hear your story and when I think about my own,

first of all, with a secret like this, if it could ever be learned without your telling, do you want to be the person who gets to tell? I think for most people, the answer is yes. And then the other situation is when you have a secret that's like this, And even if you start knowing, you know, maybe it's time we should tell we're just waiting for the right time. And one thing I've learned in my personal experience is like waiting for the right time to reveal a secret, it never comes. There is no like perfect right time to bring up something that's totally earth shattering.

And so you can get caught in a loop and waiting for the right time because it might not ever come. And so if you have a secret like this, maybe it's time. just start being a little deliberate on what would it look like to let go of that secret. You know, we were talking before, would you want to set, do you need to set an expiration date on this so you don't get caught keeping this forever? Yeah, exactly, exactly. That was certainly what happened with me. There was this notion.

There's research in adoptees where the research actually shows that adoptees have the best life outcomes when they are told prior to the age of two. And unfortunately, many people don't know that, and many people mistakenly assume that a child needs to be sufficiently old. And then you wait one more year and you wait one more year and you wait one more year. And in the adoptee community, there is actually sort of a sub-community inside of the adoptee community of people who learned late in life. And there's no specific definition of late in life.

But for some people, that means in adulthood and for others, That means, you know, even nine years old is fairly late to be learning that. And as you said, often when people don't take control of the narrative, somebody else does for them. So the person learns about it from a third party, which only makes it worse. Right. Definitely if it's a secret that cannot be kept forever, you should be thinking about whether you want to have some control over how it comes out. Right. or one that you mistakenly believe might be kept forever, but then it's not.

Right. Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing both your story as well as all of your research that you've done around the world of secrets and secrecy. We've had a lot of people on this podcast who have discussed psychology. We've had a lot of behavioral researchers and financial psychologists and people who've discussed all of these different elements of psychology, but secrecy in particular is an area of psychology that I, prior to your book and encountering your research, I've never heard about this dimension of psychological research, and yet it's something that affects all of us.

Yeah. So thank you for doing this research. Anytime. Actually, I do do it anytime all the time. It's this topic that for some reason just has kind of alluded. us for a very long time. And I think that's partly because of a very narrow idea people used to have on what secrecy looks like. They thought secrecy was the moment when you were in a conversation with someone and they asked you a question related to your secret and you held back.

If that's all there was to secrecy, it would be really easy. But there's all the moments before and afterward where your mind can return to the secret. And so I think just because people were thinking about secrecy in a very specific way, they sort of were looking at. at a few trees instead of the forest. And so we're correcting that. Right. And am I correct in observing that this is a nascent field, specifically the psychology of secrets? Yeah. Once in a while psychologist has touched it, but it's sort of as a serious field on its own, that's new. Well, thank you for sharing the beginnings, you know, your research and then the initial insights into this nascent field with us, where can people find out more if they want to know about you or your work?

Yeah, they can go to Michael Slepion.com or they can find more about the book and the research on secrecy, or if you're interested to see how your secrets compared to other people's secrets, we've been talking about these 38 categories. You can go to keepingsecrets.org, and you can see those categories for yourself, and whether you have more or less relative to folks who are, you know, the same gender or the same age and so on. You can learn more about secrecy on both those websites, too, the research. We'll come back to the show in just a second, but first... Thank you, Michael. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation?

Number one, secrets tend to fall into three categories. There are the secrets that we keep for moral reasons because we think that revealing such a secret may cause harm to somebody else. There are the ones that we keep for relational reasons in order to preserve the peace. And there are the ones that we keep for goal or ambition-related reasons. For example, if you have a goal of early retirement, you may be keeping that a secret from your colleagues. These types of secrets impact us differently with regard to the emotional or psychological burden that carrying such a secret has on our lives, which is to say that not all secrets are created equal, and there are some that exist as secrets because we have decided that certain things are better left unsaid.

And so using this thing that's called multidimensional scaling, what you can do essentially is have participants indicate how similar each common secret is to other secrets, the other secrets on the list, and we can look at how they clumped together, essentially, and which ones are far apart. And through an iterative process of doing that, you can start to understand which are the primary ways in which people are seeing secrets as being similar to each other or different from another, it turns out there's three. And so three ways in which people can think about their secrets as compared to their other secrets or three ways by which

people think about their secrets are whether the secret is immoral, whether they believe the secret is about something that's wrong or is causing harm. The second one is the extent to which a secret is relational, the extent to which a secret is related to our relationships and social connections. And the third one is the one that's, is the dimension related to you, how much the secret involves our goals and aspirations, which often comes, means our professions as well. This framework, this mental model of different classifications of secrets is helpful as we think through the secrets in our own lives and contemplate what should be said to whom and when, if at all. Often when we are making these decisions, in the absence of a mental model,

in the absence of this type of framework, we don't have mental scaffolding to be able to differentiate between different types of secrets or different types of quandaries inside our mind. And so I wanted to highlight this as the first key takeaway because it provides that mental model that can help us better understand ourselves and help us better understand the types of secrets that we keep. And so that is key takeaway number one. Key takeaway number two, people are naturally inclined to self-sabotage if they believe that they deserve it, if they believe that they have done something wrong or they are deserving of punishment. Our desire to write the moral scales of justice can be so high that we will subject ourselves to unnecessary pain if we believe

rightly or wrongly that this is what we quote-unquote deserve. This often plays out in the ways in which we become our own worst enemy and stand as our own biggest obstacles in the world of money management, overspending, investing too conservatively or too aggressively, not following up on opportunities? There are many ways as we become small business owners, side hustlers, investors, stock investors, crypto investors, real estate investors, there are so many ways that our inner psychology leads us to get in our own way and to sabotage ourselves. he had people come into the lab and recall in one condition, and one group of participants recalled something,

a time when they socially excluded someone. You know, someone can usually dredge up an example of that, and it doesn't feel good to be reminded of that. And he asked another group of participants to think about something mundane instead. Then they had participants as part of a totally unrelated study. They walked to the other side of the lab and said, We're doing this thing where we're interested in perception and we're going to ask you to pick up these small things in this tank of water and move it to the other side. Just so you know, it's completely ice cold.

It will be painful, but without any long-lasting consequences. It'll just be painful in the moment. And there's no harm beyond that. And so it turned out that when participants had just reminded themselves of something they felt guilty about, they kept their hands on the cold water for longer. And if you've ever kept your hand in ice cold water, you know it eventually starts really hurting. They kept it in there for longer. And the longer they kept their hands in the ice water, the better they felt afterward about the social exclusion of this person about this guilty act. And so it seems just experiencing this unpleasantness, this self-enforced punishment

made people feel like they were sort of doing their time and sort of making up for this wrongdoing. If you start noticing instances in your life in which you know that you are getting in your own way, maybe you're spending too much, maybe you're panicking when the market drops and selling out of what are supposed to be long-term buy and hold holdings, even though you know better. Or maybe you're speculating on meme stocks or other wild flyers. that are basically a step away from gambling, maybe the way that you invest your money or spend your money is not aligned with your better judgment.

Or maybe you're doing something in your work, in your career, in your side hustle, where you notice that you're sabotaging your own chance of success. When you see that, ask yourself if any of this might be playing into it. If maybe there's some part of you deep down the questions whether or not you deserve it, or seeks to punish yourself because you are shouldering excess, guilt, or shame, or blame. That is the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three. We often hold on to secrets because we want to preserve the peace.

And in the world of money and business and career, this is particularly true. We don't want to let people know what we earn or our net worth or how our investments are performing. We don't want to speak openly about our goals, our ambitions, our frustrations, and our likes when it comes to the work that we do or the way that we manage our assets. We fear that awkward money conversations will create a rift between ourselves and the people that we love. But could it be that there are certain conversations, awkward as they may be, that are better to have, better for educational value,

the kind of learning that comes with transparency? Could it be that by clamming up, at least in some instances, we might be creating distance rather than harmony? In those same studies, we know that if that's your reason, people find a secret as less burdensome. If you feel like you're doing this for the good of the group or for the good of another person,

that does reduce the burden of secrecy. The question, though, is, but should you be having those conversations? Should you be talking with the other people about the meetup and see where that conversation goes? Should you tell your spouse who you voted for? And I think the answer is yes. I think that if secrecy is preventing us

from having the kinds of conversations we need to be having, the kinds of conversations that can change minds and hearts, we have to have those conversations and avoiding them maybe makes the moment smoother, but it's not going to help in the long term. Food for thought. Those are three key takeaways that come from this conversation with Columbia University professor Dr. Michael Slepian on The Psychology of Secrets. Again, before we sign off, I would like to remind you that we have an incredibly robust

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