When you consider that the point of secrets is to keep them-keep them close, keep them safe, keep them inside-it makes sense that the primary way we experience secrets is alone. “Just because the goal of the secret is to hide it, that doesn’t mean the secret is only happening during the brief moments of when you need to hide it,” he says.Ī Lesson for Ravens: Don’t Eat the Tortoises Thom van Dooren
Even if it never comes up, even if you never have to actively hide it, it’s still a secret. What makes a secret a secret, Slepian and his colleagues contend, is that it’s something you intend to hide from one or more other people. “We actually don’t encounter many situations where we have to hide our secrets relative to all the times a secret will just come into our thoughts, and intrude upon our thinking,” says Michael Slepian, a professor of management at Columbia Business School and the lead author on this paper. Instead, what seems to affect people much more is how often they think about the secret. But in this paper, the actual act of hiding-the moment a person makes up a lie, or changes the subject, or simply omits certain information from a conversation-proved to be only a minor part of the experience of having a secret. Much of the research on secrecy that’s already been done focuses on concealment: People interact in a lab, and one person is trying to keep something from the other. The most common secrets that people shared with no one else were: extra-relational thoughts (thinking something romantic or sexual about someone other than your partner), romantic desire, sexual behavior, and lies. The researchers asked participants if they were keeping any of 38 different common categories of secrets which ranged from infidelity to financial secrets to secret hobbies. These stats come from a new paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which looked at more than 13,000 secrets over 10 different studies. Five of them are secrets they’ve never told another living soul. The average person is keeping 13 secrets right now.
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