A secret is an odd thing. You can’t see or touch it, and it doesn’t take up space in the physical world. Yet you can carry it around for years, decades even, until it “weighs you down” so palpably that you need to “get it off your chest.” Pretty heavy words for the ethereal contents of your mind.
Michael Slepian, an associate professor at Columbia Business School and one of the world’s leading experts on secrecy, was first drawn to the subject via these metaphors. Were they mere figures of speech? Or, he wondered, do the things we hide truly feel like a sack of rocks, a tangible burden?
The question is how an idea acquires such mass. The answers offer a roadmap for all of us, who must decide every day what to withhold and what to disclose — and how to live with our decisions.
Studying Secrets
Slepian asked two groups of people to think about a secret (big in one case, small in the other). Then, he showed them an image of a grassy hill and asked how steep it appeared.
In reality, the slant was just 25 degrees, but even a knoll seems formidable under the strain of psychic baggage. On average, the small-secret camp saw a strenuous 33-degree slope, while the big-secret camp saw a veritable cliff of 46 degrees — their perceptions were distorted, like fatigued hikers who imagine the summit receding even as they climb closer.
“They made judgments as if they were physically encumbered,” Slepian explains, and for all intents and purposes, they were.
The Weight of Lies
In 1995, Julie Lane and Daniel Wegner, psychologists at the University of Virginia, invented a secret: the word mountain. (Not quite tabloid-worthy, but good enough for government work.)
They asked people to keep this target word hidden while someone tried to extract it from them and to simultaneously memorize a nine-digit number. As expected, it took cognitive effort not to spill the beans, and thus, participants struggled more than normal to recall the numbers.
“Secrecy,” the researchers wrote, “is hard work.”
Fascinating results, but they go only so far. “Mountain,” being an arbitrary word, lacked the emotional stakes of a genuine secret. And its lifespan was unrealistic — the typical secret gets kept for a decade. Back then, however, the orthodox view regarded secrecy as concealment in social interaction, a definition that forced experimenters into contrived scenarios.
Nevertheless, when Slepian came across Lane and Wegner’s paper two decades later, he found a nugget of unorthodoxy, a one-off line pointing the way to a paradigm shift: “Secrecy is something one can do alone in a room.”
Following their lead, he realized that rumination is actually secrecy’s default form. However taxing it may be to monitor yourself for leaks in conversation, you don’t often have to; the amount of time people spend dwelling on their secrets is wildly out of proportion to the time they spend actively hiding them. A secret still requires another person, someone to keep it from.
“But,” Slepian says, “a lot of what happens is in your own head.”
This is where the true burden lies. Until we reveal a secret, it remains unfinished business, and the brain won’t stand for unfinished business. It keeps spinning the matter around, rehashing, and searching for solutions.
“Our minds return to things where there's some work to do, some action to take,” Slepian says. And all the while these intrusive thoughts distract from the world right in front of us.
Read More: The Science of Spotting a Liar
Mapping Secrets
Imagine a 3D cube. Every secret, whatever its subject, can be placed somewhere inside that cube — given coordinates, so to speak — based on three factors: whether we perceive it to be immoral, whether it involves other people, and whether it’s related to our goals.
These are the “dimensions of secrecy,” the basic patterns of categorization that emerged when Slepian asked people to rank dozens of secrets based on their similarities. Collectively, he writes, they “hold the key to understanding how our secrets hurt us, and how we should, in turn, cope with those challenges.”
When we’ve done something wrong (like gambling away a child’s college tuition), we feel ashamed, and that shame can lead to a sense of low self-worth; when our secrets are solitary (like mental health struggles), we feel disconnected from others; and when they don’t serve some goal (like cheating to pass a class), we’re unable to find clarity, since they’re rooted in emotion rather than logic.
Any given secret lies somewhere along the continuum for each dimension, and its position determines how it affects our wellbeing. Yet, according to Alisa Bedrov, a senior research analyst at the University of Utah, how large a secret looms is ultimately subjective.
“I think that depends on how much emotional and mental space they give that secret,” she says.
For example, a secret can usually be reframed more productively. If you deem it immoral, that’s fine — resolve not to repeat the same mistakes. If it feels isolating, consider how it might be benefiting others (though such secrets are perhaps the best candidates for sharing). If you can’t see the rationale for keeping it, well, look harder.
As Slepian put it, “Recognize that you have your reasons.” Confession may be what you need in the end, but these strategies can make the interim more bearable.
Read More: The Biology of Stress in Your Body
Where Secrets Come From
At this moment, odds are you’re juggling 13 secrets — the average from a 2017 study by Slepian and his colleagues, Jinseok Chun and Malia Mason. They may involve finances, or acts of theft, or infidelity — these are some of the most common categories. Topping the list, a full third of the 600 respondents admitted to hiding romantic thoughts about someone other than their partner.
How did we become such secretive creatures? The crucial cognitive advance was likely theory of mind, the recognition that other people have different beliefs, desires, and intentions from our own. It’s what allows us to think, “I know something you don’t know.”
Even some animals have this ability, though their use of it is often comically naive, as described in Slepian’s book The Secret Life of Secrets. When a subordinate male chimpanzee gets caught mating with a female — strictly forbidden by the alpha male — he simply covers his genitals, thinking that’s enough to conceal the deed.
A human child’s first attempts at secrecy are hardly more sophisticated; they deny having eaten the cookie lying through chocolate-stained teeth. But gradually, they improve, especially once secrets become useful in social life. Friends start exchanging furtive whispers, Bedrov says, “in the same way that if you like someone, you share a toy with them.”
When Bedrov first came to this field, she had a bone to pick with secrets. In her experience, they didn’t seem to serve much purpose beyond ripping apart families and friendships.
“I almost wanted to prove that keeping secrets was always bad,” she recalls, laughing. But the more she learned, the more she came to see their utility.
It turns out secrets bond us together as much as they isolate us. In a study published last November, Bedrov showed that people feel closer to friends with whom they’ve recently traded confidential information — although keeping a secret might be painful, sharing it builds emotional connection like nothing else can. Revelation, as Slepian put it, is “one of the most profound acts of intimacy that you have available to you.”
Read More: What Makes a Person Trustworthy? Science May Provide Some Clues
To Tell or Not to Tell
Still, opening up isn’t easy. We’ve all been driven to desperation by conflicting urges — to tell or not to tell. If your secret doesn’t affect anyone else, it’s often best to let it out by confiding in someone you trust. Assuming you’re not a serial killer, they’ll almost certainly respond with compassion, offering support and advice.
Things get trickier when the secret does affect another person. Confession might ease your mind but at the expense of burdening another. Is it better to spare them the truth? Say you drunkenly cheat on your partner during a work trip.
“If this was a one-time thing,” Slepian writes, “this stone might be better left unturned.”
That said, he notes that relationships come with an expectation of honesty. In one study, he asked 300 people whether they’d want their partner to confess in the above scenario, and 77 percent said yes. And if there’s a chance they could find out on their own, it may be even more important to come clean while you can.
In short, the answers aren’t always straightforward. But, at least for starters, you can have your secrets and unload them, too. By talking to a trusted confidant, you get an outside perspective without committing to a course of action.
Even if you bottle them up forever, there’s a larger sense in which you nevertheless share your secrets with billions of people — Slepian’s cross-cultural studies have shown that humans from diverse cultures all around the world have roughly the same number and the same kinds.
“We’re all in it together,” he says. “You’re not alone in the secrets you keep.”
Read More: Why the Illuminati and Other Secret Societies Are So Intriguing
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The cognitive consequences of secrecy.
Associate professor at Columbia Business School. Michael Slepian
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition. Identifying the Dimensions of Secrets to Reduce Their Harms
Senior research analyst at the University of Utah. Alisa Bedrov
Journal of personality and social psychology. The experience of secrecy
Personal Relationships. Just between us…: The role of sharing and receiving secrets in friendship across time
Cody Cottier is a contributing writer at Discover who loves exploring big questions about the universe and our home planet, the nature of consciousness, the ethical implications of science and more. He holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and media production from Washington State University.
