The Worst Part of Keeping a Secret

The Atlantic:

The average person is keeping 13 secrets right now. Five of them are secrets they’ve never told another living soul.

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. 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. 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.

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“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.

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. Even if it never comes up, even if you never have to actively hide it, it’s still a secret. “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.

Read the whole story: The Atlantic