The Science of Secrets

created equally. Uh, that you could give a character a secret identity. You could give them a secret past, a secret mission, um, a secret mark upon their body. Uh, Like I always think back to um a secret pet. Yes, well secret pet. I don't know as has been a I guess you could have like an illegal pet. But I always think back to raising Arizone in the The Bounty Hunter character played by text Cob and uh, and he has the secret what like woody woodpecker tattoo on

his body that's revealed in one of the scenes. And there's this moment between which is the protagonist also has the protagonist has it as well, and so it's the protagonist Nicolas cave, which also has a woody woodpecker tattoo. Yeah, and uh and it's a lovely moment in the film because suddenly these two characters share a secret or a secret has been exposed and uh and and there's not much made of it in the film. There's just this this, this one pregnant moment where where we just consider the

absurdity and strange depth of of what has happened. I would say, in general, it's kind of hard to have a good story without a secret. I mean, try try to think. I'm sure you can come up with a few. But secret secrets are always there in fiction because good fiction is the act of discovery, and if you want to make a discovery tantalizing, you should know that there is something to be discovered, but not know what it is. Yeah, I mean, it instantly creates, creates drama, tension, there's stuff

that the character has to hold back. The character may end up then having to lie about things. Yeah. It it opens up possibilities there and conflict and inner conflict, I should add, because that's another huge aspect of secrets.

So many of our our more weighty secrets in life, and certainly in fiction, or secrets that are tied to identity, So you end up with a with a protagonist or an antagonist who is um who whose whole You know, personality and identity is sort of a spun around of this often dark secret about who they really are, right, The tension in their character is trying to keep all that bottled inside. Yeah, now, of course, Uh, you know, secrets have been a part of our stories for a

very long time. Secrets factor into many myths and folk tales. So you have like the secret names of demons, come up right, Rumpel still skin, you have you know, if you know an entity's name, then you have some power over it. Uh. You have secret betrayals, secret histories. But I've always found one particular tale of secret and secret keeping particularly compelling, and that's the Japanese folk tale of Yuki Onna the woman in the snow Hit me with it all right, So this is the this is the

basic telling of the tale. So a young man ventures out into the woods with other woodcutters and then they're caught in a terrible snowstorm, and a terrifying figure finds them in the cold, and then one by one she drains the life from the woodcutters. But then when she comes to the young man, she spares him, and she tells him that she will let him live. But there's one provision. He must never tell a single living soul what has happened here. He has to keep this secret

his entire life. And if he tells anyone, she'll come for him and take his life. So it's like the opposite of natural born killers, or or tell them the North Remembers, or something like that is saying like, no, don't tell this story. I got to keep it inside, even though it's I mean, it's it's the most interesting thing that's ever happened to you, young woodcutter. But but you must never tell anyone. It's gonna define who you are, it's going to change the course of your life. But

you have to keep it inside. And so the young man survives the storm, He ventures back to the village, and life moves on. He keeps the secret. He meets a beautiful woman and they marry. He and his wife have children, and they settle into a happy and normal life. But the whole time he has this secret tugging at him. He feels it's weight, it's chill, and and then finally, one night, after the children are asleep, he unburdens himself

to his wife. He tells her of this deadly encounter, this deadly spirit in the woods, on that that day so long ago. So he feels a lot better than right, well maybe for yeah, I think he does for a few seconds there. But after he unburdens himself, his wife curses him for breaking his word and telling the secret. And then she reveals her true form, for she is the woman in the snow and has lived these many

years as his wife and mother to his children. So she had a secret to Yeah, yeah, I mean their whole They're both wrapped up, their fates are both wrapped up in this this one potent secret. And you know, and obviously there are you know, less defined magical qualities here, the idea that this is a secret um actually has

magical power to it. Now what happens next varies with the telling, uh, and the various versions make us ponder, you know, what the weight of a secret is, what the weight of a solemn vowel is, because that's the other aspect here is the vow not to tell. And uh. In some cases and some tellings of this she melts away into ice, water and others. She spares him yet again, but promises to come for him and show no mercy if he's not a kind father to their children. And

then she you know, walks off into the snow. But either way, the husband's heartbroken. The children are gonna wake up the next morning and find their mother gone. It's uh, you know, it's it's heavy stuff no matter how you shake it. Well, this place on our deepest fears and the thing that motivates it's most secret keeping. Now, there are a lot of different kinds of secrets you could keep. You could be a spy and keep secrets in your line of work, or you could be keeping a very temporary,

benign secret, like planning a surprise party. But most of the secrets that come to mind when you think about secrecy are things you don't want other people to know

about you. And that's that's the kind of thing that can be especially damaging in a relationship, right, Like, if there's something that you don't want your life partner to know about you, that's a fundamental flaw in the most important relationship in your life, right, I mean, it's some of the literature we're looking at for this episode, they

got into this little bit. They're like, I'm about their being a balance to right, how because you end up in a situation where you don't want to share all your secrets and then your beloved turns into a snow monster and kills you. Like, I mean, that's kind of one reading on the Tale of Yukiola is that he was a little too open with his secrets. He should not have told that secret. That's one that should have kept. The moral of the story is that he should not

have been honest. Yeah, But then there there are some versions of that tale where where she's completely forgiving because because it was not a breaking of the vowel to share that with his wife. So yeah, and then's and then of course there's there's one version where she right out right kills him. Uh. And that's a nineteen nineties retelling in Tales from the Dark Side in the movie. I like that the chassis of this story can be repurposed to suit almost any moral you want people to

take away. So like, this story could be about how you should not keep secrets, or it could be about how you should keep secrets. Yeah, and yeah, there's that's one of the things that I think is so attractive about it. There's there's an ambiguity a to the magic, like what's the what are the what's the actual what are the actual magical mechanics of what's going on here?

And then uh and then yeah, like was the guy in the right because you have a you have a guy who tells his secret for reveals the secret for a seemingly very noble reason, like it's weighing him down own, it's it's causing him pain, and it's something that's between

him and the most important person in his life. Also though the fact of the secret is not an admission of personal wrongdoing on his part or something that that he should be ashamed of, it's just about a thing that happened to him that he can't talk about, right and and I can't. I have to assume it's the kind of thing that like shapes you, that's a connects the kind of thing that changes the person watching a

snow spirit murder people before you. Uh So, you know, it's it's it's sad, it's it's it's it's depressing to think that you would have a character that would be that affected by something like it really it's a traumatic event, and and he can never talk about it. And I think that's something that a lot of and a lot

of people can relate to. That a lot of people have experienced traumas that they either do not feel they can talk about, or they or they you know, they can talk about it very rarely, or they spoke of it once, you know, to you know, an appropriate authority, and then they can't share it again. Right now. Tales from the Dark Side of the movie V that's the one where a cat jumps down a guy's throat. Yes, that's the also a Japanese legend. No, that's a Stephen

King story. But let's see. I'm not gonna remember all the tales that are retold in that one, but I know one is a one is a retelling of the Mummy, uh that I've I've referred to a few times because that's one of the few terrifying Mummy tales in my opinion. It's got Christians Slater in it, right right, and the Mummy goes around pulling people's brains out with a coat hanger,

so it's it's actually terrifying for a little bit. But this one, in particular, it's a retelling of of of the Snow Woman The Woman in the Snow, except you have it set in New York City with Gargoyles the Monsters of Gargo instead of Snow Spirit, and then you have James Ramar playing the husband and Raydon Chong playing the wife. And it's it's actually really good. It's uh. It was written by the late novels and screenwriter Michael McDowell.

Now another and far more literal telling of this uh this tale is Masaki Kabayashi's five film Kaitan, which features this tale among other Japanese traditional Japanese ghost stories. And it's extremely beautiful. It's really like a really there's a psychedelic vision to this film. It's It's available on Criterion Collection. This is one of those I've been meaning to watch for years and haven't gotten around too. I've got a good friend of mine from Tennessee really loves this one.

Oh yeah, it's it's beautiful, it's hypnotic. Um this one. I think I've actually referred to another story that's featured in this where you have the the reflection of a samurai's ghost and a cup of tea. Yeah, So in this one, what happens when he reveals the secret. This one has the more traditional version where she she spares him but makes him promise to be a good father to the children. Oh well that's sweet. Yeah, well, I

mean it's sweet, but again it's it's still heartbroken. So if it's not obvious by now, we are going to be talking about secrets today and we're gonna try to get into some of the science of secrets, talk about the psychological research that exists on secrecy, the practice of keeping secret it's and the effects of secrecy. But I was trying to think about the concept of secrecy because

it first it seemed like a very straightforward idea. Right, A secret is just what standard definition is something kept from knowledge or view? Right, Yeah, Like I keep thinking of it in terms of my my son, Like how did we introduce the concept of a secret to him? And it's in the form of giving gifts Christmas or birthdays? Right, Because it comes down to what's in this box? For your mother? You can't tell her it's a secret. Like it's a very literal scenario. There is an unseen quantity

in this box. You know what it is, and you can't say what it is. You know, for the sake of fun, and that that's the nice version, right, But so, yeah, something kept from knowledge or view. Okay, that seems fairly straightforward. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, that's not really a very accurate version of how we use the word secret. It doesn't match the usage. Because here's an example. If I live alone and I haven't had anybody over to my apartment yet, and I have

a green chair that I've never told anybody about. Is that green chair a secret? Not really, right, you, You wouldn't use the word that way. So nobody but me knows about it, but it's not a secret. But say, imagine I'm living alone, I haven't had anybody over to my apartment yet, and I also have a vintage dock in poster hanging up on the wall, and that poster is the reason I haven't had anybody over to my apartment. Is that poster a secret? In that case? I think

maybe it is. Yeah, I've been picturing in the scenario that you have an entire room set aside for this dock and poster and the green chair that you sit in while you stare at it, right, And I also sleep in the green Chair, so I have immediate conscious access to the dream Warriors. Wait, the Dream Warriors. That's stocking, right, I'm not wrong about that, am I? Oh? I'm not sure. I'm not a I'm not a huge dock and expert, but this would be the theme song for um, the

The The, the Freddy Krueger movie. Yeah. I don't want to dream no more anyway. This makes me think that the idea of secrecy it's something that we deploy as a read on intent, right, it's the intent to conceal. But there are also things that you don't want other people to know about that aren't really secrets, right, like uh, not to get too gross, but descriptive details of your excretory function. These are things you'd really prefer your friends

and colleagues not know. But would you call them secrets? Not really, right? No, I mean it's unless you're doing it and you know aut in a really novel fashion. You're probably doing it like everybody else anyway, So exactly so, you wouldn't want other people to know about this stuff,

but you wouldn't call it a secret. And I think the reason is that you there's no reason to presume that your friends and colleagues would have any interest in knowing that information, right, they don't know, You don't want them to know, and they wouldn't want to know. So there are a lot of things about you that other people don't know, but they're not secrets. I think secrets are the intersection of things that people don't know, that you suspect they might want to know, and that you

don't want them to know. What do you think about that, Robert m M. Yeah, I would say, but that's I think that's a good way of initially defining it. But then you get into like what does someone want to know? And there's like there their things they consciously and openly want to know, and there are things that they they tell themselves they wouldn't want to know, but if they were presented with an envelope or you know, or a file or something, then they might be tempted to look

inside that sort of thing. And then uh, and then there's just varying levels of like realistic concern over the secret being found out and just sort of anxiety, you know, like building up in your mind that something is some dreadful secret or you know it would be terrible of other people found out about it. Yeah. So a lot of the experience of secrecy, I think, necessarily hinges on imagining what would be going on in other people's minds.

It doesn't even necessarily depend on what other people actually would care about or how they would react. It's all about how you imagine other people would think about these details, right. Yeah. And in many of these cases too, you're imagining, like yourself being the one who leaks the secret by accidentally letting it leak. Now here's an interesting take on this. I was reading about Jacques dar Da who is twenty century French philosopher and the father of deconstructions, the high

priest of postmodernism. Yeah. Yeah, and a lot of this boils under the critique of the relationship between text and meaning. But he had the following insight to share on the nature of secrets and this these basics come from his work How to Avoid Speaking. So breaks it down like this, A secret is something that must not be spoken, Okay, but I must possess it and not give it away for it to be a secret. So I must understand the secret, or at least grasp the importance of it.

But to possess that that secret I do have to tell one person, I have to tell it to myself, like in in containing the secret in my mind, I have to tell myself that secret. If I don't, I have forgotten it. And how can I keep a secret that I've forgotten? Uho? And also to keep that secret, I must not keep the secret. Mm hmm. So yeah, if you could have a secret exercised from your memory, it wouldn't be a secret anymore. So my my advice is that have this answer ready the next time someone

asks you if you can keep a secret for them. Um, you know, and I realized some of that probably sounds a bit like some you know, academic nonsense, but but think of it this way. Secrets have weight, and if I ask you to keep a secret, you must carry the weight of that secret, even if it's slight, right, And if the information is disturbing, frightening or sad or what have you, you still have to roll it around in your mind from time to time in order to

not share it with someone else. Now, George or would probably disagreed with some of that. He said, if you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. But again, part of keeping the secret is knowing not to let it out. And if you I mean, if you, I guess if you can forget it, but then it's then you're not keeping a secret then right right? Well,

I mean that's part of the fear. Like, if you were to actually forget about a secret, you would not be in the prime position to defend against people finding out about it, right, Like, if there's a secret that people could discover about you, you need to know about it in order to steer people away from discovering it.

Right Like if if you are not in if you're not you're self aware of what people shouldn't be finding out, you're not in a good defensive posture, right And if you if you have to be alive and keeping the secret to be a secret keeper, if someone tells you the secret and it murders you, that you're not a secret keeper anymore. Um so, And then again, well, I can see what Orwell is getting at here, because Orwell

wrote about self deception a lot. You know, nine four is full of these ideas of double think and uh, and the ability to can convince oneself to believe what one knows isn't true, right Uh, And that this is sort of the final abjection of the self. I get the feeling that that Orwell ultimately is not painting a nice picture of what secrets are here. It's kind of gets down to the idea that so, so to keep

a secret, you have to tell a lie. And maybe what Orwell is saying is if you can make that lie the truth of your heart, then you have become a true secret keeper. Right, But you've also sacrificed your integrity. Right. Uh. This reminds me of another quote, and this one comes from James Joyce, and this is from Ulysses his His you know, he says, secrets, silent stony, sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts, secrets weary of their tyranny,

tyrants willing to be dethroned. Yeah, the secret wants to escape, right like it it's rain, cannot go on forever. It

has a self destructive impulse. And I often do think of secrets this way, that a secret is like a bomb, right, It's like a bomb in fiction, and that it's possible that a bomb will never go off, but the purpose of a bomb is to go off, and like a secret, almost psychologically for me, plays the role of a thing that will be probably disclosed at some point in the future, and you are just wondering the entire time when and how that will happen. And then when it is revealed,

you have to choose. Then are you then are you gonna come clean and say, oh, yes, I knew that all along. It was a secret and I was its keeper, and and and that brings various complications. Or do you say you pretend that you didn't know, and now you have a new secret. The original secret has been has been you know, declassified, but you've created the new one, the idea that you were never this keeper of this secret. Right, So here's a question. What's the relationship of secrets to lying?

We were just talking about or well sort of gets into this, Joyce sort of hints at this. Most ethical systems would judge lying to be an immoral act, barring, you know, extreme extenuating circumstances, like you might lie in the same kind of circumstances where you would use violence to defend yourself or others there something like that. But generally lying is wrong. I think I feel that way. Um, So if it's wrong to lie, is it wrong to

keep secrets? In other words, is it wrong to intentionally prevent other people from discovering facts that you suspect they would probably want to know or might want to know. Uh, I feel like the answer is probably not right. So that exposes another tension in secrecy, because some secrets are about things that are just none of anybody else's business. You know. It's not always like, well, I stole something, or I cheated on my partner or something like that.

It might be things like there's a fact about you that you wouldn't naturally feel bad about, but you feel that other people might judge you unfairly if they knew it. Yeah, Well, like the doc and example is good. You know. I feel like a lot of us have these, uh, these things in life we like, you know, you know, be a a you know, a TV show or an album

or something, and we're nostalgic for it. Yeah, and then there's this, there's this idea that we need to keep it a secret at least from certain circles, excluding temporary tactical secrets like planning a surprise party or something like that. Does does this imply that a secret is always something that suggests an injustice. Either you did something bad and you don't want people to know, or there's something about you that you think people would treat you unfairly or

unreasonably if they knew. Are there any exceptions to that? Um? Well, I think you touched on strategic secrets, right, the things that are not really something you want to keep secret forever, but it's just like you know, it's a planning a surprise or giving a gift or something. Yeah, I mean, I guess one of my my sticking points that I kept coming across, and this was, is just the idea of unnecessary secrets that people attempt to burden you with.

I've I found I tend not to find these in my own like social interactions, but I know that others have. Where you're talking to somebody and they say, oh, but don't tell anybody about this, And maybe you know, maybe the secret they're sharing with you is something lady, But a lot of times it's not, and it's something that you're you're going to go and tell somebody else about anyway. But they've they've they've put the burden of keeping the

secret on you. Also, in in workplace environments, I've encountered this where you know someone's sharing just some really unimportant bit of you know, short term stragg G for the company. Right, don't tell anybody. I don't tell anybody. I was like, why did you tell me? Because because it's a you had to share your crummy secret with me, and now I have to keep it or or break my vow over something. So pitdling, you know, somebody should start a

website along the lines of post secret. You know about post secret, right, pop secret? Popcorn? No? No, post secret. No. That this website where this dude was collecting postcards of people would anonymously write down secrets and send them. Oh yeah, I do remember this. Yeah, I mean so that was an interesting way of of people sharing their secrets without actually disclosing to people who would know about them, you know,

anonymous secret sharing. Uh. And there are probably some good questions we can talk about later in this episode when we talk about the science about whether that properly relieves any of the tension brought on by secret keeping. But there should be an analogy of that. It's a website that's just don't tell anybody yet for all work, Relay did secrets where people as soon as you get an email that says don't tell anybody yet or as soon as you get out of that meeting, you anonymously go

and upload the facts. You can even have the time released. I guess, um, now these are these are all excellent points. Now I do want to throw in one thing here too, Like when you get into secrets, you also get into this idea of confessionals, right, Like to to unburden yourself

with the secret is to make a confession. And uh, confessions have have played an important role, say in you know, in Catholic tradition, like that instantly comes to mind, and a lot of the studies that we looked at here the idea of someone going and being able to unburden themselves in an anonymous or semi anonymous fashion. Likewise, various

self help hotlines. If some if the secret that you're keeping is something say bound up in personal identity or or you know, feelings of say suicide, you might call a suicide hotline or a um or say a sexual abuse hotline. And these would be appropriate places to unburden yourself with this information and uh, you know, receive expert

advice on what to do about it. Now, that might be a good example of an exception to what I was talking about earlier because I can imagine you talked about abuse like people who have undergone a certain kind of trauma. Now, obviously they didn't do anything bad. They might suspect that other people would react unreasonably or judge them, but they might not too. In that case, they might

want to keep a secret for some other reason. They didn't do anything wrong, They don't think people will be mean to them about it or think differently about them. They just don't want people to know, right. Yeah, I mean it just comes back around again to this the very complex and and you know, a morphous quality of secrets, like not all secrets are are equal. Now, one of the things you mentioned earlier about about the idea of

a secret being harmful or not. Um, it's it's worth noting that you know there are many parents out there argue you should not teach young kids about secret keeping because it might be exploited later on in abusive scenarios or the abuse or is saying hey, you have to keep this secret. Uh. I actually ran ran across some advice regarding this from the National Crime Prevention Council, and they stressed the following that you would want to teach a small child. First of all, if a secret can't

hurt someone or something, you keep it. If a secret can hurt someone or something, you tell an adult. And if you're not sure, you're tell an adult. So it's got like a default mode of tell yeah yeah, which I think is a that kind of breaks down when you start bringing into the more complex adult scenarios of say, you know state secrets or workplace secrets, or you know the secret desires of your heart, but you know, for a childhood scenario, I think those those guidelines seem to

make a lot of sense. I think that might be good guidelines for adults. I mean, think about that. You if you're not sure it it's better to keep it a secret, you should err on the side of telling. Yeah yeah. I mean that seems logical to me. I mean, it's the same reason that you wouldn't normally endorse lying, except in some extenuating circumstance where you've got to, you know, do something defensive or save lives or something like that. Generally,

it's better if people don't lie to each other. The problem is that a child can tell an adult. The adult is the default, you know, authority figure. But who's an adult to tell God the police obviously called the cobs. Every time you've got a secret, I'd like to report a doc and poster in my apartment. Okay, well, I think it's about time to start getting into the science and maybe we can transition there by bringing up one

last thing that I think is also interesting. Why is it so pleasurable to share secrets with a person or a small group. I'm sure you've had this experience, Robert, right, Like sharing secret it's a it's a well known bonding behavior.

You're a middle schooler and you get together with your close friends and tell them who you've got a crush on or when you have you know, one way that you know you found your soul made not to get too cheesy, is that you confess thoughts and opinions to them that you would never say in front of anybody else. It's fun and delightful to share your secrets with that person. Yeah,

you know, and it's also um you know. The counterpoint is that it's disappointing, isn't it When you go to share a secret with someone and they already know the secret and you know your Your disappointment is is it's twofold. On one hand, you don't get to share, be the share of the secret, and they were maybe keeping it from you. But but when the reaction is positive, and when there's you know, mutual discovery between two people or a small group of people, why does that feel so good?

It's intensely socially pleasurable. Well, I think I think a lot of it is you have to you have to boil down all of this to sort of, um, you know, prehistoric human scenarios, right, like what we're secrets for For the vast majority of human history, what did secrets consist of. They had to do with what the location of food and resources, um, the you know, the the position of dangers that you face, be the predators or other human populations. And therefore to share a secret was to share survival

with someone. I feel like disclosure of secrets to close companions. It's so it's sort of like initiating Every time you do it, it initiates a further traversal into the boundaries of trust, Like you're going deeper into the trust landscape, which probably I think feels good for the same reasons that starting a new romantic relationship feels good. You know that feeling of euphoria people often report when they're dating

somebody new. Um, it's like you're you're going into new social territory and it feels good to forge newer, stronger, better relationships. It's like playing like a card game and in the opening hands like none of the cards have been played, and every every play is something substantially new. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. Um. But also there there's an analogy to that, I think that is institutional secret knowledge.

It's that same principle of sharing with a person or a small group and getting pleasure out of that, but making it part of an organization, like the secret knowledge that forms the basis of attraction to secret societies. And one of my favorites gnostic religions. Like if you go back to the first few centuries CE, you see these gnostic forms of Christianity, which were these strange versions of Christianity.

They seem very alien to us now, but they're fascinating to study because they were built all on the idea of like you'd have a public version of the religion that was accessible to the masses, and then you'd have a private version of the religion based on secret knowledge that was only available to the insiders. Oh yeah, I mean you should. You saw this in Greek traditions as well,

like you see it, you really see see it. And I guess in most major religions, there's there's there's the public religion, and then there are various esoteric versions of it, esoteric Buddhism, etcetera, and then branching cults and whatever ehressies from there on out. I get intense pleasure just from thinking about that and studying it. I can imagine it's so much more intense to actually be a part of that, to be one of the people who gets let in

on the secret. Yeah, and then just you, and to be led by the secret, to the idea that there are secrets that will be revealed to you if you merely click on this article and learn the learn the ten secrets of toning your abs or what have you, and that the great way to clickbait you into submissions just to promise the secret will be revealed. Yes. So we talked a little bit about children and secrets, and I started to think, like, at what point do children

actually gain a sense of secrecy? At what point do they understand secrets and become capable of keeping them. Uh. And I did find that there was a study by Peskin and Ardno in Social Development in two thousand three that tried to study the relationship between childhood development of theory of mind and the ability to do two things. One of them was play Hyden's which is a kind of secret keeping, but the other one was explicitly keeping

a secret. So they tested children who were three, who were four, and were five at playing hide and seek and keeping a secret. And this was partially because those are ages where there was some existing knowledge about how much theory of mind children generally have at those ages, And in theory of mind is the concept of being

able to imagine the thoughts and intentions of other people. Yeah, it's interesting that hide and seek comes up, because I've certainly played a lot of hide and Seek with my son over the years, and he's five now, and earlier on hide and seek tended to consist of of him high and then running out and kept him getting me Like it was really hard to to, you know, relate the ideas that you're supposed to hide and wait for

me to find it. Like the excitement would build up and then he would just jump up and come to me, right, I mean hide and seek. We requires that you try to think from the seekers perspective when you are a hider. Yeah.

And then likewise the keeping of secrets. You know, we get a we you know, get get a gift for someone, um, you know, it's generally gonna be like a gift from me or a gift from my wife and uh, and he would he would really like reveal the secret immediately when he was when he was really young, or even like want to unwrap the present right there, There was that the idea of there being any kind of suspense, that that there would be some pleasure and not knowing

and guessing was something that developed over the years. Well that's what this study found. So they found that across the span of three to five, your ability to do both of these activities changes drastically. Three year olds just are terrible at keeping secret. It's a playing hide and seek. They couldn't really hack it, right, But by four, by age four, most kids were on on the secret train,

and by five, five year olds could keep a secret. Yes, yeah, that and that that manches up with my experience pretty well. And this brings me to the secrets of kindergarten or kindergarteners anyway. And then this is actually this is actually really cool because today, as we're recording this, this is my son's first day of kindergarten. Congratulations, well, thank you. I mean, you know, there's not much you can say.

You can't say, like, well'm he's the first person in my family to go to kindergarten, you know, but um no, no, it is. It is a big deal. But but it was interesting to go through all of this with these various studies in mind, because, as you pointed out, various studies point to this as a time, you know, age five, moving in on six, when group related attitudes and behavior begin to manifest. Group membership begins to influence their learning,

their expectations, and behavior. And this includes resource sharing within their group. And this is where we get into secrets, because the secret is a resource. That's interesting. I think a secret as like an informational resource, has value. Yeah, I mean, like I said, you take it back to a prehistoric analogy, and like a secret is where where the good hunting grounds, where the where the good berry bushes? Where is their clean water? That's sort of thing, right,

So the study that I was looking at here. This is comes from Antonia Mish, Harriet Over, and Melinda Carpenter and it's titled I won't tell Young children show loyalty to their group by keeping group secrets. And this is published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology in two thousand sixteen. Now, I'm sure this study sounds delightful, right Kindergartner's interacting saying the darnedest things keeping secrets. But but the paper is actually quite disturbing read at times, because,

for instance, it touches on racial bias. Oh like, so that's part of in group variation on how children keep or relate secrets. Yeah, it ends up not playing as much into the study as our because they ended up not they didn't record any racial information about the kids, but they do point out some some sobering details here. Now, I I previously read that implicit racial bias doesn't really rear its ugly head uh and children until around age

seven or so. But the researchers here, they point to a two thousand seven study that found quote, white children between four and seven years of age favorite other white children who positively interact with a racial in group member, such as a white child over white children who hadn't interact with a racial outgroup member, such as a black child.

Oh no, that's sad. Yeah, yeah, it's it's uh, it's like I say, this is a quite quite quite some details to have knocking around in your head when you're doing your first day of kindergarden. Anyway, for the purposes of this study, the researchers didn't include any racial information. They set out to assess children's loyalty by testing their

willingness to keep a group secret. Previous studies cited in the article indicated the children began to understand the idea of privileged information around age four, and that children can keep secrets in some context at this point. So that goes pretty much with what we were saying earlier. Right right age four, most kids could do it right. So

here's how the study broke down. Children were assigned to color groups, you know, like green, red, yellow, and Sarah, and they were told a secret by by by two members of their own group or a member of an out group. So that's the initial setup. And you have a new neutral character who shows up and tries to

buy secrets with colorful stickers. So loyalty means you get no stickers in this scenario because because the Tempter is coming around and uh, the and I should point out that the Tempter here's a puppet and the secret Shares are also puppets, and the the the character whose name is Siri, is attempting to to buy your secrets with these stickers. Siri is going to have the gender of

the child that they're interacting with. And the stickers are going to range from just like a red sticker, green sticker, yellow sticker, et cetera, to uh, there's also a heart shaped red sticker, which is you know, sounds like it's pretty cool. Uh so, well, so one thing I think we should say just to make clear if you're like, how how motivated could you be? I think when you're a little kids, stickers are. Stickers are a hot commodity. I mean, the stickers are what you get when you

get a shot at the at the doctor's office. Stickers are what you get in as a prize for not causing a disruption in the checkoutline. Yes, stickers are a lot of fun. I mean I feel like when you're four or five, stickers are basically cut up hot dogs to an animal are a dog. So uh. They tested forty eight five year olds gender split, and they also tested forty eight four year olds. The prediction was that

we'd see more loyalty in the five year olds. Uh. And the children were just from day care centers in a midsized city. Again, no racial or ethnic details were recorded. A human served as a moderator. The male female hand puppets acted as secret keepers. The hand puppets Siri was the briber and h you also had a book of secrets factoring in the experiment, and this was provided by the puppets. So they conducted the experiment. And oh and by the way, children who could not remember their color

group were kicked out. So some of the children, well they had to, you know, they had to because a lot of it had to do. You need to identify with group yellow or group green. But if you're asked what group you're in and you say, you know, oh, I'm in room seven of the kindergarten or whatever I'm in, you know, Mrs Williamson's the class, that's not going to cut it because you need to identify with the color

group for the experiment to work. So the results were that overall across both ages and conditions, the majority of children kept the secrets, no gender effects. Children were more inclined to keep in group secrets than alt group see crets. So among the five year olds who again performed better, you had twenty one who kept in secrets within their group, thirteen who kept out secrets. Among the four year olds,

fifteen kept in secrets, thirteen kept out secrets. And you would be happy to know, parents, that all the children went home with two super fancy stickers and not any of the bribe stickers. So so hopefully nobody went home

thinking that ratting out secrets was a profitable venture. So this is kind of interesting because it looks like at least within this experiment, uh who knows what would happened if you tried to repeat it, But within this experiment, five year olds had learned a lot more in group loyalty than the four year olds. Like there was there was less of a difference in the four year olds between whether they kept secrets in group and out group, but with the five year olds, significantly more of them

kept secrets in the group. Right right, Yeah, so I guess, you know, I guess we were seeing the you know, the the the advancement they have alson of the individual's ability to prioritize secrets and prioritize privileged information. To look at the Green team and say you're not one of us, I'll betray you. Uh. And I included a picture in our notes here of the puppet, and maybe I can throw this in the landing page for this episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. But I should

point out the tempter. Is it a lifeful looking puppet and is not a punch of strawberry witch you have? But it's not like a Punch and Judy Show Devil or anything. No, this thing, it's going to be in the next Annabel movie, the Annabel's sidekick wave in. It's a little cotton hands summoning pizzoo zoo. Alright, well we have we have one more study on small children here, I think to reference before we take our first break, and that is a study title Secret Sharing Interactions between

a Child Robot and Adults. But yeah, and this is by Cindy L. Bethel, Matthew R. Stevenson, and Brian Ceciletti. So in this one, it basically as a question, Hey, how are children going to deal with secrets if they're um if they're interacting with a humanoid robot as well as say a human adult, if they're interacting and specifically to with a a stuffed animal dog or a robotic dog. And this was this was a pretty interesting study to look at. So there's just a quick quote from it

to give you an example. Here the quote, the qualitative results from these studies indicate that the children were readily able to apply their interaction style with an adult to their interactions with the robot in both the pilot and follow up studies. Future research needs to be conducted, but it is expected that with longer interactions with the robot, the children will treat the robot more as a peer,

which would be beneficial and gathering sensitive information. So I guess the idea here is that maybe a robot could be used to elicit the sharing of secrets, especially like if children have been abused or something like that the children might be in some cases able to admit that to a humanoid robot. Yeah, I think so. It makes me wonder though about like what would be the applications for for adults, Like could we gain something by sharing

our secrets with robots who we have robot confessionals. I was wondering the same exact thing, like, is that the next step up from post secret you can you can confess anonymously. Maybe better than that, but not as destructive as confessing to a person is confessing to a non

judgmental terminator. Well, you know, it does remind me of various I believe NASA studies that have looked into the idea of creating like basically a computerized therapist and uh that a virtual therapist that one would interact with on lengthy space missions to check on your, uh psychological well being. Isn't that in the movie Moon? Yeah it is. That's right. That's a major plot point in that with the Kevin Spacey voiced robot that he he speaks to and relates to. So, yeah,

it's not it's not too far far off. I think, all right, well, I think we should take a quick break and then when we come back we will get into the weeds with some complicated research on the psychology of secrets. Than alright, we're back, okay, Robert. Now we're gonna get into research on secrets in a couple of areas that I want to admit. At the outset, I

think is thorny and confusing. Um So, one of the things that I want to focus on is the research on the health effects of holding secrets and the supposed health benefits of revealing secrets. Maybe before we get into this, Robert, just what would your intuitions be, Would you just assume that having secrets is bad for your health? Well, my my initial reply is that, again, not all secrets are created equally, and but I also know that yes, even

individuals carrying a lot of the anxiety in themselves. You know, if you if you can't leap at night because of the secret you're keeping, like, there are going to be some health effects there. At the same time, I'm also hesitant to like to make too many, you know, firm declarations about about the health effects there without looking at the research, because you do get in you potentially get into the gray area of like, oh, negative thoughts cause disease and and so forth that can be taken to

the extreme by by pseudo scientific ideas. One thing that I do think is interesting right now is the body of scientific research on the mind body connection. You know,

to what extent your mind affects physiological health. There's lots of super solid research indicating that there is an extremely serious link between the two, and yet that the whole mind body medicine thing can definitely be taken to pseudo scientific extremes like you say, and like people can start to say like that you can you know, think your cancer away and stuff like that, which, uh, no evidence

indicates that's the case. But at the same time, there are tons of studies that do seem to be reliable and do show that mindset has measurable health outcomes, right, I mean, like I said, you can you can just look at an extreme example and just imagine somebody having to keep a secret and it's causing them such anxiety that they have trouble either eating or sleeping, a very realistic scenario, uh, and one that you has very would

have very obvious health effects. Yeah, or just simply causing stress. And we know that stress. Stress causes the release of neurotransmitters and hormones that can have effects within the body. Having chronic stress is bad for you. But anyway, let's

look at the research. So back in two thousand two, the psychologist Dr Anita Kelly, who is a professor of psychology at Notre Dame published a book called The Psychology of Secrets, and she spent a lot of her career studying the effects of secrecy and what happens when people reveal secrets. So I want to look at one particular paper of hers from Current Directions and Psychological Science, called

Revealing Personal Secrets, and I thought this was interesting. So in this paper, Kelly collects the research on the consequences of revealing personal secrets. And a personal secret here is a secret that directly involves the secret keeper. So it's not one of those don't tell anybody yet things at work, right, It directly involves you. It's a secret about you. And then she does something fascinating. She begins to develop a framework for win and under what circumstances you should reveal

a secret. I don't know if I've ever heard any advice along those lines before. Well, I mean, aside from the National Crime Prevention Council tips that we heard earlier for children, all right, I've never heard anything like this for adults. So she starts by acknowledging something interesting. For decades, at the time this had been published, had been conventional wisdom among psychologists and therapists that secret keeping was bad

for the mind and the body. Like we were just talking about it, seems intuitive, right, uh, And Kelly points out that research began to bear this out. For example, UM research up to that point indicated that people who tend to conceal personal secrets had more physical body complaints like headaches, nausea, ulcers, and back pain, and they also tended to have more anxiety, shyness, and depression than people

who didn't conceal information. She sites research showing that disclosure of personal information is associated with better health outcomes, such as better immunological function and fewer trips to the doctor, and one experiment showed that even simply writing down a disclosure of facts about a private traumatic event had an effect.

They like, they took medical students and had them right about personal traumas and then gave them a hepatitis B vaccine, and those students had significantly higher antibody levels at four and six months later than subjects who wrote about control topics that had nothing to do with deeply hell emotional events and then received the same vaccine. So if if true, that's very interesting. And so if it's true that disclosing personal secrets leads to better health outcomes on average. Why

is this the case? Based on our own research, Kelly concludes that the reason revealing a secret can have positive effects is that it allows the secret keeper to gain new insights into the secret, leading to closure on the subject. And in this model, a kept secret it's you know, I use the analogy earlier, it's like a bomb that

hasn't gone off yet. But maybe a better way to think about it is that it kept secret is an unsolved problem or an unfinished task, and thus it occupies an outsized space in the mind and requires frequent attention and mental energy. And Kelly actually evokes the Zigarnic effective. We've discussed that in the show before, Yeah, we have.

We talked about it in our Tetris episodes. And one of the reasons that Tetris might be so compelling is that it's an eternally unfinished project and it always wants to call you back for more. Uh. But so the terms Zigarnic effect. It comes to us from the Russian psychologist and psychiatrist Bluma Wolfovna Zigarnic, who lived from nine

to nine. She first observed it in the nineteen twenties, and there there's a quote from Roy Baumeister and Brad Bushman in their two thousand eight textbooks Social Psychology and Human Nature that says, quote zigarnic effect is a tendency to experience automatic intrusive thoughts about a goal that one has pursued, but the pursuit of which has been interrupted.

That is, if you start working toward a goal and fail to get there, thoughts about the goal will keep popping into your mind while you're doing other things, as if to remind you to get back on track to finish reaching that goal. So, I mean, keeping a secret is a task, yeah, and and and therefore it requires requires mental energy to varying degrees to uh to to keep it. Like, I keep thinking of this analogy, and I'm not the only one to come up with this,

actually encountered it in some of the studies. We're looking at the idea of their being like a free flowing stream, right, And then every secret you have to keep is like putting a stone in there that has to be navigated around, and it potentially changes the flow of social interaction. And uh, yeah, if you have if you throw some big rocks in there, if you if you throw a lot of little rocks

in there. Then you're gonna potentially alter the flow of the river to you know, considerable, You're gonna catastrophic levels. Well I know it's just a metaphor, but yeah, exactly. I mean you you you essentially damn the river, and a damn con burst right eventually will if there's nothing to relieve the flow. Yeah, I think I think that makes perfect sense that it would be tied in with sigonic effect. Yeah, so this does feel very intuitive. Now.

I do think we might undercut this with more research we talked about going forward, but it certainly feel is intuitive. It's one of those things. It's got that truthiness, right, Yeah,

but truthiness can be deceiving. But so the idea here at least is that when when people disclose a secret and talk through it, and this is key for for Kelly, it's not just that you reveal the secret, but that you have the ability to talk through it with someone and gain insights on it that allow you to achieve closure, to sort of close the book and understand something. And that's of course going to be more complicated than it sounds,

depending on what the secret is. I mean, for instance, on one, on one hand, it would seem to indicate that yes, seeking say professional help for whatever your quote unquote secret might be. So, for instance, if if it has some sort of you know, abuse connotation, and then you you say, you know, call up the rain hotline, you're able to talk with someone who can steer you in the right direction of how best to to deal

with this. But on the other hand, like closing the book on it is easier said than done, right right totally, So yeah, well, in under what's you would to really close the book on a secret? It has to be a rather pointless secret, has to be one of those dumb work secrets or or you know, mildly interesting social secrets. Well,

close to the book is my language. I mean that that might not be the best metaphor, but what it is is that you want to achieve some kind of resolution, You gain new insights that make this no longer an unsolved problem. So I think one example would be if if someone has has been keeping their say, sexual orientation a a secret there there closeted, and therefore like coming out of the closet even did like a select group of people that would enable you to then like own

it and deal with it. In a new way. But it wouldn't mean that you're like you're done, you know, like it's really the beginning of a new phase in that particular journey. Yeah, totally. And that that's, as we've said, not all secrets are created equally. That that's a different kind of secret them many other secrets, like for example, and some of the research we've looked at today shows that sexual orientation is very often the kind of secret where where a person feels they can reveal to some

people and not to others. So you have to you have to play management of different revelation groups and and to a certain extent, manage been a different identity, different versions of yourself. I mean, of course that everyone does that to certain degrees, I think, but but we're talking about having to do it to an agree where it would have potentially negative effects on your on your psyche.

And that's a great point because revealing a secret might not always lead to positive outcomes, right, And and Kelly acknowledges this. So she's trying to come up with the rubric of when should you reveal a secret? You've got a secret that's eating away at you, when and where and how should you reveal it. Uh, it appears that the circumstances under which you reveal the secret are important. So obviously you can imagine lots of revelations that would

make everything worse. You can iagine a scenario where you know you've been cheating on your spouse with an alien robot from Enceladus, and you know you're happy in your marriage, but you know that happened. That happened maybe maybe not say it's ongoing, but it happened one time, and you reveal it to your spouse and your spouse is not forgiving, and he or she becomes angry, and this leads to alienation in your relationship, and maybe it ends the relationship.

Are you better off then? I mean you might say maybe maybe it was worth it to be honest, But then you could also say, well what if it's destroyed the most important relationship in my life. Um, So there are a lot of questions. It comes back to the woman in the snow, right, because on one level, yeah, the husband gets to to live, you know, secret free, but he no longer has his wife and and he has to tell his children in the morning that hey, sorry,

Mom's not here anymore because Dad's allowsy secret keeper. Yeah, so it's confusing, like it might better, might be better to be honest in the long run, but it might not be. I mean, it might be just destructive to people's lives in the long run. And so so taking into account complications and consequences is a real question. Another complication. Kelly points out, research is pretty clear people don't usually

keep your secrets when you share them. One of one piece of research she sites is from which found the college students. So, okay, this is college students. Maybe they don't keep secrets particularly well, but at least in this group, when students shared an emotional event with a confidante, the confidante reported telling at least one other person about that disclosure in sixty six to seventy eight percent of the cases. So most of the time, you're gonna go tell somebody

else about this deep emotional thing that somebody shared with you. Again, that's why we need the robots. The robot can be programmed to be a secret keeper. You have a robot, it's only purpose is to keep your secret. Then do you have to destroy the robot or is it important that the robot continue to exist. Well, because we come back to our our initial philosophical discussion that the robot has to know the secret, understand the secret. Otherwise the

robot is not a secret keeper. It's just it's it's deleted. It's the same as telling somebody and then murdering them. Okay, so we cut to the chase here. When should you

reveal a personal secret for maximum benefit? Well, Kelly thinks in in this paper at least, that you should reveal a personal secret when you've been able to identify a confidante who can be trusted not to tell your secret to others, and that's kind of rare, who you can depend on to be non judgmental, so they're not going to say, like you monster, and who you can expect to help you gain new insights into your secret and bring you feelings of closure. Uh So that's interesting because

that sounds to me like she's basically describing a counselor therapist. Yeah, yeah, exactly, have the same thought, Like that would seem to line up with you know, a a certified you know, self help hotlines such as you know, suicide prevention or rain or something like that, or or like an individual counselor there. It's like either way, it's somebody who it's their job

to not be judgmental, but to just try to help you. Uh, it's their job to try to help you find insights and and understand things about yourself and about what you're telling them. And it's part of their job to keep you keep everything confidential. All right? So, well that sounds good.

Then what's the what's the possible downside? Well, you know, so I mentioned a minute ago that part of what went into her study was the idea that their negative health consequences for from keeping secrets, and I think the picture on that is not entirely clear. There have been plenty of studies showing some kind of correlation between negative health outcome from keeping secrets, but just the results are

scattered and inconsistent. Um, So, for example, what if it's not keeping a secret that does my charm to your health? But what if some of these results are triggered by a different level of correlation, meaning that the kind of people who keep more secrets naturally tend to be less healthy people to begin with? M hm, Does that make sense? So it's not that keeping a secret makes you unhealthy,

but that unhealthy people are more likely to keep secrets. Okay, I mean that's like from a scientific standpoint, that's that's that makes perfect synse. That would be something you'd want to explore. Of course, it's hard to imagine a real life, like conscious version of this way, like, oh, that one looks sickly, that's my that's my secret keeper. Well, so, Anita Kelly was the same author as the earlier study.

She was one of the authors of a later study along with Jonathan Yip, called is keeping a secret or being a secretive person linked to UH Psychological Symptoms in the Journal of Personality in two thousand six, And this study tried to compare negative health symptoms across time to figure out whether keeping a specif effects secret or generally being a secretive person had a greater effect on health outcomes.

And in this study, keeping a specific secret so when when they found people said yeah, I have a secret I'm keeping, that did not in fact correlate to worse health outcomes. What they found was, in fact that people who were generally secretive people were more vulnerable to more

symptoms to begin with, uh yeah. I also saw an article on Psychology today with the uh with with Kelly, and she she pointed out yet the workshow that keeping the major secret did not predict worse health at all, but that she did say that you can argue that secret keeping is still an important part of developing intimacy, etcetera. So you have to factor in all these other aspects of secret keeping, you know, in addition to the health obviously, right. Yeah.

So this is not to say like, if if secrecy doesn't actually affect your health, then there's nothing to worry about. You know, it might affect relationships and everything like that, but then maybe it does affect health. And so this

is where things just continue to be messy. Kelly is one of the authors of another paper with Robert Rodriguez from two dozen six called Health Effects of Disclosing Secrets to Imagine Accepting versus non Accepting Confidants in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, And this one seems to go back in the other direction, and just to be real quick, basically what this study did is it had students write down confessions of personal secrets while imagining three

different conditions, either imagining writing to an accepting confidante somebody who is there listening to you to what you confess and is not judging you to a non accepting confidant or to no confidant, just writing into the void. And what they found was that the students who wrote the confession to an imagined accepting confidant had reported fewer illnesses after eight weeks than did the ones who wrote to a non accepting confidant. And if that that seems kind

of believable. But if that's true, that that makes you think that just like the imagining of having a secret accepted or rejected is incredibly powerful and and produces long running stress effects on the body. Well, I mean it comes back down to the idea of survival within groups.

You know, for the vast majority of human history. So even in the study of the author's pointed out that you know, if you're if you're keeping personal secrets, you're basically running scenarios about being ostracized for for for the secret you're keeping, and therefore you're kind of in a constant state of fearing your survival. Because again, nowadays, if you're ostracized from your social group, it doesn't necessarily mean

you're going to starve to death in the wilderness. But for the vast majority of human history that was more of a reality that was that was more of a legitimate possibility of of being ostracized by your immediate group. Yeah, so I don't know. What. What do you think about the health effects of secrecy, Robert, I'm getting a from the research I've looked at, I'm getting a very jumbled picture. I do think that there is some kind of there does appear to be some kind of correlation between secrecy

and some negative health outcomes. But the research does appear to go back and forth, and it's not all always focused on the same question asked the same way every time. So this is one of those areas where I don't

feel super confident to pronounce solid discoveries just yet. Yeah, and again, it just it comes back again to the unequal nature of secrets and even like it's going to be relative to the individual, because you could have one individual that can can keep the secret of what happened in the dark cave, uh, you know, and they can just file it away with a lot more ease, you know, maybe maybe maybe due to some sort of unique wiring of their you know, their cognitive equipment, but they're able

to sort of compartmentalize it and keep that secret. Someone else they could They could be in the scenario where they cannot sleep at night because they keep remembering the glowing red eyes from the cave. Well, yeah, definitely. Because a secret, obviously, in many of the cases where it's going to be most destructive, is highly related to the

idea of guilt or shame. And if you're a type of person who, say, has a low guilt quotient, I don't want to say you're a psychopath or something like that, but if you don't tend to experience much of a guilty conscience, I can't imagine secrets bothering you all that much unless you're just constantly worried about being discovered, you know,

not so much worried about the original content of the secret. Yeah, and U. And one way to look at this might be to perform an exercise where you look at your own life and like, move your secrets out of the way, and then think of things that you don't recognize his secrets that but could be reclassified as secrets if you cared enough about them. You know what I'm saying, Give me an example, what do you mean? Okay, so say,

let's let's see what would be an example. Um, I guess we guess one would be like what if I what if I stay up one night my wife is gon to bed and I watch say raw Head Rex or some some horror movie of questionable quality, and I'm not I'm not keeping it a secret. It's just in the background. Maybe I don't even tell her because she because I know that she probably doesn't care and doesn't want to hear about the plot of raw Head Rex

r um. But if I were to, But but I could re classify that information and say, no, this is a secret. She cannot know about my watching raw Head Rex. You know, if you start sort of tweaking the reasoning for why you didn't reveal this, Uh, then it can it can take on new form. Yeah. I mean, as we talked about earlier, it seems very much that secrecy is in the mind not of the beholder, but of the secret keeper. Uh. And in what they want other

people to know. I mean, so you might be a person who ate the whole sleeve of oreos or whatever, or the whole sleeve of saltines for some reason. Uh. And and that's just you know, you're a comedian, and you make it, you build a whole bit around that fact. It's funny I the whole slave of oreos, or you might be a person who's legitimately ashamed and embarrassed and wouldn't want people to know. I think that's a good example. Yeah, And it doesn't have anything to do with the opinions

of other people as they exist outside you. It's just what you think about them and what kind of person am I. Yeah, alright, we're gonna take a quick break and we come back. We're going to get into the physical burdens of secrecy and uh and at the very end we'll briefly discuss nudity. Than all right, we're back. So, Robert,

here's the thing. Do you ever think about metaphorical perception, Like, it's no surprise that when we perceive physical quantities are perceptions are colored by our thoughts, right, Like, for example, if you're tired, you might estimate that it's actually later in the day than it is, right, something like that makes sense. But one odd way of thinking about influences on our perception is when our metaphors color perception. Here's

an example. A two thousand eleven study by Schneider at all I found that if you think the contents of a book are important, you judge the book to weigh more when you hold it. Like so importance. We have a metaphor that says something that's important is heavy. It's

a weighty matter. So like someone who puts a lot of faith and say a Bible or a Koran or some of their sacred text like holding it in their hand, there on some level perceiving it as being heavier than an equal, you know, an equally sized, equally weighted volume of say vampire romance romance books. Yeah. Uh, And so I do want to point out that actually the authors of the study I just cited do think that the association between weight and importance is actually deeper than just

metaphorical association. But clearly some amount of metaphorical association is there. So, if we conceive of secrets as a burden, as we often have throughout the episode, uh, you know, it's something you're carrying around with you, does that exact a metaphorical psychological toll on the body and the mind? Does your body treat you as if you're carrying something when you're carrying a secret, carrying something heavy? That's an interesting idea.

I mean, I've actually heard people say, oh, so and so really laid some heavy stuff on me, you know, like bringing to mind the idea that you were you were on the ground, and they have they have physically placed a weight on your body, and now it is

more difficult to move because of it. I want to cite a scientifically rigorous case study, which is that there's a scene where there's a character on The Sopranos who's uh, one of the early seasons, who's constantly having back pain, and it turns out this character is harboring a secret betrayal, and the psychiatrist character in the show, she says, you know, well, a secret is a heavy load. It might cause feelings like that. Now, of course that's fiction, but I can

see things like that happening in real life. But of course that's just our intuition. How about if we test it. Well, some people have been testing this and the answers are complicated. This is another one, I'm sorry to say where the answers are not clear. Uh that there's gonna be some back and forth in complications. So you've gotta stick with

us for a minute. So there's an original study from two thousand twelve in the Journal of experimental psychology by Michael Slapian at All called the Physical Burdens of Secrecy, in which the researchers found that people who kept big secrets such as marital infidelity or sexual orientation made different judgments of physical quantities having to do with work. So, for example, test subjects who were made to think about a secret that they kept, either a big secret or

a small secret. They were then asked to look at some pictures. So the ones who had been thinking about a big secret judged a pictured hill to be steeper. Just looking at the photo of a head on hill slope, People who had been thinking about a quote big secret thought that the incline was about forty six degrees, as opposed to people who thought about a small secret, who thought that it was about thirty three degrees. They also apparently judge distances to be farther. Now, this was tested

by having subjects toss bean bags towards a target. Those who thought about a big secret through their bean bags farther, which the researchers interpreted to mean that they judged the distance to the target to be greater. Also, in a separate test among subjects who had cheated on their partner. They found that the subjects who reported more psychological burden from their infidelity, meaning those who thought about it more, judge tasks like carrying groceries and helping someone move to

require more effort. And then a final study found that a test group who had to conceal their sexual orientation was less likely to help with physical work like moving stacks of books than a control group who had to conceal an uncontroversial personality fact like your level of extra version. So, other studies have shown that people carrying a heavy load judge hills to be steeper and distances to be farther, and that you can kind of see why that would be, right.

The implication here is that the mind is interpreting the secret as it would a literal burden. Yeah, and I mean you could also take it apart and say that it's almost as if the individual knows that it's going to not only there gonna have to climb that hill, but they have to climb the hill while thinking about this secret, like this secret around in their head. Yeah, and sorry if that point isn't clear. Like so one thing that's been shown in researches. You put a heavy

backpack on. Somebody, once they've got that heavy backpack on, they think a hill looks steeper than the same person without a backpack, or they think a distant target looks farther away than without that backpack on. And and that that's physically, I mean, you can see why that would be. You're factoring in the expense of doing it with this extra weight. And so the question is does this psychological

weight play a similar role in the mind. Now, none of these studies actually say you get a better workout with a heavy seat, because otherwise that's what you need in a personal training and be like, all right, you're gonna really get out, You're gonna kill it today. And speaking of killing, I want killed a Doberman pincher. Now, go out, go go go get it, go go go

kill it. Uh, none of the research is saying that. No. In fact, you'd imagine it's probably the opposite, right, Like, you're you're not getting the physical benefits of of having you know, a weight belt on in your workout, but you're having the mental difficulty of getting through your workout bearing this this load. Right. Yeah, yeah, Now, I want to I want to stress, as I said, going in that there's some complications to this, and so we shouldn't

just take these results at face value. But before we get to the complications, I want to talk about one more follow up study by Slapy and Massa Campo and

Embody called Relieving the Burdens of Secrecy. Revealing secrets influences judgments of hill slant and distance, and so this was a follow up study, and the authors found that making test subjects think about a secret caused them to see distances is longer and hills is steeper yet again, but that anonymously revealing details of a secret seemed to mostly

eliminate this effect. And as in the first study, estimates were altered for perceptions of physical space relating to body exertion, but not to numerical estimates generally, So you could have people estimate other kinds of things that aren't related to how your body would need to do some work, and it doesn't seem to affect that, so it wouldn't make you bad at math. It's not just not just that

having a secret makes you generally estimate higher numbers. It's that specifically would make things that you might have to like distances or slopes, you'd after traverse look more difficult. Okay, so that's the follow up study. It seems like that they find that in addition to their original findings, if you if you reveal your secret, you might get some relief.

But it's good to check for follow up research because in this case, other studies attempted to replicate slapians original research from two thousand twelve and failed to get the same results. Um, so I wanna cite this one by perture at all. The burden of secrecy, no effect on hills land estimation, and bean bag throwing. And this is in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Some bean bag throwing

in that in that that article title. Though, yeah, yeah, it's a little it might be a little bit salty. But they're also very polite and that they thank Slapian for they say he cooperated with them and trying to help them replicate the experiments exactly. So, yeah, they replicated the experimental procedure as closely as they could with the help of Michael Slapy, and they failed to replicate the

findings of the original study, calling those results into question. Also, it's worth noting that these researchers had larger sample sizes in their replications study, giving their results greater statistical weight. Uh. They also performed a meta analysis combining with other existing attempts to replicate the original results, some of which claimed

to find the same results. But they found that when results were combined across the existing studies, the correlation between having a big secret and the judgment of a steep looking hill was not significant. However, there may be some nuance here. So now everything's up in the air, right, you have this original study of claims to find this effect, people look for it with even larger sample sizes and don't find anything at all. Uh, And so what's going on?

Are we just in bogus land here? Well, Slapian did try to introduce some nuance with another study, and this might get at what the problem was. So what he claims is in a study from that, Maybe it's the problem was dealing with this supposed size of the secret, Right, they were dealing with these concepts of a big secret

versus a small secret. And maybe it's not actually that the size of the secret has any effect on how you judge the steepness of the hill, but that a person's level of preoccupation with the secret does more reliably predict how steep the hill seems. In other words, it's not really what the secret is, it's how much the secret, larger or small, is eating away at you and keeps

intruding on your mind. Okay, so here's a possible example. Um, what if I told you do not tell Christian that I bought a new box of pins and pins of pens. Ink pens, Oh, ink pens, don't tell. I was imagining like pins like a pincushion, Like, what are you going to do with pens? Stick them into the Christian doll? We'll see. That's the thing. You wouldn't know, you, So you might find yourself running this through your head. Why does he want me to keep the secret of the

inkpens and just a new box of ink pens? What could what could possibly be going on? So, even though there's no actual weight to it, you might return to it again and again just trying to figure out why it's a secret. So that that's that's my one possible take on that, because otherwise, if it's not an important secret, why would you come back to it unless there's something cantalizing about it, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, or you're

really proud of it. That could be another example. So like the boss that you're you know, really hoping to be in the ends with, they share some just you know, dumb, sup work secret. But then you keep thinking, oh, man, they shared the secret with me. This is I'm on the inside. Now I'm I'm I'm in the upper echelon, this is I'm on my way up. Well that that's another thing is that the secrets in these studies are almost always just assumed to be negative. I mean in

those few cases. And I think that's been our discussion so far as that most secrets do have negative connotations. But in those cases where you're keeping some positive secret, would that have the same kind of effect? Man, would that also make you feel weighed down? Like he like your secret is you were a part of the surprise committee. You're a part of this the surprise birthday party committee.

Like that's it's just full of fun. Christian with pens, Yeah, yeah, he loves pens and these I didn't mention that these were all you know that each one's themed after his favorite uh, you know, comic book character. So he's gonna love him. Okay, is there like a pin man? That's the brand pin Man pens Yes, okay, well, anyway, one more thing about that study that they also said that the effect seemed to be mediated by the quote judged effort to keep a secret. So people subjectively report how

much difficulty they're having keeping a secret, how much it takes. Uh. And so that may be a literal adaptation for resource conservation, because you're saying it's it's taking effort. Okay, so where are we now? I mean, this is frustrating because, as is often the case I'm sure you've experienced before, Robert, when you get into research, is especially in social psychology, that there are these these results that are just messy and all over the place, and I feel like methodologies

are not always unified. You always feel like I wish people were asking the same question instead of related questions. Yeah. Well, it just it comes back again to just the changing nature of the secret and you cannot just put a secret in a Petri dish and and and use it in your experiment. Yeah. And you see that demonstrated time

and time again with these results. And that actually is one of the things that feeds into the last paper I want to talk about, which is more work from Michael Slapian with Jen shock Chun and Miliam Mason in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. I think this is just coming out called the Experience of Secrecy, And so this isn't following specifically on the burdensomeness of secrecy, whether there's anything to that or not. We can leave

that up in the air for now. Yeah. This this is more this team trying to say, Okay, what is secrecy really? We need a new redefined theory of what secrecy is if we're going to study it. And so they start by saying, you know, attempts to describe secrecy are hampered by some problems. Why hasn't there been all that much research on secrecy? Well, one of the things is it's hard to study. By definition, secrets are things

that people try to hide. So if you want to go with real secrets that people hold that are about their lives, it's difficult to reliably coax those secrets out in an experimental framework and manipulate them. You always wonder like, are people really being honest? Uh? And are people and and different secrets are going to have different weight to people write like it's hard to manipulate the secret variable yeah, it's hard to You probably are not having a lot

of bring your own secret experiments here. You know you're going to provide something. It's going to basically come back to the kindergarten scenario where there's a puppet with a book of secrets, and this is a stand for secrets. Yes, that's what a lot of the research does, is provides you secret. But when you're provided with a secret in a research environment, the secrets trivial. I mean, it just

doesn't really mean anything to you. So you're probably not going to treat it like you would a secret that's relevant to your personal life. And if it's relevant to your personal life, you might ask people, do you have a secret? You know, for the purpose of an experiment, think about that secret now, do X, Y and Z. One person might be thinking about I cheated on my spouse, and the other person might be thinking about I secretly want to write a comic book or something, you know

what I mean. They're just not really equivalent. And if you were somehow able to draw in someone's actual secrets into the experiment, it ceases to be a scientific experiment. It becomes like a like a jigsaw killer s right, like that could basically be an entire horror movie, right there, someone experimenting on people and using their real dark secrets to their advantage. Right. So, so there's all this difficulty in this research area. Secrets are incredibly important psychological phenomenon.

I think it totally matters to study them, but they're just hard to study to you rigorously. And another thing the author's point out is they think prior research has defined secrecy too narrowly. Uh So they make this point, and I think this gets into something we've actually been

talking about throughout the episode. Now, they say, you know, previous research is focused almost entirely on secrecy as deliberate interpersonal concealment, preventing other people from finding out something, either omitting information or actively deceiving in order to hide a piece of knowledge from another person or persons. And the authors here propose a model of secrecy that is instead

intra personal. While the ultimate goal of secrecy is to prevent other people from knowing something, the primary experience of secrecy, what it's like to have a secret, is mostly intra personal. It's inside. Uh it's again ala Lane and Wagner. I think we mentioned this earlier secrecy is something you can do alone in a room. It's just you rolling the secret back and forth in your head. Uh, you know,

contemplating the contents of the secret. But also you know, what are they going to be effects if you share the secret with someone else, either intentionally or unintentionally, right, or thinking about the contents of the secret itself, not even just like the disclosures, like you might be obsessing over whatever it is that's bringing you trouble, how people would react. I mean, yeah, there's so much to roll

through in your brain. And so the authors here try to redefine secrecy not as the act of concealment from others, but is the state of mind the intention to conceal information from others. So, and another thing they point out is that not every act of inhibition and conversation is secrecy. I think this is a very good point. Actually, there are hundreds of ways that you practice inhibition and keep yourself from saying certain kinds of things during interaction with others.

But most of these don't have to with keeping specific personal information a secret, right. Most of them have to do with something like manners or appropriateness. You're not trying to prevent people from finding something out. You're just trying

not to say something that would be not appropriate to say. Yeah, And to come back to what we're talking earlier about four or five and six year olds like you see all that coming online as well, the gradual realization that that not everything is that is appropriate, uh, you know, content for discussion. You know, you can't share every detail of your your latest bathroom break just because it happened, and you're that kind of like free sharing soul, right.

So yeah, So if it's possible that there's a personal fact about you that you wouldn't want other people to know, and yet it never comes up in conversation and nobody ever asks you about it. If that's the case, is it a secret, Well, I'd still say yes, even if there's never any occasion where you have to act to conceal it. It's just because you don't want people to know that it is a secret, I would agree with that, yes.

So yeah, in that case, it seems like secrecy is defined primarily by the intent of the concealer, not by the behavior of the concealer. I mean, for instance, your email password or your bank account information is essentially a secret, but I don't think it necessarily. I mean, it might bring a certain amount of physical or mental anguish to remember those passwords, but for the most part, you're not sitting around like anguishing over this secret keeping that's taking

place regarding your Gmail password. That's a good point. I mean, if secrets do, if they are some kind of burden, or if they do have some kind of effect on us, why does it seem to be that these these studies are only focused on the sort of negative affect of facts about ourselves as opposed to just like secret information that has kept confidential for totally utilitarian reasons. Yeah, it's like most of the secrets tend to be story shaped

secrets as opposed to just coded secrets or just informational secrets. Right. That's a really good point. I mean, I wonder what the difference is psychologically, How does your body react differently to them, if at all? Um So, Yeah, but we spend a lot of time alone with our secrets, and they can surface whenever the mind wanders, and of course we probably all know from experience that they often do. Right, You've I'm sure you've had this experience, Robert. You're alone,

You're sitting in traffic or something like that. And if you have any secrets, they tend to just pop into your head uninvited. And this can happen a whole lot. I wanna cite just one study by a cane at All from two thousand seven in psychological Science where they were attempting to judge how often people's minds wandered off of whatever they were doing in daily life. And they use this digital assistant to prompt people throughout the day

to see what was on their mind. And they found that people reported their minds were wandering almost about a third of the time, about thirty percent of the time. Uh So, most to the time, they reported that their minds were wandering to mundane day to day thoughts. But the contents of mind wandering vary from person to person. Sometimes they were wandering to plan, sometimes they're wondering, wandering

to worries, and secrets are among these worries. So every time your mind wanders to a secret, you get to be reminded of your own lack of honesty, your own lack of authenticity, which can be very undermining to your sense of self worth. Right, Yeah, and also an incomplete task. Remember that as well, exactly right. So back to this paper. Based on the hypothesis of secrecy being primarily intra personal, you know, inside you instead of between you and other people,

they make two predictions. Uh, they say, quote, first, people catch themselves mind wandering to secrets outside of relevant concealment settings more frequently than they encounter social situations that necessitate active concealment of secrets. So they're saying, bay stun their new model, we should expect to find that people think about their secrets way more than they actually have occasion

to prevent people from finding out about them. Right. And then the second thing is quote the frequency with which people mind wander to their secrets predicts lower well being independent of the frequency with which they actively conceal their secrets. So here they're predicting, the more your mind just intrusively features secrets content, the more secrets just pop into your head,

the lower your well being is going to be. Um. So this paper had ten studies throughout it, too many details to go into here, just a few highlights, and they came up with thirty eight categories of secrets after a little pilot study, and they would ask, you know,

have you done this is it a secret? The categories of secrets would be things like uh, emotional infidelity, sexual infidelity, theft, uh, work cheating, things like that uh And across the multiple samples, consistently, more than nine pc of people admitted to having at least one secret. So it seems like when you really drill down and give people categories to choose from, most people are keeping at least one secret, and lots of

people are keeping multiple secrets. The most common types of secrets people had that they reported never having shared with anyone were sexual behavior, lies, romantic desires, and extra relational thoughts. No big surprises are right, Um? So people did generally mind wander to secrets they found much more than they actively concealed them and interactions. And this was true for all kinds of secrets except for one, which was surprises,

which is kind of sweet. People spend more time actively concealing surprises than than letting their mind wander to them. Well that's yeah, Well that that makes sense too, because again those are like those are the positive as are the bright spots in the secret keeping universe. Right, So, according to self reports, the more people mind wandered to their secrets, the more they claim their secret harmed their well being, and this was true for mind wandering, but

not for active concealment. So the general findings here where that having a secret leads to active concealment and mind wandering of the subject to the secret, but mind wandering to the secret happens much more often, and mind wandering to the secret appears to have a negative effect on well being. Now I had a big question about this. Uh, I guess we're we're going to wrap up in a minute here, But I'm wondering in these mind wandering events,

what's the phenomenology there? Because there you're just talking about the mind wandering to a subject. When people's mind wanders to a secret, what are they generally thinking of? Are they thinking about the subject of their secret, like the thing it is they're they're keeping secret, or they thinking about how the secret would be perceived if it were discovered, or are they thinking about how to keep it from being discovered? Like what is the prime merry feeling of

your mind wandering to a secret? I mean, I imagine a lot of it's tied up in you know, the nature of the default mode network, and that we're sort of continually worrying about the past and the future. So it's going to basically color like, what does this say about who I am in the past or the future, the keeping of this secret or the nature of the secret? Right that would be my read on it. Yeah, I

think that's a really good read. And the who I am is a big factor because the the So in the study I just talked about, the authors, they're presenting an authenticity model of secrecy that is interesting to me because it's basing the whatever potential harmful effects of secrecy there are, they say are are maybe largely rooted in not necessarily like a spending cognitive resources thinking about the secret, but in the secret undermining our sense of authenticity and

self worth, Like it hurts our self esteem to think about the fact that we have to keep things secret. So in the study, like I said, they define secrecy not as the act of concealing information from others, but the desire to conceal information from others. And I wonder if you could take that a step farther insofar as that information relates to facts about yourself, could you go even more basic and say that secrecy is an intentional

mismatch between your public and private self. Huh yeah, I think you could, you know, and that that actually naturally plays in within the final example I want to bring up for our podcast episode here. Oh yeah, well what is that? That's we're talking about public and private itself? What is more public and privateself than the clothed self and then nakedself? The clothes the version of you that is literally wearing clothes and the version of you that

is literally naked. Well, I guess if you're never nude, even the privateself isn't always clothed. Well, that's that's true. The never nudes of arrested development that they put an additional spin on this. I'm not sure that Georgio Agambin actually thought about this, but he is, Okay, he is. He is an Italian philosopher of the century. He was born in two so he's still with us, and he's written a good bit on this idea of nudity as a secret, so he uh, it's really really fascinating stuff.

He gets into it at you know, far greater philosophic depth than we have time to discuss here. But for instance, he points to the myth of Adam and Eve is the birth of shame and the beginning of ethics. Uh He says, quote, if nudity results in us being ashamed, it is because we cannot hide that which we would prefer to hide from the glance of the eye, because the unrestrainable impulse of escaping from oneself is encountered by an equal certain impossibility of evasion. Now, can you translate

that for me again? He goes, He goes pretty deep into it. He talks about nudity and clothing as metaphors for the original state of humanity and divine grace. But his basic argument for nudity here or denudation is that uh quote forms of human engagement can become substantively democratic it enacted through an unconcealed disclosedness. So he's saying that, you know, nudity is about like it's like basically boils down to you know, letting the absence of secrets be seen.

So like nudity is the ultimate honesty. Yeah, in in a sense it is. If you're trying to get to ultimate disclosure, ultimate honesty, ultimate equality of information, you should not only tell all your secrets and never tell lies, but you should take your clothes off. That's what we do with the voider plates, right, we sent off images of naked human beings to say and and that was of course controversial. Uh, but we were saying, this is

what human beings are, these naked ape creatures. But of course that's a little dishonest because look around you, you know, and maybe you're a nudist colony listening to this, but or you're in a traditional sauna. But by and large it's probably is not the case. People were probably wearing clothes around you. And that's kind of a Gammon's argument here. He says humanity for humanity, nudity has become quote unevent not a state. In the same way you could basically

say that, like secrets have become the state. You know, we could we possibly expend this off and say that the keeping and trade of secrets has become the state of humanity and the so these secrets are the skins that we have done as we march eternally out of the garden of Eden. Wow. Well, I would not have predicted that we were going to end up with nudity Roberts,

but I think that's actually highly relevant. Yeah, it's um, I mean, clothing is sort of the it's the embodiment of one of the more benign secrets, right, because you're when you when you wear clothes, you're not really betraying anyone, right, You're not like covering up something horrible. I don't know, maybe some of us are. You're you're not covering up a crime or something like that, something people should know about. But I can see what he's saying that the enclothed

state is naturally an inauthentic state. I guess yeah. And it has become the norm, so that the actual like physical honesty and openness has become an event. It has become like these rare occurrences in the timeline of human existence. So what are people more likely to give up their secrets or their clothing? Oh, that's a great question. That's kind of kind of comes down to like a you know,

a jigsaw kind of scenario. Give up your clothing and your secrets, so you're gonna you're gonna walk down the street. There's a whole other thing too. He goes crazy on the Emperor's new clothing and all the connotations there. But yeah, would you get do you give up your your clothing or your secret? I don't know. I would imagine if the secret is weighty enough, you'd probably give up the clothing. Man Horrobert, this has been an interesting discussion, but I'm

frustrated by the science in this one. This is one where I mean, this has happened before, especially when we get into social psychology. I feel like it happens all the time that they're The literature is replete with studies that I'm kind of skeptical of the reported results, and then studies that fail to replicate, and then studies that get conflicting results or that aren't exactly asking the same question but being applied to each other. I don't know.

It's one of those where what's there seems interesting, but I don't know what's true or what to make of it. Well, welcome, welcome to the modern age. That's that's our in clothed age. But you know the great thing about this topic is that everybody is going to have some insight for this. People are gonna have thoughts on, uh, your children and their ability to keep secrets or not keep secrets. The weight of secrets is an adult um. The nudity scenario.

I would love to hear from any nudists out there, or individuals who have you know, participated in nudist events and how how that makes them feel in terms of you know, uh, you know personal psychic burdens that we've been talking about here today. Yes, seriously, you have got me wondering about this now. So like for someone with the with the new dist orientation, might you might you actually come to see shedding your clothing with the same kind of relief that a person might feel admitting a

secret that they've kept for a long time. Yeah, I mean I would imagine stuff. All right, Well, hey, let us know. You can get in touch with us all the usual ways. First of all, go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mothership. That's where we'll find all the podcast episodes, as well as links out to various social media accounts including Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram, etcetera. Uh,

certainly interact with us on Facebook. We have a Facebook group there the Stuff to Blow Your Mind Discussion module, and you can pop in there with you know, some more detailed, longer form thoughts about everything, And if you want to get in touch with us directly, as always, you can email us at blow the Mind at how Stuff Works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it, How stuff dot com, the big