Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Michael Slepian on the Secret Life of Secrets: How Do We Trust Others With Our Secrets EP 146

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. If there's a secret that's upsetting you or that's bothering you, you don't have to reveal it to the people or person you're keeping it from, but you do want to talk about it with the third party, whether it's someone face-to-face over the phone, over the internet, another person can give you something that you could just not find on your own. Other people think differently than you do. And that proves so helpful.

Starting point is 00:00:29 Just a simple conversation, a single conversation can make a whole different. Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armeils. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.

Starting point is 00:00:55 If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guest ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become passion struck. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 146 of passion struck, one of the top health and fitness podcasts in the world. And thank you to each and every one of you who comes back weekly to listen and learn, how to live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you missed our episodes from last week, they included my interview with Trisha Manning, where we discuss how you can become an intentional

Starting point is 00:01:39 leader. And we do that by reviewing her book, Leading with Heart, and leaving a lasting legacy. I also interviewed last week Dr. Sarah Faye about her new book, Pathological, The True Story of Six Mist Diagnosis. My solo episode from last week was on the importance of microchoses, and how they influence our daily and long-term growth. Please check them all out. I also wanted to thank you for your ratings and reviews. We now have over 8,000 five star reviews globally on iTunes alone. And if you love today's episode or one of the other ones I mentioned, we would so appreciate getting a five-star review and you forwarding this to your friends and family members. It means so much to helping us improve the popularity of the show. Now, let's talk about today's guests.

Starting point is 00:02:25 Michael Slepian is the Sanford, C. Bernstein, and co-associate Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia University, a recipient of the Rising Star Award from the Association of Psychological Science. He is the leading expert on the psychology of secrets. Today, we are discussing his new book which actually launches today the secret life of secrets. How are inner world shapes well-being, relationships, and who we are? His research has been covered by the New York Times, the Atlantic,

Starting point is 00:02:58 the New Yorker, the economist, the Wall Street Journal, BBC, and many more. In today's episode, we discuss why Michael spent the past decade studying the psychology of secrets. He reveals his research involving over 50,000 participants from around the world on why we keep the secrets we keep. Most commonly, addiction, infidelity, mental health struggles, romance, and financial hardship. We discuss the psychology that's behind secrets, how they affect us and how to better understand them

Starting point is 00:03:31 and cope with them. Why, through secrets, you can discover a hidden self and so much more. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now. Let the journey begin. I am so excited to welcome Dr. Michael Slepian

Starting point is 00:03:49 to the Passion Stark podcast. Welcome, Michael. Thank you for having me. I wanted to start out the interview by talking about family secrets. And I think all families have secrets, but your father confessed to you a huge secret. That would refer to it as a bombshell secret. And it's revelation resulted in you dedicating the past 10 years of your life to studying

Starting point is 00:04:22 secrets. How did that event impact you and why has this become your life's passion? Yeah, so I think you're right that every family has a secret. Family secrets are one of the most common secrets we see people having. And where this intersection between learning this from shell of a secret and my own research first happened is I had been studying secrecy for just a year or two looking at this idea of or asking this question

Starting point is 00:04:51 of which secrets do people report bring this feeling of burden. And we didn't want to just ask people whether they felt burdened by a secret. We wanted to get at it in a more indirect way. And so we simply asked people to think about a big secret, and then to tell us how much effort would be required of a variety of tasks, and including some even more indirect questions along those lines. And we found that sure enough when people think

Starting point is 00:05:16 about secrets, there does seem to be this sense of burden that happens while people are thinking about secrets. And so I was doing that research and then sure enough, I learned this really surprising secret of my own family's secret. When I'm interviewing for Columbia presenting sort of this initial research on secrecy, later that night I get a phone call for my dad who tells me I have to tell you because your brother just found out I can't have children. I'm biologically unable to have children. He was telling me that he's not my biological father. And of course, that's incredibly shocking to learn. We learned the entire family apart from my brother in New. And so we're the only two people in the dark about this. And what became interesting

Starting point is 00:06:02 from a research perspective is their experiences with that secret. They told me they didn't really have to hide it in conversation very much because no one talks about genetics. You know, no one talks about the extent to which you're related to your parents. There's just not a conversation people have. And so it wasn't a hard secret to hold back in conversation. It wasn't technically difficult. It didn't require much conversational gymnastics. You just don't mention it, but still the secrecy was burdensome. And so that's when it's

Starting point is 00:06:30 certain becoming clear to me that I think we've been thinking about secrecy wrong the whole time. Sure, sometimes you have to hide a secret in the moment in a conversation, but the secret exists before that moment, and it exists after that moment. And that turns out to be where the burden is. So hiding a secret in conversation turns out to be the easy part. How did your brother end up finding out about this? Was it taking a DNA test?

Starting point is 00:06:57 It's very common to have this experience where you take a DNA test for a totally different reason and then you learn something totally shocking. That wasn't what happened for us, although that is a common experience. What happened for us, is my brother was on the phone with my mom and they were just chatting,

Starting point is 00:07:12 just catching up and my mother told my brother that she recently got in a two-hour argument with our grandfather, her dad. And my brother was very surprised here that's not just the nature of their relationship. They don't ever get in argument since my brother was very surprised here that's not just the nature of their relationship. They don't ever get an argument since my brother asked her, so what were you arguing about? And my mom said, I can't tell you,

Starting point is 00:07:33 because what they were arguing about was whether they should still continue keeping the secret. And so my brother said, you have to tell me and she said, well, actually, I can't. It's a secret, and it's a secret I promised I would never tell you. And as you can imagine hearing that, maybe my brother just pushed until he eventually learned what it was. Well, I think we all hear this word secret, but from your perspective and for the audience, so they can understand this moving forward, how would you define what a secret is? So this definition actually turns out to be a really important issue, the old way of So they can understand this moving forward. How would you define what a secret is?

Starting point is 00:08:05 So this definition actually turns out to be a really important issue. The old way of thinking about secrecy was secrecy is an action. Secretcy is when you hold a secret back in conversation. And there's a few reasons why that won't work. Most prominently our secrets don't disappear after these moments of concealment. The moment you intend to hold a secret back from someone is the moment you have a secret

Starting point is 00:08:33 to take a not uncommon example. Imagine that someone has cheated on their partner while out of town. And immediately says, I have to make sure my partner never lets, never knows. Even if that person doesn't talk to their partner for days or doesn't see them for days, they still have a secret. And so that's why the definition is important.

Starting point is 00:08:53 I define secrecy as the intention to hold an information back from one or more people. But that's when secrecy begins as soon as we form that intention. This podcast is all about the importance of intention and how that overall impacts the daily micro choices that we make. And therefore becomes part of our bigger life outcomes. And I believe when we have intention, we prioritize our actions and behavior towards anything in our environment

Starting point is 00:09:25 related to that intention. And that light, how is secrecy different from privacy? So you put it so well, exactly. To have an intention is to be on the lookout for cues toward that intention. If you intend to eat healthy, when someone asks whether you want salad or fries, you're paying attention and hopefully you follow through it and say salad. Why this helps us distinguish secrecy from privacy is there's so kinds of things about you, the other people don't know about you, but these things are not necessarily a secret. know about you, but those things are not necessarily a secret. To take an example, in many situations,

Starting point is 00:10:07 people find it uncomfortable to talk about sex, or don't talk about sexual experiences with friends or family. That doesn't mean those sexual experiences are secret. It doesn't mean you're keeping secret the sort of everyday situations you're in. But you may just not talk about it out of concern for privacy or what is normative to talk about. Perhaps it's not appropriate to talk about sexual experiences at work, for example.

Starting point is 00:10:32 But you of course could also have a specific experience that you intend to keep secret. And so if it's just generally something you're not talking about because people tend not to talk about it, that's probably privacy, where you can draw that line is, it's not just that people don't know about this, but if they ever asked you about it, you wouldn't tell them. That's when we're at a secret. I found it very interesting when I was reading the book

Starting point is 00:10:56 that you researched over 40,000 people and discovered that there are 38 categories of secrets that people keep. What did your research point out are the most common ones? Yeah, so some of the most common ones are experiences like you've told a lie and you're going to keep it secret that you haven't told the truth. So while the lying is a way to keep the secret, you can also keep a lie of secret. That's a very common one. Another very common secret is family secrets,

Starting point is 00:11:27 which we touched on earlier. And then after that, some of the other big ones, there's essentially two different ways to define what makes the secret common. There's experiences, like everyone has family details, so it's very common to have a family secret. Another way of defining what makes a secret common is even if it's not a common experience, when people do it, they keep it a secret. And the most common secret people keep

Starting point is 00:11:55 if they've had the experience who can't keep something a secret if you haven't had the experience is what we call extra relational thoughts. That is, you are in a romantic relationship with one person called extra relational thoughts. That is, you are in a romantic relationship with one person and you have some kind of romantic thought about another person. We don't talk about that with other people. We frequently keep that secret. I find that research very interesting

Starting point is 00:12:16 and also that the average person keeps 13 of the secrets on the list, five of which he or she has never shared with anyone else. How did you determine that? Yeah, and so in some ways, some people are surprised to hear that number because it sounds high, but actually in some ways it's an underestimate because so what we've done is we've asked a couple thousand people to tell us a secret that they're keeping. And we essentially just looked at all the responses and tallied up the examples of sea birds people had most frequently. And so that's where we arrived at this list.

Starting point is 00:12:51 There was these 30 categories of secrets that really jumped out of the data. And so when we know this list is really comprehensive, because when we give people this list, we see 97% of people have at least one of those secrets right now, one of those categories of 38 different kinds of secrets. And the average person has 13 categories of these secrets. As in, for example, they might have a secret about an infertility, a secret about money, a secret about family, and that would count as three, before even allowing the idea that people might have multiple family secrets, people might have multiple financial secrets, maybe a club,

Starting point is 00:13:30 might have multiple secrets about cheating. And so that number 13 is just the number of different kinds of secrets people keep. And as you said, five of which they have never told anyone. Yeah, I find that pretty amazing that you were able to get to that definitive of a list. But it doesn't surprise me. Once I read the book,

Starting point is 00:13:53 that it would be 13 categories and five of them that are kept hidden. I, although I did think it could have been even more than five. Yeah. Throughout the book, you reference Tony soprano and Edward Snowden.

Starting point is 00:14:08 And you said in both cases that keeping their secret was an isolating experience. Why is that? So I think at the end of the day, what it means to be human is, of course, we want to connect with other humans. The number one way to do that is to tell other people what's on your mind to tell people about your prior experiences.

Starting point is 00:14:30 This is how we connect with other people. Besides that, you know, all we have is like physical touch. So there's sharing experiences currently and ones we've had before. And so to have something really important, we're upsetting in your life and to not talk about that with other people, it can be really isolating, whether that's Tony soprano keeping secret that he's in therapy or, and we would note in keeping secret this massive global surveillance program that he recently learned about and his intentions to blow the whistle.

Starting point is 00:15:04 If there's something that's on your mind every day, it feels really isolating to not be able to talk about that with other people. Of secrets are so harmful, then why do our minds frequently return to them? Yeah. So this is what's so frustrating. And it gets back to what we were talking about before on intention. The whole point of a secret is to conceal it if it ever comes up in conversation. And so having the intention for secrecy means you wanna be on the lookout in your environment

Starting point is 00:15:32 for cues related to the secret. But this is, and so you want your mind to be easily reminded of the secret, in case you need to conceal it in that moment, but that increased sensitivity toward anything related to your secret will mean that you are also reminded of your secret even when you don't need to be concealing it in the moment.

Starting point is 00:15:50 And it turns out to be that's the most frequent experience we have with our secrets, having our mind returned to them even when we don't need to conceal them in that very moment. And so our mind will return to these secrets because they're important and they feel unresolved. And because we are especially sensitive to anything related to our secrets so that we can conceal it if necessary. So how does the concealing of secrets in general impact, nor overall wellbeing?

Starting point is 00:16:16 Yeah, so common intuition and what psychologists believed for decades was that moment in the conversation when you're holding something back, when you're dancing around the truth or dodging questions or holding something back, that that's stressful and that's why secrets harm us. It turns out though that it isn't why secrets harm us. And I think the reason we've been so mistaken for that for so long is, you know, we might remember a few moments when concealing a secret was especially hard, or a researcher might create a situation in the lab where concealing a secret is difficult, but it turns out to be

Starting point is 00:16:56 the average secret is not difficult to conceal. If we look at the entire universe of secrets, people tend to keep, they don't find it all that hard to conceal a secret. All you have to do is not talk about it. And so it would seem so simple if that's all that secrecy was, but it's not. And the reason why secrets harm us is because our minds return to these secrets time and time again, even if it's not difficult to conceal conversation, even if you never have to conceal it in conversation, you still have to live with that secret in your thoughts alone. And that's where the harm is. Well, I just wanted to explore this a little bit more.

Starting point is 00:17:31 So how do you go from intent? Because we've been speaking a lot about intention to it becoming a burden. Yeah, so this is a good example to go back to my family secret. I interviewed my parents for the book. I had learned a little bit about what it was like to keep that secret when I first learned it 13 years ago. But not until I wrote the book that I have some follow-up questions.

Starting point is 00:17:55 And I asked them, when did you first decide to keep this a secret? To keep it secret that you're going to have these, you know, I was like, did you decided after I was born or did you decide it after my younger brother was born? And my mom told me neither of those was the truth. They decided that they were going to keep secret that their donor conceived children were donor conceived just from the children. And they made that decision before they ever started trying. And so before there was ever a person to conceal the secret from because they only meant to conceal it from us, before there was ever a person to conceal that secret from, they could already experience the burden of intentionally holding this information back at some point in the future.

Starting point is 00:18:41 Because you can already be worried, you know, what it's we looked different from my father. What if one day we need to know about our genetics? And so it's a really good example. And that's sort of what I'm into beginning where it really changed my understanding of the secrecy and what it means to have a secret. The moment you intend to have a secret, you have that secret and your mind can get stuck on it well before you ever have a chance to actually hide it in conversation. Yeah, so similar to Edward Snowden, I worked for the National Security Agency and other three-letter agencies during my time in the military.

Starting point is 00:19:17 And when you've got security clearances that are that high, let's take away infidelity or other things that we've been talking about. Let's talk about state secrets. Did those also impose a burden on the person as well, who duty it is to keep them? Yeah, I think so, and I think Edwards noted and puts it really well in his autobiography. If your work is something you don't ever think about on your own time, it might not be hard at all. There might be no effect there because we see

Starting point is 00:19:45 in our research it's the more your mind returns to the secret the more we see these negative health and well-being consequences. But you know most people care about their work. Most people think about their work a lot and most people get the opportunity to talk about that work with other people. Again, it's a primary way of connecting with other people. It's just to tell them what you're doing. What's on your mind. And so for folks who have high access to sort of highly confidential information, if it's something that bothers them, for example, in Edward Snowden's case, they're going to be thinking about that a whole lot. And that's going to make it even more frustrating that you're not allowed to talk about it. We'll be right back to our interview

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Starting point is 00:21:42 Now, back to my interview with Dr. Michael Salayman. Now that we've kind of laid out why they're burdened, what a secret is, etc. I think it's good to go into chapter two of your book and discuss the birth of secrets. And I was hoping you could use the example that you laid out about chimpanzees and the false belief test to describing how we develop secrecy throughout our childhood. What it means to be able to keep a secret is you have an awareness that there's something in your head that is not in other people's heads and you can keep it that way. And so when we look at the animal kingdom and ask, are there other species that keep secrets? We need to be very careful to not look at a behavior that seems to be secrecy and it's not.

Starting point is 00:22:34 So for example, animals will hide food, right? That doesn't mean they're understanding some other animals mind and whether it's aware of the food or not, it's just protecting its food. So really meet the bar of secrecy. We need evidence that the animal or the person, whether it's a baby or a, maybe human or chimpanzee is able to reason about others' minds. Because if you can't do that, you can't keep a seeker in the way we're talking about it, just intending to hold information back from one or more other minds. How do we understand whether a chimpanzee can understand another chimpanzee's mind? to hold information back from one or more other minds. How do we understand whether a chimpanzee can understand

Starting point is 00:23:08 another chimpanzee's mind? You can't just ask. So you have to do these clever experiments. So in the chimpanzee version of the false belief test, essentially what we do is first we check can chimpanzees understand what another chimpanzee can see or not. And so the first version of this

Starting point is 00:23:26 is there's a piece of food that's placed in front of a partition. So only the participant should you can see the food and the other should in which case this chimp is an alpha male who you wouldn't want to mess around with can't see the food because there's this barrier blocking the chim's life site. And in that condition, the research participant, chimp, knows that the alpha chimp cannot see the food. And so it'll grab and take it. In another condition, the partition is transparent. And in that case, the chimp just leaves the food

Starting point is 00:23:57 where it is. It understands that the dominant alpha chimp can see the food. And so it doesn't touch it. And so chimps can understand what another chimp can see or hear. So that's step one. But the next question is can the chimp understand what another chimp knows or doesn't know. And that's when we go to this false belief test. And in this version, rather than placing a food in front of a partition that's transparent or opaque, the researcher puts the food in a box and both chips can see this. And so normally the chip would never go to that first box

Starting point is 00:24:33 because it knows the food is in there and it knows the alpha chip can see that food. And so it would never touch it. The more interesting condition is when the researcher puts food in the first box and then takes it out of the first box when the authorship isn't looking and puts it in the second box. And so you or I or any child over the age of five would know that the authorship who did not see the food get relocated would naturally go to the original box where the food was first located. It would have no reason to go to the second box because it doesn't know the food that moved there. The chimp participant doesn't have that sophistication thinking. While it understands that the first chimp did see the first piece of food, it acts as if that first chimp magically somehow knows

Starting point is 00:25:27 the food dot relocated. It can't quite step away from what it knows to understand it's different from what the other chimp knows. And so while children by age four really clearly demonstrate the ability to understand what another person has a belief that his faults chimps fail at that stage. And so while they can engage in concealment behaviors that involve

Starting point is 00:25:52 blocking the visual access to something, they can't take that one step further. They understand that you can conceal an action, but not information. Okay, and so can you therefore just explain a little bit more where humans start differing from chimpanzees along that maturation curve? Yeah, and there's essentially two ways, two advancements that we have. The first is we can understand when someone has an impression about some state of the world that's wrong, that's false.

Starting point is 00:26:30 So we can keep track of that sort of extra layer of beliefs. We understand we know the true state of the world and for some reason this other person doesn't know it. That enables us to keep secrets. We can't intend to keep a secret unless we understand that that person's mind is not already aware of the information. And so that's the first way that we surpassed ships. We understand one another holds a false belief. The second way is that we can talk.

Starting point is 00:27:01 Champions can communicate with Grunts and Hollllers, but they can't ask another chimp how is your day. They don't have the words that we have. And those words are actually quite useful because you can use those words to hide a secret. Someone asks you how did the bays get broken? And you say, oh, actually, a cat broke that bays. That wasn't me, it was our pet cat. So words really help you keep secrets in a way that just is far more advancement than what gyms can do. But then here's the second important difference.

Starting point is 00:27:39 We can use our words to share our secrets with others. And children do that. Children will tell you that what it means to have a best friend is you share your secrets with that person. And so as soon as children start learning that they have an inner world that's not known to others unless shared, is when they start selectively sharing that inner world with people they deem

Starting point is 00:28:04 worthy or special. And so in an early life, children will use secrets to try to not get into trouble for accidents and mishaps, but they will also use secrets to get close to another to another child. And so that's the second difference. We both can understand when someone doesn't know something. And we can tell them that thing with words, which shows can't do that. So now that we've talked about chimpanzees and childhood,

Starting point is 00:28:32 then there's this transition to being a teenager. What would your advice be for parents of teenagers and how through this lens of secrets can they develop healthy relationships with them? Yeah, so I think the most important first recognition is this distinction between privacy and secrecy. And as children grow up through adolescence, they start becoming interested in being their own person

Starting point is 00:29:02 and finding some separation from family, developing a sense of autonomy and identity that isn't entirely wrapped up into family. And part of that process is developing a sphere of privacy and that it is that not every single thing, every inner thought and detail will be shared with their parents. I think, in a obvious example of this is sex.

Starting point is 00:29:26 It's really awkward to talk about sex with family and so people don't. And so developing a sphere of privacy is a normal part of healthy development. And then there's secrecy. And some aspects of secret keeping in teens is just like what we were talking about with children. If you've done something wrong and you think that your parent won't fight out about it,

Starting point is 00:29:49 if you don't tell them, the teens might keep that thing a secret. But the trouble is when it comes to bigger secrets. And you're struggling with schoolwork. You're struggling with a substance. You're struggling with feelings of shame. When teens start keeping those kinds of secrets from their parents, you're struggling with a substance. You're struggling with feelings of shame. When teens start keeping those kinds of secrets from their parents, that's when we see

Starting point is 00:30:09 that the troubles begin. And so what can they do? The thing that makes secrecy more likely in teenage years is when a teen reveals something to a parent, something that a parent would get upset about. It feels very natural to convey anger and disappointment when someone admits something to you that you see is wrong, but the trouble with the angry outburst response

Starting point is 00:30:35 is that it closes the door to future confessions. As hard as it can be to in the moment respond differently, when a team makes them so vulnerable and reveals something sensitive, even if it's something you disapprove of, you can still express that might not have been the right thing to do, but you could also express acceptance and understanding. The compassionate response keeps the door open to future confessions, whereas an angry outburst will close that door

Starting point is 00:31:04 and you want to keep it open, because if there's something a team is struggling with, it's not going to make it any easier to keep it a secret. I can agree with that more. And it is always challenge when your child does that, because your reaction is want to react very adversely to it. So taking a step back and doing as you're suggesting can be difficult in the heat of the moment,

Starting point is 00:31:28 but it does open up the long term potential for that child to think differently about what they're gonna say next time. So that all in itself really gets down to the child is developing core values. And this whole area of your research about core values and moral standards, I found very fascinating because when we speak of intentions, intentions are really formed by our core values. And what you found is that both of them really play a big role into whether a secret

Starting point is 00:32:00 is big or small. So I wanted to take that a step further by talking about your groundbreaking research that you did on the Hillslant and how looking through the lens of the Hillslant, you discovered something that I think most researchers would have never found to be the heart of what causes that Hillslant to grow in its apex. What was that? Yeah, so my original study is on secrecy, where we're not exploring sort of the everyday experience of secrecy, but simply asking them the question of which secrets feel burdensome. And so we ask people to think about secrets, and then we ask them to do something with the little strange, which is judge the steepness of the hill. And what that judgment corresponds with is how difficult you perceive that hill in terms of whether you could walk above that hill in terms of whether you could scale it. So the more challenging a hill looks judged the hell as steeper.

Starting point is 00:33:08 They essentially found the external world more challenging to interact with as if they were encumbered or burdensome, somehow by just simply thinking about a secret. It didn't matter whether the secret was something you would consider big or small, but it was the extent to which they were preoccupied by that secret that really was related to this sense of burden, as we're revealed by this judgment of steepness of the hell. So that leads me though, why then is morality one of the most important aspects of a person's character. Yeah, so it turns out that morality is one of the most important aspects of our secrets, but also just more broadly a person's character in general. When you do something morally good, when you do something that helps other people, you tell other people about that,

Starting point is 00:33:58 you want other people to know about all the good things you've done out in the world, because people tend to think of themselves as a good person. And we want other people to learn about that person and to know that person. And so then what happens when we do something morally wrong? That's when we become concerned about, well, what would happen if someone would learn about this thing? And this is when we start keeping secrets.

Starting point is 00:34:23 It's natural to want to make sure people uphold the positive impression they have of you. But those impressions for the people that are close to you are nowhere near as fragile as you might imagine them to be. You learn about something, your partner, or your best friend did that is not a good thing. It's not going to fundamentally change everything you think about that person.

Starting point is 00:34:50 It will just be one drop in the bucket of a lifetime or of shared experiences and learning something we can sort of take an understanding of why someone might make a mistake and people around you that are close to you will be understanding. We're quick to strain to judge a stranger from a piece of negative information, but not a loved one. And so while it feels tempting to sort of like uphold this image you want people to see, that image won't be as termished as easily as you think it would be. And when you're really stuck thinking about this thing on your own, you can sort of get stuck on helpful

Starting point is 00:35:17 and unrealistic way of thinking about it. It's not as bad as you think it. And you can talk about these things with people. Yes. Well, I wanted to jump to a couple stories about New York. If the listener is not familiar with Columbia University, it's located in an area called the Upper West Side, which is adjacent to the west side of Central Park. And in the book, you referenced how you and some other researchers would randomly go up to people in Central Park, and it turned out that they were representing 29 different countries amazingly.

Starting point is 00:35:54 What was the point of that and what were you trying to get from those random interactions? Yeah, so we had already conducted a number of studies at that point that we're just asking. It turned out when I started doing my research on secrecy, it quickly became apparent. We knew almost nothing about it. And the reason we knew almost nothing about it is the studies that came before mine would create these concealment situations in the lab.

Starting point is 00:36:20 I ask you to keep a secret. I ask a second person to ask you questions related to the secret. It turned out that that to ask you questions related to the secret. It turned out that that's not what secrecy normally looks like. People often think about their secrets when they're not in concealment situations. So the only way to find out how people experience their secrets in everyday life is to ask them. So we had run a couple studies online, a couple of thousand people and found out which were the secrets people most commonly kept,

Starting point is 00:36:43 and how often the secrets were around people's minds and what was happening when they were which were the secrets people most commonly kept and how often the secrets were around people's minds and what was happening when they were thinking about the secrets. And it turned out to be that when you were just simply on your own time not having to hide a secret, that's when we think most about our secrets. And so what we wanted to do before we sort of ran with this idea was to make sure it wasn't some weird peculiarity of American participants who do online studies. Maybe there's something weird about them. And so we went out to Central Park where we knew there'd be tourists from all over the world and wanted to make sure our results held with them. And they did. These are folks

Starting point is 00:37:21 from 29 different countries, as you mentioned. And so it is nice to see, okay, this isn't some weird American thing. This seems to be more universal. Yeah, we're so lucky to have that right in your back, you're hard to work. You could have done that random sampling like that. Well, that leads me to another place where you could have a random sampling, which is the New York subway system. And in chapter four, you lay out how the dimensions of secrets are similar to a subway system. Can you explain that analogy and how you used it to determine the three dimensions of secrets? Yeah, so once we understood that it seemed that most of the harm of secrecy is simply having to think about a secret on your own, not having to conceal it within

Starting point is 00:38:05 social interactions. The next question was, okay, what about thinking about secrets is so harmful? And to answer that question, because we were really interested in how these processes naturally unfold, that's why we don't create secrets in the lab. And so we didn't want to create experiences that weren't there. We didn't want to ask leading questions. And so the only way to understand how these processes naturally unfold is to sort of lead the participant to tell you what the dimensions of secrets are.

Starting point is 00:38:39 And then we can understand what other primary ways we think about secrets in one of the primary ways they can hurt us. And so what we essentially did is we had participants create maps of the common categories of secrets. And we asked participants to take all the secrets, like imagine you're putting them on a bulletin board and to put the secrets that they saw is more similar to each other closer together.

Starting point is 00:39:01 And the ones they saw is less similar to each other farther apart. And what that gave us was essentially for each participant a table of distances, how far away each secret was from each other's secret. And we averaged all participants maps and then we arrived at this one map that essentially said how different each secret was from each other's secret. What do we do with that? If we imagine it like a map,

Starting point is 00:39:26 and imagine the distances reflecting how far apart the secrets are, through a few different ways of showing participants this map, we could understand what were the dimensions running through it. And so what we have participants do, is essentially view what was essentially just a jumble of secrets. So a jumble of secrets, it turned out

Starting point is 00:39:47 people we needed three dimensions to plot the secrets in a way, to the map, the average map of the other participants. But once we understood, okay, participants seem to be using three dimensions to sort which secrets are more similar to one another, to find out what those dimensions were, we essentially imagined your subway car just driving through, in our case, what was a cube and you're passing each secret or each station

Starting point is 00:40:13 along the way. And so we asked our participants which order is made sense. But as if you took the subway map and you just saw the stations and you couldn't see where the lines were running through them and you couldn't see the grid of New York by looking at just the just saw the stations and you couldn't see where the lines were running through them and you couldn't see the grid of New York by looking at just the map of the stations. You can see okay several the lines seem to run from North to South and some lines run from East to West. And so if you just drew random lines stations with the subway lines, but some by chance would randomly align with the stations as you would pass the stations in an ascensible order. And that's what we had our participants to do. They looked at each sequence of stations as you would drive through

Starting point is 00:40:56 in these different angles, this 3D map, and we just asked them which orderings made sense, and if it did make sense, would explain the ordering. And so essentially, when people said the order made sense, they were saying, yeah, they are meaningfully sorted. This is like a subway line passing the stations in the right order, and the most common descriptions for the correct order of stations passed for what were our three primary dimensions of secrets. And so one dimension was how

Starting point is 00:41:26 moral the secrets were. So when we got that line driven in the right direction, as we passed secrets, they became more moral. Another dimension was how much the secrets related to our relationships and social connections. So as we moved through the map at a different angle, the secrets became more relational. And the third dimension was angle, the secrets became more relational. And the third dimension was how much the secrets relate to our goals and aspirations, which often means in our professions. And as we drive through the map in that proper angle, we saw the secrets become more goal oriented. And if you were driving the other direction, they were less goal oriented and more emotional. And what was so useful about that procedure

Starting point is 00:42:06 is the map comes from participants' minds. They created the map, and then they found its compass. They found a way to make sense of that map. And it turns out that those three primary dimensions of secrets relate to three ways in which your secrets can hurt you. More and more secrets cause you shame, secrets that are less relational, less related to your social connections feel more isolating, and secrets that are more goal oriented, we feel like we have

Starting point is 00:42:36 good insight into and secrets that are less related to goals and more related to emotions. We feel like we have less insight too. And why is it useful to find out that our secrets hurt us in three primary ways? Because just like the subway system, the trains run in both directions. And so there are three ways in which a secret can hurt you. And there were three ways in which a secret can, does not hurt you if you drive

Starting point is 00:43:01 in the other direction. And so what we've been doing in our research is helping people see those three paths and finding the one that takes them in a more helpful direction. That's really interesting, as I've read the chapter and then even more so as I've just heard you talk about it, all I can think of is either the show homeland

Starting point is 00:43:20 or the Americans. And I have this picture of the Carrie Matherson character with all her lines on the board. And if she just had your methodology, her life would have been so much simpler. Yeah, so we were showing participants, essentially, a meaningful sorting of secrets and other predictions were figuring out the pattern that explained them.

Starting point is 00:43:41 And that helps us understand what we can do with our secrets. How can we drive in the direction that takes us to better well-being instead of worse? Well, I think this analogy to either homeland or the Americans is a good one because in both aspects, they're talking about how do you conceal secrets, which is the topic of your chapter five. And so one of the things I wanted to explore from that chapter is, why does keeping a secret from your partner have the potential to do more harm than good? And how does this lead to both parties becoming more secretive? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:44:20 So when we think about keeping secrets from partners first now, it's incredibly common. People keep secrets on the partners all the time, but out of them are so little that it doesn't matter. Imagine you are on your way to a party, you're just late to change. So that kind of secret, totally okay. When you're keeping a secret about your past, when you're keeping a secret about something that your partner would really care about, then we're into more dangerous or trouble some territory. If you're keeping a secret about something a very easy way to keep that thing secret, is to never have conversations related to that secret. If it's about money or if it's about sex, whatever it is, if there's a conversation topic, you're frequently

Starting point is 00:45:11 avoiding, your partners could eventually pick up on them. And if it seems like there's something that you are unwilling to discuss with them, that first of all doesn't feel good, but it even worse is that if your partner feels like you're concealing from them, this makes them feel like you are not including them in your life. And that really hurts. And so even if someone just suspects that you were concealing from them, that can create this vicious cycle, it turns out that the more you keep secret, the more you think your partner keeps secrets is not actually related to actual secret keeping. The way out of this potential cycle of secrecy is essentially learning to open up

Starting point is 00:45:54 and it won't be easy. And that's actually useful. You're bringing up something that's difficult to discuss. Your partner will recognize that you're doing something difficult and you'll get credit for that. Avoiding problems doesn't typically solve them. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:11 And I mean, that leads to why does some secrets hurt while others do not? Yet, probably in the same vein, we keep both from our partners. Yeah. And so sometimes we feel like we're doing the right thing, it's not easy, this would make things worse if we revealed it, you know,

Starting point is 00:46:30 one useful strategy for what to do in that situation is talk to a friend and see if they think you're doing the right thing by keeping the secret. Because maybe you haven't sort of drawn the line in the right place and, you know, some things do need to be discussed. Yes, as is often the case. Well, another line of questioning on the same topic is in the book e-reference, a professor you work with, Tori Higgins. And I liked one of the things that Tori brought up, which

Starting point is 00:47:06 is why is the purpose of our communication not only to share knowledge with others, but also to obtain knowledge from them? Yeah. So when we reveal information about ourselves to someone or when we just share about some thoughts we're having that does convey sort of what we're thinking to that person. And part of revealing information to others is we want others to learn about us. We want others to know us. And this is the basis to social connections and relationships. But that's not the only reason you share information with other people.

Starting point is 00:47:40 The world's a complicated place. And we often want to understand how other people think about it and to see if their perspective lines up with ours or if there's some differences and that sort of means there's something to learn about if I share with you what I'm thinking about in the news and my latest thoughts about my current thoughts. It's probably I want to know how you think about it to see if I'm thinking about it in the right way. The way we learned about the world is through sharing experiences with other people and finding out what they think about them. Yeah, and I think one of the things that I have been finding out a lot lately

Starting point is 00:48:20 is how much sorrow and longing and overall negative experiences impact who we are, but are valuable for our growth. And I've had some guests on recently talking about this ranging from Susan Cain and her new book, Bittersweet to Liz Fossiline, her new book, Bit Feelings and Dr. Michelle Seager who's talking about this through the lens of the joy choice and the way we exercise, etc. But my question to you is, what does your research show our reasons people fall into this unhelpful negative thinking? Yeah, it often comes down to if there's something that's bothering you or there's something that's upsetting you and you're choosing to be alone with that information you're really unlikely to find a healthy

Starting point is 00:49:11 way of thinking about it. You might come to the conclusion that you're a bad person. You might come to the conclusion that you've done a bad thing or you've really wronged someone and you know you're not sure. Talking to someone will help you sort of understand whether you're being too hard on yourself. Talking to someone will also help you channel that negative emotion in a productive way. It's sometimes right to feel bad. A life with no negative emotions, probably.

Starting point is 00:49:44 It's hard to imagine how that would work. It's good to feel a bad sometimes when it's appropriate to do so, but there's different ways of feeling bad. When people feel that they're a bad person, we call that shame. When people feel that they've done something bad, we call that guilt. And it turns out when people feel ashamed, when people think their secret reflects poorly on themselves and they're a bad person, then that's when they really feel that's when their negative emotion is can make the world a difference when you feel instead of feeling like a bad person, you can recognize I did a bad thing. And that's a much more helpful framing for this negative emotion. If you've done a bad thing,

Starting point is 00:50:38 the good news is you don't have to do that bad thing again, you can do something differently or maybe there's a way to repair. You can apologize or show that you are trying to do something different next time. But if you feel like you're a bad person, it feels like there's no way to change that. And these things, it's easier to find a more productive way of thinking about this by just simply talking to someone, what's so great about other people is they don't think the way you do. And that's really helpful because they'll have a new perspective that's really hard to find on your own. And that's going to improve helpful. Yeah. Swann, this leads to negative emotions. Really comes to how do we accept ourselves. And that is the topic of today's solo episode I did,

Starting point is 00:51:25 And that is the topic of today's solo episode I did, which is all about self acceptance and what hinders it and then what we can do to overcome it. But I didn't really think about it through the lens of secrets. So how does secrecy impact us accepting ourselves? Yeah, so if we think about something that happened in the past, there's no way to change the past. And so if you've done something that you regret,

Starting point is 00:51:48 or if you hurt someone, you can't change that you did that. And it may feel hard to accept that. It may feel hard to find solved acceptance in the face of these things that you did in the past that you feel so bad about. And while it seems like there's nothing you can do about that, it, that's not true. You can find healthier ways of thinking about these things

Starting point is 00:52:13 and talking to someone really changes everything. I'm not saying you have to reveal your secret to the person you're keeping it from, but if you talk about that secret with a third party, there you will have a different way of thinking about it. And they might offer you something that helps you feel more at peace with your secret. They might say they've done something similar and they might say, that must be so difficult.

Starting point is 00:52:39 I'm here for you. They might give you advice. There's so many things another person can offer you if you give them the chance. And I think those are the things that are going to help you find peace with something you've done and get to solve acceptance. I think another thing that probably helps with self-acceptance

Starting point is 00:52:57 is coping skills and that's something that you talk about in chapters four and eight. And I don't want to be a spoiler for the reader. So I won't delve into those three areas, but they align to the three dimensions that you talked about earlier. But what I did want to ask is, do you have some tips for a listener on how to deflect direct questions in a conversation about a secret? This was a fun one. There are a lot of things you can do to deflect. The first thing is to never bring up the conversation topic. You have a secret about money, never talk about money with anyone.

Starting point is 00:53:34 That can only get you so far because as everyone knows, you are not the sole arbiter of which topics are introducing to conversation. And so what happens when someone asks you a question that you don't want to answer? One option is to just answer. I don't want to tell you that. I won't speak to that.

Starting point is 00:53:54 Generally not a very good strategy. It's very direct. It can be very efficient, but it might feel kind of weird or awkward or be perceived as rude even. So what can you do instead? That's when we get to deflection. It turns out there are so many different ways

Starting point is 00:54:10 you can deflect in ways that won't even be apparent that you're deflecting. One of the best ways to do this is to just ask a question of your own. Someone asked you a question that if answered with a regular your secret, you can quickly pivot and ask a question of the route. And most people will start answering the question

Starting point is 00:54:29 and the conversation can simply move on. What you're trying to do essentially is to give an answer that sort of pushes the conversation in another direction. If you can't think of a question on the fly, you can just think about anything else that's on your mind and just say it. Oh my god, I'm so hungry. Did you bring lunch today? Whatever it is, people naturally just answer the questions that are asked of them. And you can just push the conversation into a different direction. This feels like this wouldn't work because it's too easy, but it really is easy. If you've ever been in a conversation and you have an anecdote that you were ready to enter into the conversation, and then you realize

Starting point is 00:55:10 you missed your chance, conversations, topics move so rapidly, if there's multiple people in the conversation, you're fine. You can just stay quiet. Now, what if a question is asked directly to you? If someone says very clearly, I have a question is asked directly to you? If someone says very clearly, I have a question for you, answer it. At that point, if they're really,

Starting point is 00:55:30 really pressing you, a final strategy is to express gratitude, is to thank them. If someone's asking about something that's difficult for you to talk about, that person is probably not trying to take you down. That person is probably trying to help you. And if you care about the relationship with that person, one of the most effective things you can do when someone asks you a question that you don't

Starting point is 00:55:53 want to answer is you'd be like, thank you for asking about that. I really appreciate that you care about me to check in on me. You may not be glad, but saying you are can be really helpful. Because if you just answer that's too personal, that's too private to discuss, that can be really offensive. We don't like to think our friends or our partners or our family don't feel comfortable enough to open up to us. And so what you want to do is signal it's not the person asking who's the problem, it's just the timing or that you need more time and you could say thanks for asking, I really value our relationship, it means a lot to me that you have asked me that, but I need more time to think about this or I don't want to talk

Starting point is 00:56:35 about this right now and that can really help. It certainly can and I think another way to think about secrets is positive secrets. And interestingly enough, and my upcoming book, which comes out later this year, third section of the book is all about the psychology of progress. And in your book, and chapter seven, it's about the psychology of positive secrets. And I was hoping you could just discuss that a little bit and how to employ it. Yeah, so positive secrets. Maybe at first blush, it sounds like it's an oxymoron, but in fact, there's a lot of really positive things that will often keep to ourselves. Some of the most vivid examples of this are things we keep secret in order to reveal a gift that you're giving someone to wrap it in wrapping paper. You don't tell them about you, a gift today, you sort of surprise

Starting point is 00:57:28 them, or a marriage proposal. A lot of those keep our kept secret until the reveal or think of a couple trying to get pregnant and then they do, but they don't tell anyone at first. A lot of positive things in life, people have come to learn about needing to be taught it that it can be more exciting if you keep it a secret first and you sort of get some time to live with it on your own and to get excited about it. And then reveal it to these excited recipients,

Starting point is 00:57:56 mix the whole enterprise so much more special and exciting. And that's why you'll see things like flashmobs as marriage proposals and all these crazy things. It just really is a way to celebrate this positive thing you feel good about. And as you might imagine, positive secrets operate very differently from the other secrets we've been talking about. And it's not just because people feel good about them, but they feel in control over them, especially when the plan is to reveal it at a

Starting point is 00:58:25 later date. You can just feel like, I've got it all figured out. I know what I'm doing. I know I'm doing it for the right reasons. And I think the lesson that we want to take from that is that we're actually in control of all our secrets. It really feels that way more so with positive secrets. But it's that way with all our secrets. And I think we wanted to take that lesson and understand how we can feel that way when it comes to our other secrets too. Okay, so we've talked about a lot today.

Starting point is 00:58:55 If the listener was to take away one lesson from the book, what would it be? If there's a secret that's upsetting you or that's bothering you, you don't have to reveal it to the people or person you're keeping it from, but you do want to talk about it with the third party, whether it's someone face to face, over the phone, over the internet, another person can give you something that you could just not find on your own. There's no way to get on your own.

Starting point is 00:59:25 Emotional support that comes from other people, advice and guidance, new perspectives, a different way of thinking about it. That comes from other people. It's so hard to find a different way and more helpful way of thinking about something on your own. But anyone else can do that. And it makes this huge world a difference.

Starting point is 00:59:44 Other people think differently than you do. And that proves so helpful. Just a simple conversation, a single conversation can make a world of difference. Yeah, so much truth to that. Well, Michael, your book comes out today. What a great job. Incredible work you have here.

Starting point is 01:00:02 Obviously, I'll put it in the show notes. If a listener, though, wants to know more about you, how can they do that? They can go to michaelslapian.com where there's some more that you can learn about our secrecy research and the book of course, or you can go to keepingsecrets.org where you can fill out a survey of the 38 categories of secrets and look at which secrets

Starting point is 01:00:21 we're kept more across gender and age and how you compare to different folks. Well, Michael, thank you so much for joining us today and I can't wait to see where this research goes in the future. Great, thank you. What a fascinating interview that was with Dr. Michael Slepian.

Starting point is 01:00:38 And I wanted to thank Crown Publishing Group, Penguin Random House and Michael for giving us the honor of helping him launch his new book. During today's episode, I brought up a number of previous episodes, including episode 19, on the importance of the power of choice. My interview with Susan Cain, which was episode 121, the interview with Liz Fossland, episode 128,

Starting point is 01:01:00 and my solo episode 124 on how you create a balanced life. And if you're new to the show, or you would just like to introduce this to a friend or family member, we now have episode stutter packs both on Spotify and on the PassionStruck website. These are collections of your favorite episodes that we've organized into convenient topics, such as entrepreneurship, romance and relationships, overcoming adversity, and so much more. Please just go to passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started.

Starting point is 01:01:30 And if there is a guest like today's that you would like to see me interview or topic that you wanna hear me cover on my momentum Friday episodes, please just reach out to us at momentum Friday at passionstruck.com now. Go out there yourself and become passionstruck. Thank you so much for joining us. The purpose of our show is to make passion go viral.

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Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Michael Slepian on the Secret Life of Secrets: How Do We Trust Others With Our Secrets EP 146

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