“For decades, secrecy research focused on the effects of concealment. But he couldn’t find much research on how people thought about secrets outside those conversations. Typical studies looked at interactions between two people while one of them tried to hide something from the other. “I wondered if it was just a linguistic thing that people do, or if it reflected something deeper,” he says.ĭigging into the secrecy literature, he found that most existing research focused on the effort involved in keeping a secret. He had been researching metaphor-looking at the ways people use language about physical experiences to describe abstract concepts-and he became intrigued by the metaphor of being “weighed down” by a secret. Slepian got his start studying secrets indirectly. Yet until recently, psychological scientists hadn’t spent much time exploring how keeping secrets affects us. Almost everyone has something to hide (though, of course, not all secrets are of the deep, dark variety). Secrets are a universal human phenomenon. “When people confide in us, we take it as an act of intimacy that can bring us closer,” he adds. On the bright side, those shared confidences can be a boon to bonding, he’s found ( Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol.

The more people are preoccupied by that secret, or feel they have to hide it on behalf of the confidant, the more burdensome it is,” he says. “The bad news is that when people share their secrets with us, we feel like we have to guard them. Being confided in is a double-edged sword, says social psychologist Michael Slepian, PhD, an associate professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School who studies the psychology of secrets. Can I tell you a secret?” The next time someone asks you that question, you may not want to say yes.

Keep your secrets