Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 367: The Price of Secrecy | Michael Slepian

Episode Date: July 28, 2021

This episode is all about secrets.  Did you know that there are 38 categories of secrets—and statistically, according to Michael Slepian, you probably have about 13 of them right now? Slepian is the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Associate Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. He studies the psychology of secrets — and how keeping secrets affects our social life and work life, particularly as it pertains to trust and motivation. In this conversation we dive into common misunderstandings about secrets, the hardest part about having secrets, the toll secrets take (both physically and psychologically), how other people can help us handle our secrets in a healthier way, and the impact of societal systems and structures on our secret keeping. (One thing to note: There are brief references to abuse and other traumatic events that some people keep secret.) If you don't already have the Ten Percent Happier app, download it for free wherever you get your apps: https://10percenthappier.app.link/download-app. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/michael-slepian-367 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, today on the show we're talking about secrets, what we commonly misunderstand about secrets and why there is such a high price both physically and psychologically to having secrets. Did you know that there are 38 categories of secrets and statistically,

according to my guests today, you probably have about 13 of them right now. Michael Sleppian is the Sanford C. Bernstein and co-associate professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School. He studies the psychology of secrets and how keeping secrets affects our social life and our work life, particularly as it pertains to trust and motivation. He has studied the consequence of keeping secrets,

including how they change our behavior, judgment, and actions. And in this conversation, we talk about the hardest part of having secrets and the toll secrets take. How other people can help us handle our secrets in a healthier way. The difference between shame and guilt and the benefit of knowing that difference, the implications of his research for managing teams and the impact of societal systems and structures on our

tendency to keep secrets. Just to say quickly, there are some brief references to abuse and other traumatic events that some people keep secrets. So just a heads up on that. If you're a long time listener, you've heard me talk many, many times about our companion meditation app. You might even be a little sick of it. So you might ask, why does Harris keep talking about this? If I want to meditate, can I just go on YouTube and search for a guided meditation for free or sit in silence on my

own or use another app? Well, first of all, yes, all of that. You can do all of those things. There are many different ways to learn how to meditate. And if you've already found one or more ways that works for you, that's great. Keep going with it. However, I do think there's nothing special, if I do say so myself, about the relationship between what we do here on the podcast, interviewing world renowned experts, getting their take on issues that impact our minds on a day-to-day basis, and the app where we share practices specifically chosen to help you apply the lessons you learn here on the podcast. There's a kind of deliberate symbiosis.

In our conversation a few weeks ago, the meditation teacher, Seb and A. Salassi, hit on something key about this relationship. Let me just play you a quick quote from her. I'm a big proponent of what I would call integrating study and practice. So combined with our practice or what we call insights, that's why this tradition is called insight is these aha moments and you're so great at articulating that and bringing people on to kind of discuss that, like what is it that we're learning and then how do we kind of

re-incorporate that back into the practice? I will be honest, it makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable hearing Seb praise my interview skills. She may or may not be right about that. But what I do think she articulates brilliantly is why we're so gung-ho about the before-mentioned symbiosis between the work we do here on the podcast and the work that we do over on the app. Practice and study work best in concert because you're working several parts of the mind at once. And that's how I learned from my teachers, you know, engaging my prefrontal cortex through reading study, work best in concert because you're working several parts of the mind at once. That's how I learned from my teachers, you know, engaging my prefrontal cortex through reading books or articles or having conversations.

I mean, those articles and books were recommended or sent directly to me by Seb. But then also doing the practices that helped me sort of integrate the wisdom into deeper parts of my mind and my body. And that's really the experience we're striving to bring you here at 10% happier. The wisdom of experts explained in a relatable way, alongside practices that help you apply what you've learned. So I encourage you to give it a try

by downloading the 10% happier app for free, wherever you get your apps. So end of pitch, but thanks for listening. Michael Sleppy and thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. Let me ask the most obvious question in the world. Why secrets? How did you get so interested in that? Not in a direct way, in a rather indirect way. And I think that's proved to help us learn a lot more about secrecy than was the original plan. I was originally in grad school interested

in studying metaphor and the ways in which people use it to better understand abstract concepts. One such example of many was people have this curious way of describing secrets as if they carry physical weight, as if you carry a secret around with you, as if it can be burdensome and way you down. And so a long time ago, now, the question was, you know, why do people use this language? Does it reflect something more than just figurative speech?

Do people actually feel as if a secret can burden them? And so we ran some studies where we asked people to think about a secret. They were keeping and it did look like when people were thinking about a secret that they were keeping, they acted in the same way as folks who were carrying physical burden would. So they judged Hills as steeper as if it would require more effort to walk up them. They judged distances as far there as if it it required more effort to traverse a distance. As if the secret was sort of holding you back or compromising your resources. What was funny about those studies is we were seeing a burden from a secret even in a moment when the participant was not hiding it. And that sort of changed the course of where this research has

gone in the past 10 years. That a secret can burden you even when you don't have to hide it in a specific moment. I see. I was confused. It can't be a secret if you don't have to hide it, but what you mean is literally wasn't relevant to the current situation. Yeah. Our secrets can affect us in far more manners and ways, and even during the moments, or especially during the moments when we are not hiding them.

When you're hiding a secret, you're just making sure you don't say it. That's not so bad. It's all the other moments where the secret can come back and sort of return to your thoughts. What's going on here? Why do secrets weigh us down so much? Is it an interesting question because you can imagine an alternate universe where secrets is not hard, right? You don't want to mention something, you just don't. Something's on your mind that you don't want people to know about it. You just don't tell it to them. It's not so easy, though.

And so understanding why we don't live in that world, I think. You could see a number of ways that things change when you have a secret. If you have a secret and something really important to you and you're not talking to other people about it, you're alone with that secret. You're not going to find the best path forward if you're just thinking about it on your own. You're not going to find healthy ways of thinking about it. Those come from conversations with other people. And so it turns out to be less about the moment of hiding and more about what it means to be

living with a secret alone with a secret. So this gets us into a little bit gooey, but nonetheless, really true and relevant and important areas around very few ways to talk about this without lapsing into cliche, but sort of being true to yourself, being literally being true to yourself, being vulnerable, being open. Am I hunting in the right direction here? Absolutely. People feel inauthentic for having a secret from the people around them. And it turns out, it doesn't matter how much you hide it.

It's the more you find yourself thinking about that secret, the more you feel inauthentic for having it. So what do you recommend? Because I can think of secrets in my own life. I mean, I've divulged a lot of secrets and I can tell you it feels, but I thought when I wrote a book about having a drug problem and having panic attack as a result of that,

that I was gonna be dead, but it turned out to be just the opposite. It was completely invigorating. And it felt like, yeah, I'm so much less to high. I felt freer in my public movements and private movements, but I wasn't really hiding it privately. But in public, you know, as a news anchor, I just felt much more at ease because I was really being myself. And yet, there are things in my life that I don't want to divulge publicly or privately

because I feel like it would create too much pain. Yeah, so that's where things get complicated, right? Other people are part of this. As you're trying to decide whether to reveal something or not, you might have a concern, well, if I reveal this to my partner, this could hurt their feelings or it could damage our relationship or destroy our relationship. And you know, when that's the consequences of revealing your secret, it makes a lot of sense.

You'd consider other things before that. And so what do you do? There's actually a really easy way out of this kind of conundrum, which is just talk to someone else. You don't have to reveal the secret to the person you're hiding it from, but you know, if you choose carefully,

and if you choose the right person, you can get so much help while it still remains a secret. How do you put this to work in your own life? I try not to have secrets. And when I do, I try to be sure to talk about it with at least someone. I try not to have a secret that only I know. If you don't reveal it to the person in question though, aren't you still keeping a secret from that person

and can it not play a sort of insidious role in your relationship? Right. And so these are the hard ones. You know, maybe your relationship could withstand the revelation or maybe your partner would say, I recognize this wasn't easy for you to tell me, and I'm glad that you felt like you could trust me that we could handle this together. If you think that's a possible way forward,

then maybe it is the kind of thing that you're better off talking about. Difficult conversations are never easy, but they don't necessarily get easier by sort of putting them off. They probably, in fact, get harder. And so if you're struggling with, when's the right time to reveal it? How do I reveal it?

Again, someone else can really help you sort of come up with a game plan for what's the right time to reveal it, how do I reveal it? Again, someone else can really help you sort of come up with a game plan for what's the right way forward. Other people are such fantastic resources, and it's so easy to forget that when you're used to not talking about something. I'll give you an example. This is not super loaded, but it just seems apropos. But one of the things I do in my job is talk to younger employees about their jobs. And one of the young staffers that I was talking to recently was telling me about the fact that he had a new job and he felt very insecure about the fact that there were things that he was being asked to do that he didn't actually know how to do. It wasn't

that he's not smart, he's very smart. It was that he literally hadn't been trained on these technical programs to edit video tape. And I said, the first thing is do trust your boss. Yes, got to go tell them ASAP. And he did it and he got trained and he feels so much more confident, this spillover effects were dramatic beyond just the acute issues related to his job responsibilities. He found himself feeling more comfortable speaking up in editorial meetings, et cetera, et

cetera. It really lifted a weight. That example sort of really nicely illustrates that some secrets do have a timeline where maybe sooner is better. You got the information he needed sooner and that would be really helpful. And certainly if your situation is that you're trying to decide what do I do with this thing that might get worse as you wait longer, it's sort of that's one clue that maybe start talking to somebody about this sooner and to get just another perspective if you're not talking about

This thing that's in your life with other people you're just stuck with your one perspective on your own And it won't be challenged in a way that you want it to be challenged Yeah, in some ways the net result of your research and I want to dive into some more of the nitty-gritty of it But seems like the huge takeaway is talk to other people. Social connection is important. Yes. On the one hand, it feels so obvious, but on the other hand, people don't do it. Do you find that men are tougher nuts to crack here than women? In thinking about gender differences,

one thing that we've looked at is related to this question you're asking, is there some sort of different rate of secrecy? And it doesn't look like there's different rates of secrecy across men versus women, but they do seem to confide secrets and others differently. And this is this point we're talking about before. If you have a secret that you're not telling person A, you can talk to person B about it.

It's still secret from person A. So you can confide a secret in the second person while still maintaining secrecy from the original person. And it seems that women can find their secrets more often and then do men, men are more likely to have a secret entirely to themselves. And I think what's happening probably there is to get help to talk about a secret. That's a request for help and some man are maybe not explicitly.

The require is sort of opening yourself up and making yourself vulnerable and seeking others' support. And some of those things are tied up with gender stereotypes. Yeah, it's like why men won't stop to ask for directions. I first stumbled upon your work because I read a reference to it in a book by Sharon Salzburg, the great meditation teacher. She wrote a book, she's written many books, a book in question here, it's called Real Love. And I can't remember the exact context, but she was talking about a study you did with gay men.

In this study, we were trying to sort of get at the sense of, you know, the meaning behind these actions really matter as in what makes it a secret heart is not sort of the technical aspects of holding it back in conversation, but what it means to be holding it back. And so in this study, we recruited a sample of gay men and they were in one of two conditions. In both conditions, they were talking to an interviewer who was asking some questions and they were told that this is a study on impression formation. And we're going to show your video recordings to other people and there is going to make some judgments about you.

And we're going to ask you to try to hide some part of yourself from them when we record this video and one group of participants was told to whatever they did to not reveal their sexual orientation. The other group of participants was told to not reveal their extroversion and we got a little lucky here because we were hoping that our participants would identify as extroverted and almost all did all but one. And what's nice is some of the nonverbal features of sexual orientation in men and extroversion are similar or at least stereotypically so expressiveness is sort of common to both of those.

And so we thought asking them to sort of hold back their extroversion, they might do something similar in their nonverbal behavior, but the meaning is totally different. And sure enough, for the folks who were concealing their sexual orientation and follow up, supposedly the study was over, and someone was just walking by the room and said, hey, could you help me move

some of those stacks of journals over there? And the folks who just concealed their sexual orientation were less inclined to help, as if they felt burdened or fatigued by having gone through the exercise of concealing their sexual orientation. So interesting. Do you have a sense of what the physiological mechanism is there?

So the short answer is that we already know concealing secrets is stressful. At least anecdotally, people will say it's kind of stressful to hide something back in the moment if not awkward or uncomfortable. But we've found in our own research, it's even stressful to just simply think about a secret.

And we've seen that even with our psychophysiology, we see sort of the markers of feeling sort of aroused and stressed by just simply having to think about your secret. We've established in the course of this conversation that one of the big answers here, if not the big answers, you know, talk to other human beings. However, I suspect you're not advising us to literally just spout our secrets all the time to anybody who cares to listen. That's correct. The person you choose matters quite a bit.

And so we've done research on what people are looking for in a confidant. So I can tell you what people find very helpful and that usually will align with what you'll find helpful. People are more likely to confide in people that they see as compassionate, empathic and caring and kind and warm. People also like to confide in people who are assertive, someone who might push you to do something after you tell them what the problem is. Someone who just gives you the push that

you might need. Those are things that people like in a confinant. There's some things that people find less helpful in a confinant, which is mere politeness. So someone who's just more concerned with sort of social norms and rules, people don't find to be very valuable and confident. And then also folks who are highly social and extroverted and bubbly, happy, go lucky. People tend to also not to like to confide in those folks either, whether maybe they think they'll blab, talk about their secret or have too many connections with people that you know.

And it does turn out that the more you have overlapping networks, if your secret is about someone in that network, you're asking a lot to sort of could fight a secret to that person, because now they have to keep the secret on your behalf. And so what this all adds up to is you should look for someone who will be helpful, but also someone you can trust your secret with, someone who can keep their

mouth shut. The interesting thing is you don't need a very positive response to feel better. In fact, even a lukewarm response from confiding a secret we find is seen as helpful, and makes people feel better. That's all it takes, because you're like, okay, I said it, you know, they told me it was fine. You know, maybe they weren't the most helpful, but it still feels good to have this conversations. And so someone who will have that helpful conversation for you and will be discreet will be very helpful. Have you looked at in your research what, if any any benefits there are for the confidant? Yeah, so there are both benefits and costs.

So the cost is you might treat the secret as if it were your own. If someone confides a secret in you and it's about like your best friend, like now you have to hide the secret from them. Now the secrets could be on your mind and we find even having another person's secret on your mind can feel burdensome, but there is a good too. People understand that confiding a secret as an act of intimacy and an expression of trust and you're making yourself vulnerable signals a lot of trust for that person. I guess another cost would be, I know somebody who is perceived to be and is genuinely compassionate.

As a consequence, a lot of their time is spent talking to people about their feelings. And that can, you know, just prevent this person from doing their own work. Does that add up to you? That sounds totally right to me. It's interesting to think about who those individuals are. There is this term emotional labor that's used more in the context of certain professions require a lot of emotional labor, but you can imagine someone because they're so compassionate and caring and such a warm resource that they sort of take on more burden of other people's secrets. I can totally see that that they have sort of an extra emotional labor to work through

because they're such an attractive confidant. And yet I found in my own life that, well, I do sometimes worry about the cost to my time, worry so much about having to carry somebody else's secret because I guess maybe nobody has ever told me something is so burdensome that I just, it's weighed me down. But the feeling of being useful, of being trusted, the intimacy that's created to me, just my end of one here, that being confided in the benefits seemed to vastly outweigh the costs. I think so too.

And you know who will work as a continent and who won't. Like, you'll choose the right person. And it doesn't take much. The response has to be very negative for you to feel it has backfired. Can you just take us on a stroll through your research, what the findings have been, how it's morphed over time? The original insight was that it seems to be that there's something burdensome about secrets

other than the moment of when you're hiding it. And so what is the nature of that burden? And when does it affect us? We see that first of all, people report having their mind wander and return two thoughts of their secrets much more frequently than they actually have to conceal their secrets much more frequently, then they actually have to conceal their secrets.

And so even though the whole point of having a secret is to conceal it whenever required, that actually turns out to be a relatively infrequent experience. First of all, no one's asking about your secrets. No one's asking if you've ever cheated on your partner. No one's asking if you've ever cheated on your Texas. These aren't sort of normal questions to ask people. And they're only relevant to some of your conversations. And so the actual task of keeping a secret, even though that seems to be the sort of stressful part, one where it's going to hurt you the most,

it just doesn't happen very often. But you have all the time in the world to think about your secret on your own. And if you're choosing to be alone with the secret, you're guaranteeing that you're gonna have to think about it once in a while. If you're choosing not to talk about this thing with other people, there's only one venue you're leaving sort of leftover to work through this, your own mind. And the bad news is you're not gonna do as good of a job

if you choose to do it alone. Almost certainly it will be less effective and less healthy than if you sort of brought someone else into the conversation. When you find your mind returning to thoughts of your secret, we see there's sort of ways in which that is more helpful and ways in which that can be more harmful.

For example, the more folks are really focused on the past when thinking about their secrets, those are definitely more people at risk for these harms of secrecy. You can't change the past when thinking about their secrets, those are definitely more people at risk for these harms of secrecy. You can't change the past, and so sort of perseverating on that past is probably not going to get you anywhere very useful when folks are more thinking about the present and the future thinking about secret seems to be more productive and less counterproductive. Because we also tend to feel bad about these things that we're keeping secret. This is why we're keeping them secret in the first place.

We're concerned that people will judge us negatively or we're a surmore harshly. Because we often feel bad about our secrets, there's these two emotions that are quite frequently part of the story, shame and guilt. Folks sometimes use those words interchangeably, but psychologists have this important distinction

that they make where people who feel shame, they think of themselves like I'm a bad person. Whereas when you feel guilt You think I've done something wrong my behavior is bad So my behavior is bad as guilt. I'm a bad person as shame and the problem with feeling like a bad person The problem with feeling ashamed is there's no magic pill that Turns someone from a bad person to a good person. If you feel like you're a bad person, it's really hard to understand how you can change that. So folks will feel helpless and powerless to change if they feel ashamed.

But we've found it. We can change that easily. If we just ask you to stop thinking about how this reflects on who you are, it doesn't have to be that way. Think about how this reflects on who you are, it doesn't have to be that way. Think about how this reflects on your actions. Your behavior may be wrong, and if that's the way you're thinking about it, that's good, because you don't have to act that way next time,

you can do something differently next time, and that's why it's really helpful to understand to sort of evaluate your behavior negatively rather than yourself. And when we sort of help people understand that distinction and recognize, no, it was my action that was wrong, they feel better. So the good news about this distinction is we can just simply point it out to our participants. And when we ask them to recognize that they need not think about this as reflecting poorly on who they are as a person when we get them

to instead think about, this just reflects poorly on, you are as a person when we get them to instead think about this just reflects poorly on something I did once. That makes people feel more capable and coping with the secret. They recognize that they can do something different going into the future. So when we sort of push our participants away from shame and toward guilt, much more healthier outlook follows, they feel more confident and they feel like they know a path forward. Much more of my conversation with Michael Slepian right after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellissi. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder

E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them.

It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Britney. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Welcome back. Two heads up as we head into the second half of this conversation. First heads up, this conversation was recorded during a time when COVID rates were very high in the United States. So that's some helpful context for our conversation about the intersection of secrecy and COVID. And also toward the end of the interview, you're going to hear one of our producers,

DJ Kashmir Chine-In. So you'll hear DJ asking a great question of our guest. I'd like to get the producers into the game once in a while. So here we go once again with Michael Slepion. I'm curious what study design. I mean, you talked about the study of the game once in a while. So here we go once again with Michael Slepian. Curious what study design. I mean, you talked about the study of the gay men earlier, but how else do you study secrets in the lab? The in the lab part is something that I have a lot of thoughts on. If by in the lab, you mean physically in a lab space where we've sort of created a secret

from nowhere, you know, the sort of classic full experimental control, like there's one person in the room and you're trying to hide that, you know, from another person, kind of like this study I was describing earlier, I don't think that kind of study has very much to offer in terms of helping us really understand about our secrets. And the reason is that the lab studies are just too artificial. Not only are they too artificial, they're only going to tell you about the psychology of a secret born five minutes ago. You just can't get the real kind of weighty secret that we've been thinking of into the lab. You just can't. If you could, it would pose ethical problems. But you can't, anyway. You can't create a secret that

someone's had for 10 years in the laboratory, just impossible. And so the way I do my research is say, you know what, we're going to sacrifice experimental control and instead just learn about people's real secrets. We're going to ask people about the actual secrets they're keeping and we're going to learn how those secrets affect them day to day and how they hurt. And we've come up with this list of common categories of secrets that we use in our research. And it's a list of these 38 common experiences that people keep secret. And the average person from that list has 13 of those 38 categories of secrets.

97% of people have at least one of those categories of secrets right now. And so we ask not just about one of your secrets, but for each secret you have from this list, we look at these variables of interest. And so we're looking at the psychology of sort of all your secrets, both your big ones and your little ones, rather than sort of inventing them in the lab and looking at the effects of that. Can you walk us through some of the categories? You don't have to list all 38, but yeah,

you know, they're going to be exactly what you'd expect. A of secrets around. Sexual behavior, infidelity, mental health, a lot of discontent, discontent with your social life or your professional life or your physical appearance. There's a lot of secrets related to work, whether that's sort of poor performance or you're cheating in some capacity, things like that. Would imposter syndrome fit in here? That's an interesting one. So there's this gray area that sort of complicates things where for it to count as a secret, at least in my book,

you have to specifically intend for that information to remain unknown. And so there might be things that people don't know about you. But if the reason they don't know about you, but if the reason they don't know about those things is just they haven't yet come up in conversation and you'd be happy to discuss them if they were to, that would be different. Or it maybe it's something that people don't know about you and you wouldn't normally just tell anyone, but you would tell someone that you felt close to and that sort of privacy. For it to count as a secret, you have to really specifically not want other people to know.

And so for example, if you felt like you had this impostor syndrome and it was really important to you that people not know that if you really felt like you were holding it back from them, then that would definitely be a secret. So if you had impostor syndrome and you didn't want anybody, it worked to know, but you did talk about it to your partner or shrink, then it wouldn't be a secret. Oh, no, then it would still be a secret at work and weighing you down as a consequence. Yes, but then the good news is if you're talking about it with

those other people, they're going to give you some useful advice. So there could be a secret that you've told everyone at work, but not your romantic partner, right? So a lot of people can still know a secret, but as long as it's still unknown by someone else, then you're because you're keeping it that way, then it's still a secret. But as you said earlier, you can relieve some of the burden by talking to somebody even if you don't tell the aggrieved party. Exactly. And so in that case, I would describe that as confiding in a third party while maintaining secrecy from the original person. as confiding in a third party while maintaining secrecy from the original person. But I think the hard fact here is there may be times

where we really have decided that for our own safety or for the mental health somebody else, we're gonna keep a secret from the victim or whatever from the relevant party, we're gonna talk about it with others. Nonetheless, we're gonna be paying a cost. Even if we talk about it with others to reduce the cost. Right. And again, back to your data. So it sounds like the bulk of the data is from

direct interviews with actual human beings. Yes. And we engage those over the internet. So we don't do it in person because I think people are much more comfortable admitting to these things and sort of the anonymous internet space. And so people feel a little bit more comfortable in that environment. But yeah, it's mostly with Americans. And so there is this need for future research to understand, you know, what generalizes to other cultures or, you know, what doesn't. This goes back to the question of sort of being true to yourself or authenticity as the kids say,

keeping it real. Do you think we can tell when somebody's secretive or to put it another way? Do you think other people can tell when we're holding things back? So this is a really interesting question that I've recently been thinking about myself. And so there's a few different ways to think about this. If we're thinking about the studies in the lab, those studies where we bring two people into a room under some clever reason, have one person conceal something from the other person. When we're talking about those kinds of studies, what's interesting is that you can't tell.

People can't tell who's concealing, who's holding something back and who's sort of being honest if that's the comparison. And so, in some ways, people can't tell. In some ways, it would have to be this way because we're not mind readers, right? I can't know exactly what you're thinking unless you tell me. Now, if you're in a romantic relationship and you've been with someone for a while and you kind of know when something's bugging them, then it's a little bit different when you recognize, when you can see someone seems to not be fully opening up, I think you can tell that.

That doesn't mean they're necessarily keeping a secret, but you can see how those things are related. So, I get that there would be no secrets. There would be no point in even attempting to keep secrets if we were mind readers. And yet, you have established that there are psychological and physiological costs to having secrets, and that it can interrupt the sort of authenticity. So I'm just wondering, there must be some sort of social cost to being secretive in that people might not trust us

or that they're, animologically we can pick up when somebody's not all the way honest. That's a great question. You are right that if you're, you know, there's keeping a secret and that's sort of an isolated one thing I intend to keep this thing secret from these people. And then there's being secretive. And of course, being secretive means you're more likely to have more secrets. But when

folks are secretive, yeah, that is something that people can recognize that if someone is pretty closed off, that is noted. If someone sort of doesn't reveal a lot of information about their private life or just their thoughts and feelings, they'll seem both more closed off. And folks who are prone to secrecy in this way, they're also very reluctant to ever ask for help. They sort of feel like their problems are too great

to bring up with other people. So being secretive is especially harmful because it means you often don't get the support you need. You're sort of not opening up with people to the extent that others do. One thing that strikes me as potentially, I'm not all secrets, let's be honest, have to do with our own perceived misbehavior. You might keep secret that you were victimized. There are lots of things you could keep secret. But one potential fix, at least from a Buddhist perspective here, to some secrets would be

to lead as ethical a life as possible. I mean, it's often referred to as the bliss of lamelessness. Now perfection is not on offer here. I don't think, although I guess, I'm the man who made Buddhist superliving enlightenment would disagree with me, but nonetheless, I don't think from us unenlightened worldlings of it, we're going to be perfect, per se, but wouldn't one thing that would undercut the need for this rather, as you've demonstrated, sort of, noxious tool be to live as ethically as possible?

Yes. That would certainly help with the secrets that touch on sort of wrongs and harms and immoral behaviors. There's still, of course, the other secrets, secrets around sexual orientation that, you know, secrets around preferences, secrets around mental health and belief and ideology. There's still those secrets. Of course. And, like I said, you know, you may be the victim of a crime that you don't want to admit and some sort of abuse in your childhood. Many people keep that secret for lots of reasons that are understandable.

You talked about beliefs. What are your thoughts on secrets as it pertains to the current political environment? We've collected some data on that. Back in 2016, if we can all remember a world before Trump was elected president, at that time, like other folks, we thought Hillary Clinton was going to win that election. And we were really interested in something that was happening at the time because there is this sort of secret invitation only Facebook group that went up during that 2016 election or in advance of the 2016 election that was for people who supported Clinton.

But for whatever reason, felt like they couldn't voice that support publicly to people around them. And here was a group where you could feel safe voicing your political support. And so we designed this study in the lead up to the 2016 election, imagining that the prototypical person who was keeping their vote or political preference

or beliefs secret were going to be, essentially people who were secretly supporting Hillary Clinton, we thought we might see a lot of, for example, women in red states who didn't want to admit to their husband that they were going to vote for Clinton. We were very surprised when that was not the prototypical secret voter. We saw an unexpectedly very large proportion of Trump voters in our data, which is all the more remarkable because this was a context where people lean a little liberal from the population we were drawing

from. And so despite drawing from a slightly liberal population, when we specifically said, okay, we're interested in people who are secretly supporting one candidate, but telling people they're voting for someone else, those people were overwhelmingly Trump supporting. And what was interesting was that they were especially concerned for their reputations. And this was why they were keeping their 2016 vote for Trump secret. It says a lot about why potentially why polling problems exist until this day. Yeah, and I think this is part of that story. I think that story is complicated and super nuanced, but at least when we just put up an ad saying,

hey, we're really interested in folks who voted for one person, but didn't tell people about that or even told people they voted for someone else, that ad just pulled in a bunch of Trump voters. And we were super surprised that we could even get that many people to report those kind of preferences in this sort of liberal leaning population. And so who are these people keeping secrets from?

They're spouse, they're family, they're friends, people that they're very close to. And I think the one lesson from that research is these are people you can talk to. These are conversations people should be having, but they're not. How do you think about secrecy in the context of a global pandemic? I've also been thinking about that as well. I think what's interesting about this time right now is if you're engaged in some social activity, even if you're sort of following all the rules, even if it's a distance, and you're wearing a mask, if there's like a photo that goes up, maybe you don't want a photo to go up on Facebook because they're afraid of sending the wrong message.

And so I think people feel like they can't reveal potentially at these everyday behaviors and there's some potential concern about doing the wrong thing and sort of publicizing that. So we're being secretive now about breaking the quote unquote rules. Yeah, I think so. I think people are taking sort of little vacations

where they can and sort of trying to be hush hush about it. And I guess you would argue there's a psychological cost to that. Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of costs to that. That's actually just here at home, you know, my just students got in trouble for traveling and breaking the rules that they agreed on. The university rules, and so there's sort of real ramifications of sort of getting caught, too.

But this gets back to the ethical piece. Yeah. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions we carry about secrets and secrecy? I think the biggest misconception is that the way in which a secret hurts you is the stress of hiding it in conversation. And the reason why it's not helpful to have that idea, besides that it's wrong, is you're not understanding where the real harm is. If you don't know how your secret hurt you, it's going to be really hard to find a way forward or to reduce those harms if you don't really understand where they're coming from. So secrets create these sort of strange blind spots

because we're not talking about them, we don't understand them as well as we could and we don't even understand how they're hurting us. And so it's really helpful to understand no actually where your secret is hurting you. It's not about hiding it. It's about being alone with it. Because when you understand that, it suggests a very different path forward. I think you said having a secret is less an act

than a state of being. We know over and over because I've had so many, many social scientists on the show. And it just seems like the one of, if not the keys to human flourishing is social connection and anything you do that inhibits that is likely to have significant back draft. Yeah, the only way to connect with other people in this world is by sharing experiences

with them. That is what their connections are made out of. And so to hold back from that, you're sort of holding back from the primary way of connecting. Were you significantly more secretive before you dove into this world of research? I think so. I think I try to have fewer secrets. They often say research is me search. I thank you for not asking me to reveal you a secret.

I'm definitely not asking that. DJ, do you have anything? I mean, I have a personal question I've interested in. Go. Love it. Well, I just, so I hear Dan on this like concept that like living a more ethical life might reduce some secrets. And then I hear you, Michael, on the notion

that there's some that are kind of unrelated to that. And what I'm thinking particularly about what you were saying around sexuality or what you were bringing up down around abuse, like it feels like there are some pretty strong structural forces that are supporting secrecy. Like it's not just that people are making bad individual decisions. It's that like society is teaching us to be ashamed. I was

just wondering if that's a correct insight. If you could talk a little bit about beyond individual choices we can be making. Is there anything else we should be talking about here when we talk about the damage of holding this stuff inside? I think a really great example of this, So I think a really great example of this, the costs of holding certain conversations back, it's very easy to see with, for example, the Me2 phenomenon and the meaning that that has, it's enabled people to come forward in a way they felt they couldn't before. And so now we're having these conversations that we weren't having before and we should have. And so when people are keeping secrets, when people feel like they can't talk about something,

it sort of reduces some needed conversations that need to be had, they can really block meaningful change. I think that's very perceptive, really a wise question. I think we tend to think of secrecy as something has to do with individual decision making, but in fact, there are societal structures and structures

that incentivize us to actually not say things that would be healthy to say. In particular, I'm thinking about sexual identity, but there are lots of areas where we need to think about this issue structurally. Does that land for you? Yeah, yeah. In thinking about how to make people feel comfortable talking about these things, one of the unique challenges of having something that's a secret and that you want to talk about with other people, but for some reason, aren't,

if it's not the kind of thing that'll just come up in conversation, you have to bring it up. And that can be hard. That can be hard if it's not the kind of thing people talk about. I can also think about this as somebody who is in a leadership position at a company and within teams at that company, there's this concept of psychological safety,

where if everybody on the team, no matter where you fall in the hierarchy, feels comfortable speaking out, saying things that otherwise they might keep as a secret or hold as a secret, the team will function better. And so those of us in positions of authority need to really think about what incentives we're providing consciously or subconsciously. Yeah, how to create those feelings of safety to reveal something and sort of make yourself vulnerable and doing so and feel safe to do that. I was giving a talk recently to a business unit at a large Fortune 500 company and the head of that business unit opened up by talking about his own anxiety

and imposter syndrome and mentioned that he had mentioned this several times. I just think that kind of modeling of just basic humanity and frailty really incentivizes other people to actually be themselves. One of the easiest ways to make someone feel more comfortable opening up is you opening up to them. First, it feels very natural to sort of reciprocally exchange disclosures. Final question for me, you've dedicated your life as I understand it to the study of secrecy. What is the impact you hope it has on the world? The impact that I would hope for is we're bringing these secrets into everyday conversation

and helping people understand you're not alone in having secrets. It's in fact quite common. The average participant in my study has 13 secrets from this list of 38 that we have. And so, secrecy is incredibly common. And the kinds of secrets we keep are really similar to so we're all keeping the same kinds of secrets. You know, we're not alone

in that process. And so that's one thing, just understanding how common secrecy is and and that your experience is shared. And then helping people understand what's harmful about that experience, it may not be what you might have expected. It's not the moment when you have to bite your tongue. It's when you have to just be alone with a secret without others help. And helping people understand that the way forward is you don't have to reveal the secret to the person, but just getting some help from other people, feeling comfortable to talk about it and getting their guidance and advice and support.

Yeah, so it sounds like a more open world. Yeah, and you know, it's not that you have to reveal all your secrets tomorrow. It's okay to have some. It's just we probably have more than we need to. Michael, it's been a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to Michael. This show is made by Samuel Johns, DJ Cashmere, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartel, and Jen Poient with Audio Engineering by Ultraviolet. Audio and as always a hearty salute to my ABC

news colleagues, Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohan. We'll see you next time. and Josh Cohan. We'll see you next time. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.