[This is an ABC podcast]
Sana Qadar: Okay, here is the irony of all ironies; Michael Slepian researches the psychology of secrets, but what he didn't know until about a decade ago was that his family had a major secret that they were keeping from him, one they planned never to reveal, until, out of the blue, they did.
Michael Slepian: Yes, so I had just spent the entire day on interview at Columbia where I presented my research on secrecy, and at the very end of the day, close to midnight, I received a call from my dad, a missed call, and then I received a second missed call from my dad, and I'm thinking, oh no, something really tragic has happened for him to be calling me twice so late at night.
And then I called him back after this very long day and he proceeds to tell me that he is unable to have children. He is telling me that he is not biologically my father. You know, something like that is of course really surprising to learn but I was also wondering, well, why was this secret kept from me, who else knew? And it turned out that my entire family, everyone apart from me and my younger brother, had known this secret this whole time. I think that was even more surprising, just that our entire family had been keeping this secret for our entire lives.
Sana Qadar: You're listening to All in the Mind, I'm Sana Qadar. Secrets come in all shapes and sizes, from small and innocuous, to big and awful. Why do we keep them? What is it cost us when we do?
And so this secret was so secret that you didn't even know it existed. Like, there was no whispers or inkling that there was something hidden in your family, is that right?
Michael Slepian: Yes, I had no clue at all.
Sana Qadar: Today, the secret life of secrets.
What did you make of all that information at that time?
Michael Slepian: You know, I immediately thought, okay, first of all this is extremely surprising, but second of all it's okay. I really quickly thought about people that I'm close to and really good friends and I'm not genetically related to them, so to find out that my father is not my biological father, it's just like, well, who cares who has which genes, it didn't really bother me, it was the secret-keeping that was more troubling or more surprising.
Sana Qadar: And do you know why he chose that moment, that day, that time of night to ring you and tell you?
Michael Slepian: Yes, so what had happened was my brother found out the day before, that's another story, so he finds out, then my parents are, well, of course now I need to know too. Very sensibly, and I'm so glad that they did this, they waited until after my interview was over because it would have been so unbelievably distracting if they'd told me right before the interview. Could my dad have waited until the next morning? Maybe. But that was the reason.
Sana Qadar: Luckily, Michael aced the interview, and he is now a Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia University. He is also the author of the book The Secret Life of Secrets. As part of his research, he has looked at the most common secrets we keep, and family secrets, whatever they may be, make the list. Others on the list include secrets about romantic desire…
Michael Slepian: Issues around money and finances…
Sana Qadar: Mental health struggles…
Michael Slepian: Sexual behaviour…
Sana Qadar: A hidden belief, like about politics or religion or certain social groups…
Michael Slepian: Secret ambitions are also common.
Sana Qadar: There are 38 in total and they are based on the results of a survey he conducted of 2,000 Americans, but he has found similarities globally too, although there are also cultural differences which we will talk about a bit later, but in terms of what defines a secret, what makes it a secret as opposed to keeping something private, this is what he has to say:
Michael Slepian: It comes back to the intention. So there are plenty of things that people don't know about us but it's not because we are keeping them secret but more it's so that it's the private matter. So for a lot of people they might not talk about money with friends or they might not talk about sex, and it's not that there's details, there's financial details about our sexual experiences or secret per se, but it's just not the kind of thing we would talk about with someone that we weren't close to. But if someone close to us asked us something related to those issues we would probably be willing to talk about it, but if someone asked you something that if you were to answer you would reveal something that you intentionally want to hold back, you wouldn't reveal it, so that's when we sort of cross over the line to a secret. And so privacy, it's more of a reflection of how close someone needs to be for you to reveal something sensitive, whereas a secret is a very specific intention to withhold information.
Sana Qadar: And so you've got your own family story of the secret that was kept, but what do we know more generally about why we keep them?
Michael Slepian: For why, I think people at the end of the day feel like they are protecting something by keeping a secret, whether it's themselves or someone else.
Sana Qadar: And in terms of ambition versus infidelity, is the…the motivation would be different for the why there, right?
Michael Slepian: Yes and no, and so infidelity, when people keep it a secret, they are trying to protect themselves or protect someone else or their relationship. I think when people have an ambition that they keep secret, they are maybe a little embarrassed about the ambitiousness of it, or maybe they worry that they are not likely to achieve that ambition and that's why they don't want people to know about it. So I think they are still protecting something, the pursuit of the ambition.
Sana Qadar: And how long has research been done on secrecy, in keeping secrets, how far does the data go back?
Michael Slepian: It's something psychologists and social scientists have always been interested in, but for some reason it has really gone unstudied for very long time, and I think the reason why there has been so little work done on it until my own work is people have this misconception of what secrecy is, and prior researchers when they looked at secrecy, they defined it as an action of concealing information during a conversation. But I define secrecy as an intention to hold information back. And what's so important about that definition is the moment you intend to keep a secret is the moment you have a secret, well before you ever have the opportunity to hide it.
And also people rarely hide their secrets, we don't go around asking people, you know, have you ever cheated on your partner, you don't often get questions asked about your secrets, and so they don't frequently come up in conversation. It turns out that it's also not very difficult to hide secrets in conversation in most cases, you just don't reveal it in the conversation where you are talking about it. And people are kind of prepared for those moments. What they are not prepared for is all the times that their mind returns to the secret. So we see that the more people think about their secrets, just simply alone in their thoughts, the more that those secrets harm their well-being. And so just having to think about the secret on your own time turns out to be where the harm is. The more you think about this secret, the more ashamed you might feel, the more isolated you might feel or the more unsure or uncertain you might feel.
Sana Qadar: This finding was the result of a series of 10 studies Professor Slepian and his colleagues conducted which showed people confronted their secrets in their own thoughts far more than they did in conversations with others. To make that finding, these studies relied on self-reports from participants on how often their minds wandered to their secrets and how much that impacted their well-being. In total, they analysed more than 13,000 secrets from thousands of participants. And this cycle of rumination harms not only your mental well-being but it can potentially harm your physical health too.
Michael Slepian: Some of the research that came before me found that secrecy is related to poor physical health and things like anxiety and depression. So we've long known that secrecy, especially habitual secrecy, people who habitually keep secrets as a way to deal with problems rather than actually working on those problems have worse health, and so the question is always…well, people assume the answer was the hiding but now we are understanding that it's not…those harms may not come from moments of hiding but come from all the other moments.
For example, there is a study in the '90s that followed HIV-positive gay men who were keeping their sexual orientation a secret and they found that those who were less out had more rapid progression of disease and even died sooner, so that makes concealment…the sobering idea that concealment is deadly.
Sana Qadar: Do you know much about the effect the secret your parents were keeping had on them? Was it taxing for them to keep it or had they made peace with it and just hadn't really planned for it to come out until it did?
Michael Slepian: They didn't mean for it to come out, their intention was to keep it from us forever, but I think as we got older though it became more difficult because they started to consider whether they had made the right decision, whether we deserved the truth or whether it would be important for us to know. You can imagine situations where it would be useful to know that you do not know half of your genetic history. And so I think the secret for them became more taxing as we got older, not because they were more frequently having to hold it back in conversation but they had to return to the secret of their minds and wonder did we make the right decision here?
Sana Qadar: That raises an interesting point; do secrets have a tendency to come out over time, is that the general lifespan of a secret, it comes out?
Michael Slepian: That's a fascinating question that I definitely don't have the answer to. Some secrets people take to their grave, and I've heard some people share stories like that with me, these are children who learned that their parents kept this major secret and it never got revealed. So I think there are certain ones that don't, and I think there are some that are more likely to come out. Certainly if you have a secret that you think it's likely it could come out somehow or be learned without your telling, I think that's a good signal to you, that maybe you want to get out in front of it and reveal it on your own terms.
Sana Qadar: Yes, I was going to ask what do we know about why people sometimes confess their secrets? Is that part of it or are there other reasons as well?
Michael Slepian: Besides just wanting to get it off your chest, besides just wanting to not live alone with the secret anymore, I think the most common reason people will reveal a secret is so they can get help with that secret and see what someone else thinks and get the advice and guidance that they need or the emotional support that they need.
Sana Qadar: The act of confessing a secret is so interesting, so packed with anguish that it was the theme of an art project that Michael was involved in a few years back. It was called the Secret Telephone and it was based on an earlier project also about secret confessions that involved Post-it notes and subway stations. Here is the back story.
Michael Slepian: Back in 2016 there was this thing that really took off over here were the day after the US presidential election, it felt like the nation had never been so divided. There was this art installation by this guy Matthew Chavez, and he essentially just gave people Post-its so they could write out their thoughts and their feelings and put it on the wall, so this was occurring on subway stations in New York.
And at its height there were 50,000 Post-its in one of the subway stations, and it was just this amazing thing to walk by. And so I saw it myself, and it was just this huge dizzying display of these different Post-its in all these different colours, and then when you would look up close each one had this outpouring of emotion, and so Matthew Chavez, this was one of his projects under the umbrella that he calls Subway Therapy.
And so a few years after the 2016 election, I was in the subway walking through and I saw these black Post-its with a silver marker and he was calling it Sticky Notes Secrets, and I was like, oh my God, this is crazy, because I was researching secrets at the time of course. And so I at first took a few quick photos and then just kept walking, and then I realised, wait a minute, let me take a closer look at this, I turned around and started reading the Post-its more closely and that's when I saw Matthew Chavez there who was taking them down for the night. And I was like, 'Hey,' and so we started talking about secrets and then a couple of months later the Secret Telephone was born.
Secret Telephone: I feel lonely sometimes and depressed and no one knows it.
Michael Slepian: And the idea behind the Secret Telephone was just like these other projects that he was doing, to give people a space to vent or express themselves, so people who happened to stumble across the Secret Telephone, which we installed in different parks throughout New York, if you happened to stumble upon it you could pick up the phone, listen to other secrets people had previously shared or share your own.
Sana Qadar: These secrets were as varied as the people sharing them, some were sad…
Secret Telephone: I'm terrified of being by myself.
I've been cheating on my partner for four years.
Sana Qadar: Some were hilarious…
Secret Telephone: We were sitting in a closed window van, my friend came with us and he was like, 'Wow man, I think Wendy our dog…I think someone stepped in one of her shits, it really smells like shit in here.' And I knew it was me!
Sana Qadar: The rest, somewhere in between…
Secret Telephone: When I was dating my boyfriend I low-key had an affair with his mom.
Sana Qadar: And so what was your involvement in the project?
Michael Slepian: My involvement was I was sort of the secrecy consultant, and our hope was to eventually use it as a data collection source that still we are working on, but right now it's still pretty squarely in the realm of an art project.
Sana Qadar: And in terms of why all those people felt inclined to share their secret, was the element of anonymity, being able to get the secret off your chest but still not be known to be attached to it, was that the appeal? Why did people feel so up for sharing their secrets like this?
Michael Slepian: We get used to thinking about secrets in a very stereotypical way. There are these things that we hide from others in conversation, but people want to talk about their secrets. Why wouldn't they? If there is something that you feel alone with, of course you want to talk about it. You might not let yourself, that's what it means to keep a secret, but if you have this chance to do it anonymously with no negative effects that can come your way, people soon were lining up to share their secrets on the Secret Telephone, it was really surprising to see. But you're right, the anonymity is certainly part of it.
Sana Qadar: You're listening to All in the Mind, I'm Sana Qadar. Today, the secret life of secrets. And Columbia University professor Michael Slepian knows secrets very well, not just because they are the subject of his research but because of a family secret that was kept from him, that his father wasn't his biological father.
Michael Slepian: I was in my 20s when I learned that secret, like my parents had been keeping that for decades.
Sana Qadar: But whatever the subject matter of the secret or the context, Michael says they all have three fundamental dimensions.
Michael Slepian: What we see in our research is essentially there are three primary ways people think about their secrets, whether it is something they consider immoral and wrong, whether it's something that involves other people and whether it's something that is goal oriented, and the more we see our own behaviour or secret about that behaviour as immoral or wrong, the more likely we are to feel ashamed. So, immoral secrets are the ones that cause us shame.
Secrets that don't involve other people, so secrets that feel really individual or personal are secrets we feel more isolated with. And then secrets that aren't clearly tied to some goal, secrets that are more emotional in tone are ones that we feel unsure about or feel that we really lack insight into, and so we see that there is essentially three primary ways our secrets can hurt us, making us feel ashamed, isolated or uncertain.
What's nice about there being three different ways in which a secret can hurt you is very, very uncommon, where a secret is hurting you on all three dimensions, which means there's three ways in which a secret doesn't hurt you or does not have to hurt you, and when we show people that, when we point it out to them and help them find a way in which a secret is not hurting them, it helps them in terms of coping with the secret.
Sana Qadar: And in terms of your family secret, how did that fit in with the three dimensions you describe?
Michael Slepian: So, for me I'm not the one keeping the secret, it's my parents. I think for them that's the kind of secret where it's something that they felt really unsure about and uncertain, especially as we got older. When we were young, when we were really young, there was really no conversation to be had if we didn't understand what donor conception was, and so I think very early on they could feel really sure about their decision. But by the time we were adults I think that's when they started being unsure and feeling more uncertain as to whether they were doing the right thing.
Sana Qadar: Coming back to secrets more generally, are there cultural differences in terms of why we keep secrets or the kinds of secrets we keep or how likely we are to share them?
Michael Slepian: So, what's interesting…we are just doing this research now as well, and so one thing that is a little surprising is actually there aren't really big cultural differences in what we keep secret, and so it seems the common secrets that we've been talking about are surprisingly universal, but there are differences in how those secrets affect people in a way that varies with culture. And so, for example, more collectivistic cultures, folks who are in environments where they prioritise the group over the individual, they will feel more inauthentic when keeping a secret. So when having a secret from close others, it feels to those folks that they are violating some norm or rule of the relationship just to keep the secret.
And then another cultural variable we've looked at is this concept we call relational mobility, essentially, how much is it that you can choose who your relational partners are. In some cultures those are predetermined, it's the people in your immediate family or your immediate neighbourhood, whereas in other cultures you sort of choose your own folks. And so when people are in environments where you aren't really choosing your own relational partners because they are already based in these very tightknit communities, it turns out that those folks disclose less overall and keep more secrets and feel more isolated with their secrets.
And so we are still learning why these patterns exist, but essentially I think what we've learned so far is there's different ways to feel alone with a secret. And in some cases when you feel like you can't open up with the people around you, for whatever reason when you're local environment seems to not allow you to open up, that will feel lonely, and then for some reason your environment is more oriented toward the group, it feels inauthentic to keep a secret from those people in your group.
Sana Qadar: Right, so those of us living in the West, in the States or Australia, more individualistic sort of cultures where, if I'm understanding, we're less likely to feel lonely with the secret?
Michael Slepian: Exactly, yes, and I think the reason for that in these more Western environments where it's up to you to find your partners and friends, disclosure is a really important part of that in establishing and deepening connections, and it turns out in other cultures it's not so much that way where disclosure is not this really central, important feature of developing and maintaining relationships.
Sana Qadar: That's really interesting, I hadn't thought about that, but yes, that definitely mimics my own friendships and relationships in my life where disclosure is a moment where you are bonding more deeply with someone.
Michael Slepian: Yes.
Sana Qadar: Okay, let's go back to the beginning of our secret-keeping experiences. How early in life do we start to keep secrets?
Michael Slepian: Pretty early, essentially as soon as we figure out how to keep secrets we try to. And so I've heard these adorable stories from parents of their kids' attempts to keep secrets. And so in their earliest years they are not really good at keeping secrets, they will just deny something that is so obviously undeniable. So, for example, they are saying, 'I didn't eat any cookies,' while having cookie crumbs on their lips, for example.
But as children get better at thinking about other people's minds, as they get better about thinking about their own mind, these are skills that actually take some time to develop, they start getting better at keeping secrets, for example, blaming the broken vase on a cat rather than a ghost. So as children get better, understanding about thinking about other people's minds and when they get better at thinking about their own, they can start understanding, okay, the knowledge I have comes from my past experience, and other people may not have this knowledge if they weren't witness to this thing. And so as they get older, around four or five, they start having a much clearer understanding that what's in their head isn't necessarily in other people's heads, and when they realise that, that's when they can start more competently keeping secrets.
Sana Qadar: Yes, and you include a funny anecdote in the book about a secret an eight-year-old was keeping, hiding her phone whenever her mum walked by. Can you tell me that story?
Michael Slepian: Yes, this is someone who…she's looking at her phone and every time her mother walks by she quickly tucks the phone away, and so naturally the mom is, like, 'Show me what you're looking at,' and this poor girl had to reveal that she had been watching YouTube videos of people French kissing.
Sana Qadar: I mean, I'd want to keep that secret if I was her as well. That's pretty mortifying, but sweet.
Michael Slepian: Yes, so as children get older they start having more embarrassing secrets to keep and that takes us all the way through adolescence where secrecy starts becoming more concerned with social approval of peers, and by the time we hit our teenage years, secrecy kind of looks like what it looks like in adults where we are afraid of opening up or we are afraid of something that we feel ashamed about, we are concerned about the implications of revealing those for ourselves and our relationships.
Sana Qadar: And just going back to secrets in childhood, I'm wondering, I feel like if I'm thinking about my childhood, secrets between friends, it was kind of a currency, like you would use it to bond a particular relationship or ice somebody out, you know, someone knows my secret and I'm not telling you, kind of thing. Does it have that kind of social role as well in children?
Michael Slepian: Yes, and in fact children have a much more healthy relationship with secrets where they do use it as a way to try to hide mischief and accidents and they do use it as a way to not get in trouble. But they also understand that secrets don't have to be thought about in this negative way, that they can be this currency of intimacy, and when you ask young children what a secret is, they'll say it's something you would only tell your best friend, they define it in these terms of friendship. And so I think there's a lesson there for adults, that it's easy to forget about that aspect of secrecy, that we don't have to think about it as these things that can cause us harm. If you reveal something to someone that you wouldn't just tell anyone, that's a profound act of intimacy, it's how we deepen relationships. Secrets can be thought about in this way as this way of establishing and deepening our relationships with other people.
Sana Qadar: Of course, some secrets do eat away at us and we struggle to share them, but that's where Professor Slepian says it can be especially beneficial to do so.
Michael Slepian: Yes, you do not have to reveal the secret to the person you're keeping it from, but if you speak to a third party, someone you trust to keep the secret or someone you trust who will listen in a non-judgemental way, having a conversation can just make the world of difference. When there is something we choose to be alone with, especially something that's bothering us or upsetting to us, it's really hard to develop a healthy way of thinking about that thing, we find really unhealthy ways of thinking about things when we are entirely alone with them, but just a simple conversation can really help so much, especially if there is a traumatic experience that you've had that you are keeping a secret, that's certainly the kind of thing where you really can have a lot to gain by revealing it to another person.
Sana Qadar: But if for some reason talking doesn't seem like an option…
Michael Slepian: Another potential way of working through a secret is essentially journaling, putting your thoughts into words or putting your feelings into words. The risk of that approach is if you are simply rehashing the past, essentially that journaling just becomes a written record of harmful rumination. And so if that's a path you want to take, what's really important to know is it will be more effective if you use it as a space to find new ways of thinking about this thing rather than just rehashing the past.
Sana Qadar: Your family secret obviously eventually came out. I'm wondering, has your research helped you process or understand better why your parents kept the secret they did for so long?
Michael Slepian: Yes, I could imagine I never knew, I didn't yet know, would I feel like I would still want to learn it? It's kind of hard to think about that kind of thing, but at the end of the day, especially because it happened, I feel like yes, it was right for that secret to come out. When I learned that secret, one of the things that it led me to realise was that my dad's parents, by grandparents and that side of the family who I was very close to, it made those relationships more meaningful, not less, to understand that those relationships weren't based in some genetic obligation or something, that I was their grandchild just as much as they would have been if I were genetically related to them. It made those relationships in fact more special for me.
Sana Qadar: That's lovely. And it was actually your research that prompted your mum to first start thinking about revealing the secret, is that right?
Michael Slepian: Yes, and this was surprising to learn. And so as I was writing the book, I then started asking my parents some additional questions about their experience with that secret, and I asked my mom, 'When did you first start considering revealing the secret?' And she asked me, 'Well, when did your first paper on secrecy come out?' And I just couldn't believe it, it was my own research that had changed by mom's thinking and made her start to realise, oh, this is actually not something good, I think it would be better to reveal the secret, and it was based off my own research that she started coming to that conclusion.
Sana Qadar: It's a very circular story in terms of your research prompting her to think about it, revealing her secret and then the secret coming out, prompting you to go further into your research in a certain direction.
Michael Slepian: Yes.
Sana Qadar: That's Professor Michael Slepian from Columbia University. He is also the author of the book The Secret Life of Secrets.
(ABC - Australian Broadcasting Corporation)