The Science of Secrets

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
And Robert, you write a fiction. I do. I do
occasionally commit acts of fiction, right, and as a fiction writer,
I'm sure you have heard this saying, though I can't

(00:25):
remember where I heard it. If you want to make
a character interesting, what should you do? You give him
a secret some broad advice because not all secrets you
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,

(00:48):
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

(01:11):
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

(01:31):
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

(01:54):
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,

(02:17):
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,

(02:39):
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

(03:00):
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

(03:23):
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

(03:43):
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

(04:03):
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.

(04:24):
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

(04:47):
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

(05:07):
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

(05:28):
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

(05:51):
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

(06:12):
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

(06:34):
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

(06:55):
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

(07:15):
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

(07:36):
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

(07:57):
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

(08:17):
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,

(08:38):
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

(08:59):
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

(09:20):
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

(09:42):
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

(10:04):
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.

(10:25):
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

(10:48):
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,

(11:10):
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

(11:33):
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

(11:57):
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,

(12:19):
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

(12:41):
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

(13:01):
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,

(13:24):
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,

(13:45):
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

(14:06):
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?

(14:27):
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

(14:50):
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.

(15:11):
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.

(15:33):
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

(15:54):
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,

(16:17):
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

(16:40):
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,

(17:01):
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

(17:23):
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

(17:47):
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

(18:07):
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

(18:30):
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.

(18:52):
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,

(19:13):
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,

(19:35):
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

(19:56):
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?

(20:21):
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,

(20:42):
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

(21:04):
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,

(21:24):
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.

(21:46):
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,

(22:09):
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

(22:32):
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

(22:54):
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

(23:16):
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

(23:37):
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

(24:00):
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

(24:23):
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

(24:46):
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

(25:07):
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

(25:29):
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

(25:51):
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

(26:12):
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

(26:33):
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

(26:54):
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,

(27:16):
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

(27:37):
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,

(27:58):
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.

(28:19):
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

(28:42):
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

(29:05):
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.

(29:28):
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

(29:52):
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.

(30:15):
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.

(30:40):
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,

(31:00):
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,

(31:23):
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

(31:46):
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

(32:09):
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

(32:31):
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

(32:55):
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

(33:16):
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

(33:37):
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

(33:58):
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

(34:21):
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

(34:45):
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

(35:07):
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

(35:30):
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,

(35:52):
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

(36:15):
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.

(36:37):
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

(37:00):
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,

(37:22):
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

(37:43):
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

(38:05):
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.

(38:27):
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

(38:51):
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

(39:14):
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,

(39:34):
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

(39:57):
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

(40:20):
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

(40:41):
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

(41:07):
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

(41:27):
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

(41:49):
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

(42:09):
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

(42:32):
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

(42:56):
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

(43:17):
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

(43:42):
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

(44:03):
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

(44:23):
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

(44:44):
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

(45:08):
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

(45:29):
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

(45:50):
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

(46:11):
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.

(46:35):
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

(46:57):
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,

(47:21):
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

(47:42):
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,

(48:04):
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

(48:25):
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,

(48:50):
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

(49:12):
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

(49:34):
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

(49:56):
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,

(50:18):
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.

(50:38):
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

(51:01):
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,

(51:25):
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

(51:47):
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

(52:07):
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

(52:28):
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,

(52:50):
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

(53:10):
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

(53:33):
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,

(53:56):
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

(54:17):
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

(54:37):
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

(54:58):
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,

(55:19):
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

(55:41):
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

(56:01):
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

(56:22):
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.

(56:43):
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

(57:07):
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

(57:28):
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

(57:49):
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

(58:10):
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

(58:33):
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

(58:57):
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,

(59:17):
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,

(59:37):
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

(59:58):
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

(01:00:21):
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

(01:00:43):
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

(01:01:06):
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

(01:01:29):
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

(01:01:53):
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

(01:02:13):
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

(01:02:36):
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

(01:02:58):
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.

(01:03:20):
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

(01:03:40):
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

(01:04:00):
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

(01:04:21):
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

(01:04:42):
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

(01:05:02):
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

(01:05:23):
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

(01:05:45):
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,

(01:06:09):
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,

(01:06:33):
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

(01:06:56):
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

(01:07:17):
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

(01:07:39):
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

(01:08:01):
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

(01:08:24):
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,

(01:08:45):
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.

(01:09:10):
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

(01:09:32):
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

(01:09:55):
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

(01:10:18):
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.

(01:10:40):
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

(01:11:01):
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,

(01:11:22):
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

(01:11:43):
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

(01:12:04):
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

(01:12:25):
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

(01:12:45):
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

(01:13:06):
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

(01:13:27):
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

(01:13:51):
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.

(01:14:15):
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

(01:14:36):
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

(01:14:58):
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

(01:15:19):
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,

(01:15:39):
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

(01:16:03):
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

(01:16:24):
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.

(01:16:48):
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

(01:17:09):
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,

(01:17:32):
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

(01:17:53):
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,

(01:18:15):
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

(01:18:36):
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,

(01:18:58):
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

(01:19:20):
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

(01:19:42):
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

(01:20:05):
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

(01:20:29):
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

(01:20:50):
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

(01:21:13):
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

(01:21:33):
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.

(01:21:56):
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

(01:22:18):
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

(01:22:40):
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

(01:23:01):
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

(01:23:22):
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

(01:23:43):
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

(01:24:04):
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

(01:24:24):
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,

(01:24:46):
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

(01:25:09):
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

(01:25:30):
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

(01:25:53):
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

(01:26:14):
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

(01:26:36):
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.

(01:26:59):
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

(01:27:21):
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,

(01:27:43):
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

(01:28:07):
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,

(01:28:31):
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,

(01:28:57):
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

(01:29:20):
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

(01:29:41):
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

(01:30:02):
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

(01:30:22):
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

(01:30:45):
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

(01:31:06):
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

(01:31:27):
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,

(01:31:51):
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

(01:32:13):
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

(01:32:35):
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

(01:32:56):
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.

(01:33:18):
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

(01:33:38):
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

(01:34:00):
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

(01:34:22):
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

(01:34:43):
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.

(01:35:03):
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

(01:35:24):
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

(01:35:46):
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

(01:36:09):
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

(01:36:32):
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

(01:36:54):
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.

(01:37:18):
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

(01:37:40):
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

(01:38:00):
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

(01:38:21):
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
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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,

(01:38:43):
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

(01:39:08):
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