Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And Robert, you write a fiction. I do. I do
Speaker 1: occasionally commit acts of fiction, right, and as a fiction writer,
Speaker 1: I'm sure you have heard this saying, though I can't
Speaker 1: remember where I heard it. If you want to make
Speaker 1: a character interesting, what should you do? You give him
Speaker 1: a secret some broad advice because not all secrets you
Speaker 1: created equally. Uh, that you could give a character a
Speaker 1: secret identity. You could give them a secret past, a
Speaker 1: secret mission, um, a secret mark upon their body. Uh,
Speaker 1: Like I always think back to um a secret pet. Yes,
Speaker 1: well secret pet. I don't know as has been a
Speaker 1: I guess you could have like an illegal pet. But
Speaker 1: I always think back to raising Arizone in the The
Speaker 1: Bounty Hunter character played by text Cob and uh, and
Speaker 1: he has the secret what like woody woodpecker tattoo on
Speaker 1: his body that's revealed in one of the scenes. And
Speaker 1: there's this moment between which is the protagonist also has
Speaker 1: the protagonist has it as well, and so it's the
Speaker 1: protagonist Nicolas cave, which also has a woody woodpecker tattoo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh and it's a lovely moment in the film
Speaker 1: because suddenly these two characters share a secret or a
Speaker 1: secret has been exposed and uh and and there's not
Speaker 1: much made of it in the film. There's just this this,
Speaker 1: this one pregnant moment where where we just consider the
Speaker 1: absurdity and strange depth of of what has happened. I
Speaker 1: would say, in general, it's kind of hard to have
Speaker 1: a good story without a secret. I mean, try try
Speaker 1: to think. I'm sure you can come up with a few.
Speaker 1: But secret secrets are always there in fiction because good
Speaker 1: fiction is the act of discovery, and if you want
Speaker 1: to make a discovery tantalizing, you should know that there
Speaker 1: is something to be discovered, but not know what it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it instantly creates, creates drama, tension, there's stuff
Speaker 1: that the character has to hold back. The character may
Speaker 1: end up then having to lie about things. Yeah. It
Speaker 1: it opens up possibilities there and conflict and inner conflict,
Speaker 1: I should add, because that's another huge aspect of secrets.
Speaker 1: So many of our our more weighty secrets in life,
Speaker 1: and certainly in fiction, or secrets that are tied to identity,
Speaker 1: So you end up with a with a protagonist or
Speaker 1: an antagonist who is um who whose whole You know,
Speaker 1: personality and identity is sort of a spun around of
Speaker 1: this often dark secret about who they really are, right,
Speaker 1: The tension in their character is trying to keep all
Speaker 1: that bottled inside. Yeah, now, of course, Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: secrets have been a part of our stories for a
Speaker 1: very long time. Secrets factor into many myths and folk tales.
Speaker 1: So you have like the secret names of demons, come
Speaker 1: up right, Rumpel still skin, you have you know, if
Speaker 1: you know an entity's name, then you have some power
Speaker 1: over it. Uh. You have secret betrayals, secret histories. But
Speaker 1: I've always found one particular tale of secret and secret
Speaker 1: keeping particularly compelling, and that's the Japanese folk tale of
Speaker 1: Yuki Onna the woman in the snow Hit me with
Speaker 1: it all right, So this is the this is the
Speaker 1: basic telling of the tale. So a young man ventures
Speaker 1: out into the woods with other woodcutters and then they're
Speaker 1: caught in a terrible snowstorm, and a terrifying figure finds
Speaker 1: them in the cold, and then one by one she
Speaker 1: drains the life from the woodcutters. But then when she
Speaker 1: comes to the young man, she spares him, and she
Speaker 1: tells him that she will let him live. But there's
Speaker 1: one provision. He must never tell a single living soul
Speaker 1: what has happened here. He has to keep this secret
Speaker 1: his entire life. And if he tells anyone, she'll come
Speaker 1: for him and take his life. So it's like the
Speaker 1: opposite of natural born killers, or or tell them the
Speaker 1: North Remembers, or something like that is saying like, no,
Speaker 1: don't tell this story. I got to keep it inside,
Speaker 1: even though it's I mean, it's it's the most interesting
Speaker 1: thing that's ever happened to you, young woodcutter. But but
Speaker 1: you must never tell anyone. It's gonna define who you are,
Speaker 1: it's going to change the course of your life. But
Speaker 1: you have to keep it inside. And so the young
Speaker 1: man survives the storm, He ventures back to the village,
Speaker 1: and life moves on. He keeps the secret. He meets
Speaker 1: a beautiful woman and they marry. He and his wife
Speaker 1: have children, and they settle into a happy and normal life.
Speaker 1: But the whole time he has this secret tugging at him.
Speaker 1: He feels it's weight, it's chill, and and then finally,
Speaker 1: one night, after the children are asleep, he unburdens himself
Speaker 1: to his wife. He tells her of this deadly encounter,
Speaker 1: this deadly spirit in the woods, on that that day
Speaker 1: so long ago. So he feels a lot better than right,
Speaker 1: well maybe for yeah, I think he does for a
Speaker 1: few seconds there. But after he unburdens himself, his wife
Speaker 1: curses him for breaking his word and telling the secret.
Speaker 1: And then she reveals her true form, for she is
Speaker 1: the woman in the snow and has lived these many
Speaker 1: years as his wife and mother to his children. So
Speaker 1: she had a secret to Yeah, yeah, I mean their
Speaker 1: whole They're both wrapped up, their fates are both wrapped
Speaker 1: up in this this one potent secret. And you know,
Speaker 1: and obviously there are you know, less defined magical qualities here,
Speaker 1: the idea that this is a secret um actually has
Speaker 1: magical power to it. Now what happens next varies with
Speaker 1: the telling, uh, and the various versions make us ponder,
Speaker 1: you know, what the weight of a secret is, what
Speaker 1: the weight of a solemn vowel is, because that's the
Speaker 1: other aspect here is the vow not to tell. And uh.
Speaker 1: In some cases and some tellings of this she melts
Speaker 1: away into ice, water and others. She spares him yet again,
Speaker 1: but promises to come for him and show no mercy
Speaker 1: if he's not a kind father to their children. And
Speaker 1: then she you know, walks off into the snow. But
Speaker 1: either way, the husband's heartbroken. The children are gonna wake
Speaker 1: up the next morning and find their mother gone. It's uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's heavy stuff no matter how you
Speaker 1: shake it. Well, this place on our deepest fears and
Speaker 1: the thing that motivates it's most secret keeping. Now, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of different kinds of secrets you could keep.
Speaker 1: You could be a spy and keep secrets in your
Speaker 1: line of work, or you could be keeping a very temporary,
Speaker 1: benign secret, like planning a surprise party. But most of
Speaker 1: the secrets that come to mind when you think about
Speaker 1: secrecy are things you don't want other people to know
Speaker 1: about you. And that's that's the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: can be especially damaging in a relationship, right, Like, if
Speaker 1: there's something that you don't want your life partner to
Speaker 1: know about you, that's a fundamental flaw in the most
Speaker 1: important relationship in your life, right, I mean, it's some
Speaker 1: of the literature we're looking at for this episode, they
Speaker 1: got into this little bit. They're like, I'm about their
Speaker 1: being a balance to right, how because you end up
Speaker 1: in a situation where you don't want to share all
Speaker 1: your secrets and then your beloved turns into a snow
Speaker 1: monster and kills you. Like, I mean, that's kind of
Speaker 1: one reading on the Tale of Yukiola is that he
Speaker 1: was a little too open with his secrets. He should
Speaker 1: not have told that secret. That's one that should have kept.
Speaker 1: The moral of the story is that he should not
Speaker 1: have been honest. Yeah, But then there there are some
Speaker 1: versions of that tale where where she's completely forgiving because
Speaker 1: because it was not a breaking of the vowel to
Speaker 1: share that with his wife. So yeah, and then's and
Speaker 1: then of course there's there's one version where she right
Speaker 1: out right kills him. Uh. And that's a nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: retelling in Tales from the Dark Side in the movie.
Speaker 1: I like that the chassis of this story can be
Speaker 1: repurposed to suit almost any moral you want people to
Speaker 1: take away. So like, this story could be about how
Speaker 1: you should not keep secrets, or it could be about
Speaker 1: how you should keep secrets. Yeah, and yeah, there's that's
Speaker 1: one of the things that I think is so attractive
Speaker 1: about it. There's there's an ambiguity a to the magic,
Speaker 1: like what's the what are the what's the actual what
Speaker 1: are the actual magical mechanics of what's going on here?
Speaker 1: And then uh and then yeah, like was the guy
Speaker 1: in the right because you have a you have a
Speaker 1: guy who tells his secret for reveals the secret for
Speaker 1: a seemingly very noble reason, like it's weighing him down own,
Speaker 1: it's it's causing him pain, and it's something that's between
Speaker 1: him and the most important person in his life. Also
Speaker 1: though the fact of the secret is not an admission
Speaker 1: of personal wrongdoing on his part or something that that
Speaker 1: he should be ashamed of, it's just about a thing
Speaker 1: that happened to him that he can't talk about, right
Speaker 1: and and I can't. I have to assume it's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that like shapes you, that's a connects
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that changes the person watching a
Speaker 1: snow spirit murder people before you. Uh So, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's sad, it's it's it's it's depressing to
Speaker 1: think that you would have a character that would be
Speaker 1: that affected by something like it really it's a traumatic event,
Speaker 1: and and he can never talk about it. And I
Speaker 1: think that's something that a lot of and a lot
Speaker 1: of people can relate to. That a lot of people
Speaker 1: have experienced traumas that they either do not feel they
Speaker 1: can talk about, or they or they you know, they
Speaker 1: can talk about it very rarely, or they spoke of
Speaker 1: it once, you know, to you know, an appropriate authority,
Speaker 1: and then they can't share it again. Right now. Tales
Speaker 1: from the Dark Side of the movie V that's the
Speaker 1: one where a cat jumps down a guy's throat. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's the also a Japanese legend. No, that's a Stephen
Speaker 1: King story. But let's see. I'm not gonna remember all
Speaker 1: the tales that are retold in that one, but I
Speaker 1: know one is a one is a retelling of the Mummy,
Speaker 1: uh that I've I've referred to a few times because
Speaker 1: that's one of the few terrifying Mummy tales in my opinion.
Speaker 1: It's got Christians Slater in it, right right, and the
Speaker 1: Mummy goes around pulling people's brains out with a coat hanger,
Speaker 1: so it's it's actually terrifying for a little bit. But
Speaker 1: this one, in particular, it's a retelling of of of
Speaker 1: the Snow Woman The Woman in the Snow, except you
Speaker 1: have it set in New York City with Gargoyles the
Speaker 1: Monsters of Gargo instead of Snow Spirit, and then you
Speaker 1: have James Ramar playing the husband and Raydon Chong playing
Speaker 1: the wife. And it's it's actually really good. It's uh.
Speaker 1: It was written by the late novels and screenwriter Michael McDowell.
Speaker 1: Now another and far more literal telling of this uh
Speaker 1: this tale is Masaki Kabayashi's five film Kaitan, which features
Speaker 1: this tale among other Japanese traditional Japanese ghost stories. And
Speaker 1: it's extremely beautiful. It's really like a really there's a
Speaker 1: psychedelic vision to this film. It's It's available on Criterion Collection.
Speaker 1: This is one of those I've been meaning to watch
Speaker 1: for years and haven't gotten around too. I've got a
Speaker 1: good friend of mine from Tennessee really loves this one.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's it's beautiful, it's hypnotic. Um this one.
Speaker 1: I think I've actually referred to another story that's featured
Speaker 1: in this where you have the the reflection of a
Speaker 1: samurai's ghost and a cup of tea. Yeah, So in
Speaker 1: this one, what happens when he reveals the secret. This
Speaker 1: one has the more traditional version where she she spares
Speaker 1: him but makes him promise to be a good father
Speaker 1: to the children. Oh well that's sweet. Yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: mean it's sweet, but again it's it's still heartbroken. So
Speaker 1: if it's not obvious by now, we are going to
Speaker 1: be talking about secrets today and we're gonna try to
Speaker 1: get into some of the science of secrets, talk about
Speaker 1: the psychological research that exists on secrecy, the practice of
Speaker 1: keeping secret it's and the effects of secrecy. But I
Speaker 1: was trying to think about the concept of secrecy because
Speaker 1: it first it seemed like a very straightforward idea. Right,
Speaker 1: A secret is just what standard definition is something kept
Speaker 1: from knowledge or view? Right, Yeah, Like I keep thinking
Speaker 1: of it in terms of my my son, Like how
Speaker 1: did we introduce the concept of a secret to him?
Speaker 1: And it's in the form of giving gifts Christmas or birthdays? Right,
Speaker 1: Because it comes down to what's in this box? For
Speaker 1: your mother? You can't tell her it's a secret. Like
Speaker 1: it's a very literal scenario. There is an unseen quantity
Speaker 1: in this box. You know what it is, and you
Speaker 1: can't say what it is. You know, for the sake
Speaker 1: of fun, and that that's the nice version, right, But so, yeah,
Speaker 1: something kept from knowledge or view. Okay, that seems fairly straightforward.
Speaker 1: But the more I thought about it, the more I thought,
Speaker 1: that's not really a very accurate version of how we
Speaker 1: use the word secret. It doesn't match the usage. Because
Speaker 1: here's an example. If I live alone and I haven't
Speaker 1: had anybody over to my apartment yet, and I have
Speaker 1: a green chair that I've never told anybody about. Is
Speaker 1: that green chair a secret? Not really, right, you, You
Speaker 1: wouldn't use the word that way. So nobody but me
Speaker 1: knows about it, but it's not a secret. But say,
Speaker 1: imagine I'm living alone, I haven't had anybody over to
Speaker 1: my apartment yet, and I also have a vintage dock
Speaker 1: in poster hanging up on the wall, and that poster
Speaker 1: is the reason I haven't had anybody over to my apartment.
Speaker 1: Is that poster a secret? In that case? I think
Speaker 1: maybe it is. Yeah, I've been picturing in the scenario
Speaker 1: that you have an entire room set aside for this
Speaker 1: dock and poster and the green chair that you sit
Speaker 1: in while you stare at it, right, And I also
Speaker 1: sleep in the green Chair, so I have immediate conscious
Speaker 1: access to the dream Warriors. Wait, the Dream Warriors. That's stocking, right,
Speaker 1: I'm not wrong about that, am I? Oh? I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: I'm not a I'm not a huge dock and expert,
Speaker 1: but this would be the theme song for um, the
Speaker 1: The The, the Freddy Krueger movie. Yeah. I don't want
Speaker 1: to dream no more anyway. This makes me think that
Speaker 1: the idea of secrecy it's something that we deploy as
Speaker 1: a read on intent, right, it's the intent to conceal.
Speaker 1: But there are also things that you don't want other
Speaker 1: people to know about that aren't really secrets, right, like uh,
Speaker 1: not to get too gross, but descriptive details of your
Speaker 1: excretory function. These are things you'd really prefer your friends
Speaker 1: and colleagues not know. But would you call them secrets?
Speaker 1: Not really, right? No, I mean it's unless you're doing
Speaker 1: it and you know aut in a really novel fashion.
Speaker 1: You're probably doing it like everybody else anyway, So exactly so,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't want other people to know about this stuff,
Speaker 1: but you wouldn't call it a secret. And I think
Speaker 1: the reason is that you there's no reason to presume
Speaker 1: that your friends and colleagues would have any interest in
Speaker 1: knowing that information, right, they don't know, You don't want
Speaker 1: them to know, and they wouldn't want to know. So
Speaker 1: there are a lot of things about you that other
Speaker 1: people don't know, but they're not secrets. I think secrets
Speaker 1: are the intersection of things that people don't know, that
Speaker 1: you suspect they might want to know, and that you
Speaker 1: don't want them to know. What do you think about that,
Speaker 1: Robert m M. Yeah, I would say, but that's I
Speaker 1: think that's a good way of initially defining it. But
Speaker 1: then you get into like what does someone want to know?
Speaker 1: And there's like there their things they consciously and openly
Speaker 1: want to know, and there are things that they they
Speaker 1: tell themselves they wouldn't want to know, but if they
Speaker 1: were presented with an envelope or you know, or a
Speaker 1: file or something, then they might be tempted to look
Speaker 1: inside that sort of thing. And then uh, and then
Speaker 1: there's just varying levels of like realistic concern over the
Speaker 1: secret being found out and just sort of anxiety, you know,
Speaker 1: like building up in your mind that something is some
Speaker 1: dreadful secret or you know it would be terrible of
Speaker 1: other people found out about it. Yeah. So a lot
Speaker 1: of the experience of secrecy, I think, necessarily hinges on
Speaker 1: imagining what would be going on in other people's minds.
Speaker 1: It doesn't even necessarily depend on what other people actually
Speaker 1: would care about or how they would react. It's all
Speaker 1: about how you imagine other people would think about these details, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in many of these cases too, you're imagining, like
Speaker 1: yourself being the one who leaks the secret by accidentally
Speaker 1: letting it leak. Now here's an interesting take on this.
Speaker 1: I was reading about Jacques dar Da who is twenty
Speaker 1: century French philosopher and the father of deconstructions, the high
Speaker 1: priest of postmodernism. Yeah. Yeah, and a lot of this
Speaker 1: boils under the critique of the relationship between text and meaning.
Speaker 1: But he had the following insight to share on the
Speaker 1: nature of secrets and this these basics come from his
Speaker 1: work How to Avoid Speaking. So breaks it down like this,
Speaker 1: A secret is something that must not be spoken, Okay,
Speaker 1: but I must possess it and not give it away
Speaker 1: for it to be a secret. So I must understand
Speaker 1: the secret, or at least grasp the importance of it.
Speaker 1: But to possess that that secret I do have to
Speaker 1: tell one person, I have to tell it to myself,
Speaker 1: like in in containing the secret in my mind, I
Speaker 1: have to tell myself that secret. If I don't, I
Speaker 1: have forgotten it. And how can I keep a secret
Speaker 1: that I've forgotten? Uho? And also to keep that secret,
Speaker 1: I must not keep the secret. Mm hmm. So yeah,
Speaker 1: if you could have a secret exercised from your memory,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be a secret anymore. So my my advice
Speaker 1: is that have this answer ready the next time someone
Speaker 1: asks you if you can keep a secret for them. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, and I realized some of that probably sounds
Speaker 1: a bit like some you know, academic nonsense, but but
Speaker 1: think of it this way. Secrets have weight, and if
Speaker 1: I ask you to keep a secret, you must carry
Speaker 1: the weight of that secret, even if it's slight, right,
Speaker 1: And if the information is disturbing, frightening or sad or
Speaker 1: what have you, you still have to roll it around
Speaker 1: in your mind from time to time in order to
Speaker 1: not share it with someone else. Now, George or would
Speaker 1: probably disagreed with some of that. He said, if you
Speaker 1: want to keep a secret, you must also hide it
Speaker 1: from yourself. But again, part of keeping the secret is
Speaker 1: knowing not to let it out. And if you I mean,
Speaker 1: if you, I guess if you can forget it, but
Speaker 1: then it's then you're not keeping a secret then right right? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean that's part of the fear. Like, if you
Speaker 1: were to actually forget about a secret, you would not
Speaker 1: be in the prime position to defend against people finding
Speaker 1: out about it, right, Like, if there's a secret that
Speaker 1: people could discover about you, you need to know about
Speaker 1: it in order to steer people away from discovering it.
Speaker 1: Right Like if if you are not in if you're
Speaker 1: not you're self aware of what people shouldn't be finding out,
Speaker 1: you're not in a good defensive posture, right And if
Speaker 1: you if you have to be alive and keeping the
Speaker 1: secret to be a secret keeper, if someone tells you
Speaker 1: the secret and it murders you, that you're not a
Speaker 1: secret keeper anymore. Um so, And then again, well, I
Speaker 1: can see what Orwell is getting at here, because Orwell
Speaker 1: wrote about self deception a lot. You know, nine four
Speaker 1: is full of these ideas of double think and uh,
Speaker 1: and the ability to can convince oneself to believe what
Speaker 1: one knows isn't true, right Uh, And that this is
Speaker 1: sort of the final abjection of the self. I get
Speaker 1: the feeling that that Orwell ultimately is not painting a
Speaker 1: nice picture of what secrets are here. It's kind of
Speaker 1: gets down to the idea that so, so to keep
Speaker 1: a secret, you have to tell a lie. And maybe
Speaker 1: what Orwell is saying is if you can make that
Speaker 1: lie the truth of your heart, then you have become
Speaker 1: a true secret keeper. Right, But you've also sacrificed your integrity. Right. Uh.
Speaker 1: This reminds me of another quote, and this one comes
Speaker 1: from James Joyce, and this is from Ulysses his His
Speaker 1: you know, he says, secrets, silent stony, sit in the
Speaker 1: dark palaces of both our hearts, secrets weary of their tyranny,
Speaker 1: tyrants willing to be dethroned. Yeah, the secret wants to escape,
Speaker 1: right like it it's rain, cannot go on forever. It
Speaker 1: has a self destructive impulse. And I often do think
Speaker 1: of secrets this way, that a secret is like a bomb, right,
Speaker 1: It's like a bomb in fiction, and that it's possible
Speaker 1: that a bomb will never go off, but the purpose
Speaker 1: of a bomb is to go off, and like a secret,
Speaker 1: almost psychologically for me, plays the role of a thing
Speaker 1: that will be probably disclosed at some point in the future,
Speaker 1: and you are just wondering the entire time when and
Speaker 1: how that will happen. And then when it is revealed,
Speaker 1: you have to choose. Then are you then are you
Speaker 1: gonna come clean and say, oh, yes, I knew that
Speaker 1: all along. It was a secret and I was its keeper,
Speaker 1: and and and that brings various complications. Or do you
Speaker 1: say you pretend that you didn't know, and now you
Speaker 1: have a new secret. The original secret has been has
Speaker 1: been you know, declassified, but you've created the new one,
Speaker 1: the idea that you were never this keeper of this secret. Right,
Speaker 1: So here's a question. What's the relationship of secrets to lying?
Speaker 1: We were just talking about or well sort of gets
Speaker 1: into this, Joyce sort of hints at this. Most ethical
Speaker 1: systems would judge lying to be an immoral act, barring,
Speaker 1: you know, extreme extenuating circumstances, like you might lie in
Speaker 1: the same kind of circumstances where you would use violence
Speaker 1: to defend yourself or others there something like that. But
Speaker 1: generally lying is wrong. I think I feel that way. Um,
Speaker 1: So if it's wrong to lie, is it wrong to
Speaker 1: keep secrets? In other words, is it wrong to intentionally
Speaker 1: prevent other people from discovering facts that you suspect they
Speaker 1: would probably want to know or might want to know. Uh,
Speaker 1: I feel like the answer is probably not right. So
Speaker 1: that exposes another tension in secrecy, because some secrets are
Speaker 1: about things that are just none of anybody else's business.
Speaker 1: You know. It's not always like, well, I stole something,
Speaker 1: or I cheated on my partner or something like that.
Speaker 1: It might be things like there's a fact about you
Speaker 1: that you wouldn't naturally feel bad about, but you feel
Speaker 1: that other people might judge you unfairly if they knew it. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: like the doc and example is good. You know. I
Speaker 1: feel like a lot of us have these, uh, these
Speaker 1: things in life we like, you know, you know, be
Speaker 1: a a you know, a TV show or an album
Speaker 1: or something, and we're nostalgic for it. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: there's this, there's this idea that we need to keep
Speaker 1: it a secret at least from certain circles, excluding temporary
Speaker 1: tactical secrets like planning a surprise party or something like that.
Speaker 1: Does does this imply that a secret is always something
Speaker 1: that suggests an injustice. Either you did something bad and
Speaker 1: you don't want people to know, or there's something about
Speaker 1: you that you think people would treat you unfairly or
Speaker 1: unreasonably if they knew. Are there any exceptions to that? Um? Well,
Speaker 1: I think you touched on strategic secrets, right, the things
Speaker 1: that are not really something you want to keep secret forever,
Speaker 1: but it's just like you know, it's a planning a
Speaker 1: surprise or giving a gift or something. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess one of my my sticking points that I
Speaker 1: kept coming across, and this was, is just the idea
Speaker 1: of unnecessary secrets that people attempt to burden you with.
Speaker 1: I've I found I tend not to find these in
Speaker 1: my own like social interactions, but I know that others have.
Speaker 1: Where you're talking to somebody and they say, oh, but
Speaker 1: don't tell anybody about this, And maybe you know, maybe
Speaker 1: the secret they're sharing with you is something lady, But
Speaker 1: a lot of times it's not, and it's something that
Speaker 1: you're you're going to go and tell somebody else about anyway.
Speaker 1: But they've they've they've put the burden of keeping the
Speaker 1: secret on you. Also, in in workplace environments, I've encountered
Speaker 1: this where you know someone's sharing just some really unimportant
Speaker 1: bit of you know, short term stragg G for the company. Right,
Speaker 1: don't tell anybody. I don't tell anybody. I was like,
Speaker 1: why did you tell me? Because because it's a you
Speaker 1: had to share your crummy secret with me, and now
Speaker 1: I have to keep it or or break my vow
Speaker 1: over something. So pitdling, you know, somebody should start a
Speaker 1: website along the lines of post secret. You know about
Speaker 1: post secret, right, pop secret? Popcorn? No? No, post secret. No.
Speaker 1: That this website where this dude was collecting postcards of
Speaker 1: people would anonymously write down secrets and send them. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I do remember this. Yeah, I mean so that was
Speaker 1: an interesting way of of people sharing their secrets without
Speaker 1: actually disclosing to people who would know about them, you know,
Speaker 1: anonymous secret sharing. Uh. And there are probably some good
Speaker 1: questions we can talk about later in this episode when
Speaker 1: we talk about the science about whether that properly relieves
Speaker 1: any of the tension brought on by secret keeping. But
Speaker 1: there should be an analogy of that. It's a website
Speaker 1: that's just don't tell anybody yet for all work, Relay
Speaker 1: did secrets where people as soon as you get an
Speaker 1: email that says don't tell anybody yet or as soon
Speaker 1: as you get out of that meeting, you anonymously go
Speaker 1: and upload the facts. You can even have the time released.
Speaker 1: I guess, um, now these are these are all excellent points.
Speaker 1: Now I do want to throw in one thing here too,
Speaker 1: Like when you get into secrets, you also get into
Speaker 1: this idea of confessionals, right, Like to to unburden yourself
Speaker 1: with the secret is to make a confession. And uh,
Speaker 1: confessions have have played an important role, say in you know,
Speaker 1: in Catholic tradition, like that instantly comes to mind, and
Speaker 1: a lot of the studies that we looked at here
Speaker 1: the idea of someone going and being able to unburden
Speaker 1: themselves in an anonymous or semi anonymous fashion. Likewise, various
Speaker 1: self help hotlines. If some if the secret that you're
Speaker 1: keeping is something say bound up in personal identity or
Speaker 1: or you know, feelings of say suicide, you might call
Speaker 1: a suicide hotline or a um or say a sexual
Speaker 1: abuse hotline. And these would be appropriate places to unburden
Speaker 1: yourself with this information and uh, you know, receive expert
Speaker 1: advice on what to do about it. Now, that might
Speaker 1: be a good example of an exception to what I
Speaker 1: was talking about earlier because I can imagine you talked
Speaker 1: about abuse like people who have undergone a certain kind
Speaker 1: of trauma. Now, obviously they didn't do anything bad. They
Speaker 1: might suspect that other people would react unreasonably or judge them,
Speaker 1: but they might not too. In that case, they might
Speaker 1: want to keep a secret for some other reason. They
Speaker 1: didn't do anything wrong, They don't think people will be
Speaker 1: mean to them about it or think differently about them.
Speaker 1: They just don't want people to know, right. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it just comes back around again to this the
Speaker 1: very complex and and you know, a morphous quality of secrets,
Speaker 1: like not all secrets are are equal. Now, one of
Speaker 1: the things you mentioned earlier about about the idea of
Speaker 1: a secret being harmful or not. Um, it's it's worth
Speaker 1: noting that you know there are many parents out there
Speaker 1: argue you should not teach young kids about secret keeping
Speaker 1: because it might be exploited later on in abusive scenarios
Speaker 1: or the abuse or is saying hey, you have to
Speaker 1: keep this secret. Uh. I actually ran ran across some
Speaker 1: advice regarding this from the National Crime Prevention Council, and
Speaker 1: they stressed the following that you would want to teach
Speaker 1: a small child. First of all, if a secret can't
Speaker 1: hurt someone or something, you keep it. If a secret
Speaker 1: can hurt someone or something, you tell an adult. And
Speaker 1: if you're not sure, you're tell an adult. So it's
Speaker 1: got like a default mode of tell yeah yeah, which
Speaker 1: I think is a that kind of breaks down when
Speaker 1: you start bringing into the more complex adult scenarios of say,
Speaker 1: you know state secrets or workplace secrets, or you know
Speaker 1: the secret desires of your heart, but you know, for
Speaker 1: a childhood scenario, I think those those guidelines seem to
Speaker 1: make a lot of sense. I think that might be
Speaker 1: good guidelines for adults. I mean, think about that. You
Speaker 1: if you're not sure it it's better to keep it
Speaker 1: a secret, you should err on the side of telling.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. I mean that seems logical to me. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's the same reason that you wouldn't normally endorse lying,
Speaker 1: except in some extenuating circumstance where you've got to, you know,
Speaker 1: do something defensive or save lives or something like that. Generally,
Speaker 1: it's better if people don't lie to each other. The
Speaker 1: problem is that a child can tell an adult. The
Speaker 1: adult is the default, you know, authority figure. But who's
Speaker 1: an adult to tell God the police obviously called the cobs.
Speaker 1: Every time you've got a secret, I'd like to report
Speaker 1: a doc and poster in my apartment. Okay, well, I
Speaker 1: think it's about time to start getting into the science
Speaker 1: and maybe we can transition there by bringing up one
Speaker 1: last thing that I think is also interesting. Why is
Speaker 1: it so pleasurable to share secrets with a person or
Speaker 1: a small group. I'm sure you've had this experience, Robert, right,
Speaker 1: Like sharing secret it's a it's a well known bonding behavior.
Speaker 1: You're a middle schooler and you get together with your
Speaker 1: close friends and tell them who you've got a crush
Speaker 1: on or when you have you know, one way that
Speaker 1: you know you found your soul made not to get
Speaker 1: too cheesy, is that you confess thoughts and opinions to
Speaker 1: them that you would never say in front of anybody else.
Speaker 1: It's fun and delightful to share your secrets with that person. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and it's also um you know. The counterpoint
Speaker 1: is that it's disappointing, isn't it When you go to
Speaker 1: share a secret with someone and they already know the
Speaker 1: secret and you know your Your disappointment is is it's twofold.
Speaker 1: On one hand, you don't get to share, be the
Speaker 1: share of the secret, and they were maybe keeping it
Speaker 1: from you. But but when the reaction is positive, and
Speaker 1: when there's you know, mutual discovery between two people or
Speaker 1: a small group of people, why does that feel so good?
Speaker 1: It's intensely socially pleasurable. Well, I think I think a
Speaker 1: lot of it is you have to you have to
Speaker 1: boil down all of this to sort of, um, you know,
Speaker 1: prehistoric human scenarios, right, like what we're secrets for For
Speaker 1: the vast majority of human history, what did secrets consist of.
Speaker 1: They had to do with what the location of food
Speaker 1: and resources, um, the you know, the the position of
Speaker 1: dangers that you face, be the predators or other human populations.
Speaker 1: And therefore to share a secret was to share survival
Speaker 1: with someone. I feel like disclosure of secrets to close companions.
Speaker 1: It's so it's sort of like initiating Every time you
Speaker 1: do it, it initiates a further traversal into the boundaries
Speaker 1: of trust, Like you're going deeper into the trust landscape,
Speaker 1: which probably I think feels good for the same reasons
Speaker 1: that starting a new romantic relationship feels good. You know
Speaker 1: that feeling of euphoria people often report when they're dating
Speaker 1: somebody new. Um, it's like you're you're going into new
Speaker 1: social territory and it feels good to forge newer, stronger,
Speaker 1: better relationships. It's like playing like a card game and
Speaker 1: in the opening hands like none of the cards have
Speaker 1: been played, and every every play is something substantially new.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. Um. But also there there's an
Speaker 1: analogy to that, I think that is institutional secret knowledge.
Speaker 1: It's that same principle of sharing with a person or
Speaker 1: a small group and getting pleasure out of that, but
Speaker 1: making it part of an organization, like the secret knowledge
Speaker 1: that forms the basis of attraction to secret societies. And
Speaker 1: one of my favorites gnostic religions. Like if you go
Speaker 1: back to the first few centuries CE, you see these
Speaker 1: gnostic forms of Christianity, which were these strange versions of Christianity.
Speaker 1: They seem very alien to us now, but they're fascinating
Speaker 1: to study because they were built all on the idea
Speaker 1: of like you'd have a public version of the religion
Speaker 1: that was accessible to the masses, and then you'd have
Speaker 1: a private version of the religion based on secret knowledge
Speaker 1: that was only available to the insiders. Oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean you should. You saw this in Greek traditions as well,
Speaker 1: like you see it, you really see see it. And
Speaker 1: I guess in most major religions, there's there's there's the
Speaker 1: public religion, and then there are various esoteric versions of it,
Speaker 1: esoteric Buddhism, etcetera, and then branching cults and whatever ehressies
Speaker 1: from there on out. I get intense pleasure just from
Speaker 1: thinking about that and studying it. I can imagine it's
Speaker 1: so much more intense to actually be a part of that,
Speaker 1: to be one of the people who gets let in
Speaker 1: on the secret. Yeah, and then just you, and to
Speaker 1: be led by the secret, to the idea that there
Speaker 1: are secrets that will be revealed to you if you
Speaker 1: merely click on this article and learn the learn the
Speaker 1: ten secrets of toning your abs or what have you,
Speaker 1: and that the great way to clickbait you into submissions
Speaker 1: just to promise the secret will be revealed. Yes. So
Speaker 1: we talked a little bit about children and secrets, and
Speaker 1: I started to think, like, at what point do children
Speaker 1: actually gain a sense of secrecy? At what point do
Speaker 1: they understand secrets and become capable of keeping them. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I did find that there was a study by
Speaker 1: Peskin and Ardno in Social Development in two thousand three
Speaker 1: that tried to study the relationship between childhood development of
Speaker 1: theory of mind and the ability to do two things.
Speaker 1: One of them was play Hyden's which is a kind
Speaker 1: of secret keeping, but the other one was explicitly keeping
Speaker 1: a secret. So they tested children who were three, who
Speaker 1: were four, and were five at playing hide and seek
Speaker 1: and keeping a secret. And this was partially because those
Speaker 1: are ages where there was some existing knowledge about how
Speaker 1: much theory of mind children generally have at those ages,
Speaker 1: And in theory of mind is the concept of being
Speaker 1: able to imagine the thoughts and intentions of other people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting that hide and seek comes up, because I've
Speaker 1: certainly played a lot of hide and Seek with my
Speaker 1: son over the years, and he's five now, and earlier
Speaker 1: on hide and seek tended to consist of of him
Speaker 1: high and then running out and kept him getting me
Speaker 1: Like it was really hard to to, you know, relate
Speaker 1: the ideas that you're supposed to hide and wait for
Speaker 1: me to find it. Like the excitement would build up
Speaker 1: and then he would just jump up and come to me, right,
Speaker 1: I mean hide and seek. We requires that you try
Speaker 1: to think from the seekers perspective when you are a hider. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then likewise the keeping of secrets. You know, we
Speaker 1: get a we you know, get get a gift for someone, um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's generally gonna be like a gift from
Speaker 1: me or a gift from my wife and uh, and
Speaker 1: he would he would really like reveal the secret immediately
Speaker 1: when he was when he was really young, or even
Speaker 1: like want to unwrap the present right there, There was
Speaker 1: that the idea of there being any kind of suspense,
Speaker 1: that that there would be some pleasure and not knowing
Speaker 1: and guessing was something that developed over the years. Well
Speaker 1: that's what this study found. So they found that across
Speaker 1: the span of three to five, your ability to do
Speaker 1: both of these activities changes drastically. Three year olds just
Speaker 1: are terrible at keeping secret. It's a playing hide and seek.
Speaker 1: They couldn't really hack it, right, But by four, by
Speaker 1: age four, most kids were on on the secret train,
Speaker 1: and by five, five year olds could keep a secret. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: that and that that manches up with my experience pretty well.
Speaker 1: And this brings me to the secrets of kindergarten or
Speaker 1: kindergarteners anyway. And then this is actually this is actually
Speaker 1: really cool because today, as we're recording this, this is
Speaker 1: my son's first day of kindergarten. Congratulations, well, thank you.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, there's not much you can say.
Speaker 1: You can't say, like, well'm he's the first person in
Speaker 1: my family to go to kindergarten, you know, but um no, no,
Speaker 1: it is. It is a big deal. But but it
Speaker 1: was interesting to go through all of this with these
Speaker 1: various studies in mind, because, as you pointed out, various
Speaker 1: studies point to this as a time, you know, age five,
Speaker 1: moving in on six, when group related attitudes and behavior
Speaker 1: begin to manifest. Group membership begins to influence their learning,
Speaker 1: their expectations, and behavior. And this includes resource sharing within
Speaker 1: their group. And this is where we get into secrets,
Speaker 1: because the secret is a resource. That's interesting. I think
Speaker 1: a secret as like an informational resource, has value. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, like I said, you take it back to
Speaker 1: a prehistoric analogy, and like a secret is where where
Speaker 1: the good hunting grounds, where the where the good berry bushes?
Speaker 1: Where is their clean water? That's sort of thing, right,
Speaker 1: So the study that I was looking at here. This
Speaker 1: is comes from Antonia Mish, Harriet Over, and Melinda Carpenter
Speaker 1: and it's titled I won't tell Young children show loyalty
Speaker 1: to their group by keeping group secrets. And this is
Speaker 1: published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology in two
Speaker 1: thousand sixteen. Now, I'm sure this study sounds delightful, right
Speaker 1: Kindergartner's interacting saying the darnedest things keeping secrets. But but
Speaker 1: the paper is actually quite disturbing read at times, because,
Speaker 1: for instance, it touches on racial bias. Oh like, so
Speaker 1: that's part of in group variation on how children keep
Speaker 1: or relate secrets. Yeah, it ends up not playing as
Speaker 1: much into the study as our because they ended up
Speaker 1: not they didn't record any racial information about the kids,
Speaker 1: but they do point out some some sobering details here. Now,
Speaker 1: I I previously read that implicit racial bias doesn't really
Speaker 1: rear its ugly head uh and children until around age
Speaker 1: seven or so. But the researchers here, they point to
Speaker 1: a two thousand seven study that found quote, white children
Speaker 1: between four and seven years of age favorite other white
Speaker 1: children who positively interact with a racial in group member,
Speaker 1: such as a white child over white children who hadn't
Speaker 1: interact with a racial outgroup member, such as a black child.
Speaker 1: Oh no, that's sad. Yeah, yeah, it's it's uh, it's
Speaker 1: like I say, this is a quite quite quite some
Speaker 1: details to have knocking around in your head when you're
Speaker 1: doing your first day of kindergarden. Anyway, for the purposes
Speaker 1: of this study, the researchers didn't include any racial information.
Speaker 1: They set out to assess children's loyalty by testing their
Speaker 1: willingness to keep a group secret. Previous studies cited in
Speaker 1: the article indicated the children began to understand the idea
Speaker 1: of privileged information around age four, and that children can
Speaker 1: keep secrets in some context at this point. So that
Speaker 1: goes pretty much with what we were saying earlier. Right
Speaker 1: right age four, most kids could do it right. So
Speaker 1: here's how the study broke down. Children were assigned to
Speaker 1: color groups, you know, like green, red, yellow, and Sarah,
Speaker 1: and they were told a secret by by by two
Speaker 1: members of their own group or a member of an
Speaker 1: out group. So that's the initial setup. And you have
Speaker 1: a new neutral character who shows up and tries to
Speaker 1: buy secrets with colorful stickers. So loyalty means you get
Speaker 1: no stickers in this scenario because because the Tempter is
Speaker 1: coming around and uh, the and I should point out
Speaker 1: that the Tempter here's a puppet and the secret Shares
Speaker 1: are also puppets, and the the the character whose name
Speaker 1: is Siri, is attempting to to buy your secrets with
Speaker 1: these stickers. Siri is going to have the gender of
Speaker 1: the child that they're interacting with. And the stickers are
Speaker 1: going to range from just like a red sticker, green sticker,
Speaker 1: yellow sticker, et cetera, to uh, there's also a heart
Speaker 1: shaped red sticker, which is you know, sounds like it's
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Uh so, well, so one thing I think
Speaker 1: we should say just to make clear if you're like,
Speaker 1: how how motivated could you be? I think when you're
Speaker 1: a little kids, stickers are. Stickers are a hot commodity.
Speaker 1: I mean, the stickers are what you get when you
Speaker 1: get a shot at the at the doctor's office. Stickers
Speaker 1: are what you get in as a prize for not
Speaker 1: causing a disruption in the checkoutline. Yes, stickers are a
Speaker 1: lot of fun. I mean I feel like when you're
Speaker 1: four or five, stickers are basically cut up hot dogs
Speaker 1: to an animal are a dog. So uh. They tested
Speaker 1: forty eight five year olds gender split, and they also
Speaker 1: tested forty eight four year olds. The prediction was that
Speaker 1: we'd see more loyalty in the five year olds. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the children were just from day care centers in
Speaker 1: a midsized city. Again, no racial or ethnic details were recorded.
Speaker 1: A human served as a moderator. The male female hand
Speaker 1: puppets acted as secret keepers. The hand puppets Siri was
Speaker 1: the briber and h you also had a book of
Speaker 1: secrets factoring in the experiment, and this was provided by
Speaker 1: the puppets. So they conducted the experiment. And oh and
Speaker 1: by the way, children who could not remember their color
Speaker 1: group were kicked out. So some of the children, well
Speaker 1: they had to, you know, they had to because a
Speaker 1: lot of it had to do. You need to identify
Speaker 1: with group yellow or group green. But if you're asked
Speaker 1: what group you're in and you say, you know, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm in room seven of the kindergarten or whatever I'm in,
Speaker 1: you know, Mrs Williamson's the class, that's not going to
Speaker 1: cut it because you need to identify with the color
Speaker 1: group for the experiment to work. So the results were
Speaker 1: that overall across both ages and conditions, the majority of
Speaker 1: children kept the secrets, no gender effects. Children were more
Speaker 1: inclined to keep in group secrets than alt group see crets.
Speaker 1: So among the five year olds who again performed better,
Speaker 1: you had twenty one who kept in secrets within their group,
Speaker 1: thirteen who kept out secrets. Among the four year olds,
Speaker 1: fifteen kept in secrets, thirteen kept out secrets. And you
Speaker 1: would be happy to know, parents, that all the children
Speaker 1: went home with two super fancy stickers and not any
Speaker 1: of the bribe stickers. So so hopefully nobody went home
Speaker 1: thinking that ratting out secrets was a profitable venture. So
Speaker 1: this is kind of interesting because it looks like at
Speaker 1: least within this experiment, uh who knows what would happened
Speaker 1: if you tried to repeat it, But within this experiment,
Speaker 1: five year olds had learned a lot more in group
Speaker 1: loyalty than the four year olds. Like there was there
Speaker 1: was less of a difference in the four year olds
Speaker 1: between whether they kept secrets in group and out group,
Speaker 1: but with the five year olds, significantly more of them
Speaker 1: kept secrets in the group. Right right, Yeah, so I guess,
Speaker 1: you know, I guess we were seeing the you know,
Speaker 1: the the the advancement they have alson of the individual's
Speaker 1: ability to prioritize secrets and prioritize privileged information. To look
Speaker 1: at the Green team and say you're not one of us,
Speaker 1: I'll betray you. Uh. And I included a picture in
Speaker 1: our notes here of the puppet, and maybe I can
Speaker 1: throw this in the landing page for this episode of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. But I should
Speaker 1: point out the tempter. Is it a lifeful looking puppet
Speaker 1: and is not a punch of strawberry witch you have?
Speaker 1: But it's not like a Punch and Judy Show Devil
Speaker 1: or anything. No, this thing, it's going to be in
Speaker 1: the next Annabel movie, the Annabel's sidekick wave in. It's
Speaker 1: a little cotton hands summoning pizzoo zoo. Alright, well we
Speaker 1: have we have one more study on small children here,
Speaker 1: I think to reference before we take our first break,
Speaker 1: and that is a study title Secret Sharing Interactions between
Speaker 1: a Child Robot and Adults. But yeah, and this is
Speaker 1: by Cindy L. Bethel, Matthew R. Stevenson, and Brian Ceciletti.
Speaker 1: So in this one, it basically as a question, Hey,
Speaker 1: how are children going to deal with secrets if they're
Speaker 1: um if they're interacting with a humanoid robot as well
Speaker 1: as say a human adult, if they're interacting and specifically
Speaker 1: to with a a stuffed animal dog or a robotic dog.
Speaker 1: And this was this was a pretty interesting study to
Speaker 1: look at. So there's just a quick quote from it
Speaker 1: to give you an example. Here the quote, the qualitative
Speaker 1: results from these studies indicate that the children were readily
Speaker 1: able to apply their interaction style with an adult to
Speaker 1: their interactions with the robot in both the pilot and
Speaker 1: follow up studies. Future research needs to be conducted, but
Speaker 1: it is expected that with longer interactions with the robot,
Speaker 1: the children will treat the robot more as a peer,
Speaker 1: which would be beneficial and gathering sensitive information. So I
Speaker 1: guess the idea here is that maybe a robot could
Speaker 1: be used to elicit the sharing of secrets, especially like
Speaker 1: if children have been abused or something like that the
Speaker 1: children might be in some cases able to admit that
Speaker 1: to a humanoid robot. Yeah, I think so. It makes
Speaker 1: me wonder though about like what would be the applications
Speaker 1: for for adults, Like could we gain something by sharing
Speaker 1: our secrets with robots who we have robot confessionals. I
Speaker 1: was wondering the same exact thing, like, is that the
Speaker 1: next step up from post secret you can you can
Speaker 1: confess anonymously. Maybe better than that, but not as destructive
Speaker 1: as confessing to a person is confessing to a non
Speaker 1: judgmental terminator. Well, you know, it does remind me of
Speaker 1: various I believe NASA studies that have looked into the
Speaker 1: idea of creating like basically a computerized therapist and uh
Speaker 1: that a virtual therapist that one would interact with on
Speaker 1: lengthy space missions to check on your, uh psychological well being.
Speaker 1: Isn't that in the movie Moon? Yeah it is. That's right.
Speaker 1: That's a major plot point in that with the Kevin
Speaker 1: Spacey voiced robot that he he speaks to and relates to. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not it's not too far far off. I think,
Speaker 1: all right, well, I think we should take a quick
Speaker 1: break and then when we come back we will get
Speaker 1: into the weeds with some complicated research on the psychology
Speaker 1: of secrets. Than alright, we're back, okay, Robert. Now we're
Speaker 1: gonna get into research on secrets in a couple of
Speaker 1: areas that I want to admit. At the outset, I
Speaker 1: think is thorny and confusing. Um So, one of the
Speaker 1: things that I want to focus on is the research
Speaker 1: on the health effects of holding secrets and the supposed
Speaker 1: health benefits of revealing secrets. Maybe before we get into this, Robert,
Speaker 1: just what would your intuitions be, Would you just assume
Speaker 1: that having secrets is bad for your health? Well, my
Speaker 1: my initial reply is that, again, not all secrets are
Speaker 1: created equally, and but I also know that yes, even
Speaker 1: individuals carrying a lot of the anxiety in themselves. You know,
Speaker 1: if you if you can't leap at night because of
Speaker 1: the secret you're keeping, like, there are going to be
Speaker 1: some health effects there. At the same time, I'm also
Speaker 1: hesitant to like to make too many, you know, firm
Speaker 1: declarations about about the health effects there without looking at
Speaker 1: the research, because you do get in you potentially get
Speaker 1: into the gray area of like, oh, negative thoughts cause
Speaker 1: disease and and so forth that can be taken to
Speaker 1: the extreme by by pseudo scientific ideas. One thing that
Speaker 1: I do think is interesting right now is the body
Speaker 1: of scientific research on the mind body connection. You know,
Speaker 1: to what extent your mind affects physiological health. There's lots
Speaker 1: of super solid research indicating that there is an extremely
Speaker 1: serious link between the two, and yet that the whole
Speaker 1: mind body medicine thing can definitely be taken to pseudo
Speaker 1: scientific extremes like you say, and like people can start
Speaker 1: to say like that you can you know, think your
Speaker 1: cancer away and stuff like that, which, uh, no evidence
Speaker 1: indicates that's the case. But at the same time, there
Speaker 1: are tons of studies that do seem to be reliable
Speaker 1: and do show that mindset has measurable health outcomes, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, like I said, you can you can just
Speaker 1: look at an extreme example and just imagine somebody having
Speaker 1: to keep a secret and it's causing them such anxiety
Speaker 1: that they have trouble either eating or sleeping, a very
Speaker 1: realistic scenario, uh, and one that you has very would
Speaker 1: have very obvious health effects. Yeah, or just simply causing stress.
Speaker 1: And we know that stress. Stress causes the release of
Speaker 1: neurotransmitters and hormones that can have effects within the body.
Speaker 1: Having chronic stress is bad for you. But anyway, let's
Speaker 1: look at the research. So back in two thousand two,
Speaker 1: the psychologist Dr Anita Kelly, who is a professor of
Speaker 1: psychology at Notre Dame published a book called The Psychology
Speaker 1: of Secrets, and she spent a lot of her career
Speaker 1: studying the effects of secrecy and what happens when people
Speaker 1: reveal secrets. So I want to look at one particular
Speaker 1: paper of hers from Current Directions and Psychological Science, called
Speaker 1: Revealing Personal Secrets, and I thought this was interesting. So
Speaker 1: in this paper, Kelly collects the research on the consequences
Speaker 1: of revealing personal secrets. And a personal secret here is
Speaker 1: a secret that directly involves the secret keeper. So it's
Speaker 1: not one of those don't tell anybody yet things at work, right,
Speaker 1: It directly involves you. It's a secret about you. And
Speaker 1: then she does something fascinating. She begins to develop a
Speaker 1: framework for win and under what circumstances you should reveal
Speaker 1: a secret. I don't know if I've ever heard any
Speaker 1: advice along those lines before. Well, I mean, aside from
Speaker 1: the National Crime Prevention Council tips that we heard earlier
Speaker 1: for children, all right, I've never heard anything like this
Speaker 1: for adults. So she starts by acknowledging something interesting. For decades,
Speaker 1: at the time this had been published, had been conventional
Speaker 1: wisdom among psychologists and therapists that secret keeping was bad
Speaker 1: for the mind and the body. Like we were just
Speaker 1: talking about it, seems intuitive, right, uh, And Kelly points
Speaker 1: out that research began to bear this out. For example,
Speaker 1: UM research up to that point indicated that people who
Speaker 1: tend to conceal personal secrets had more physical body complaints
Speaker 1: like headaches, nausea, ulcers, and back pain, and they also
Speaker 1: tended to have more anxiety, shyness, and depression than people
Speaker 1: who didn't conceal information. She sites research showing that disclosure
Speaker 1: of personal information is associated with better health outcomes, such
Speaker 1: as better immunological function and fewer trips to the doctor,
Speaker 1: and one experiment showed that even simply writing down a
Speaker 1: disclosure of facts about a private traumatic event had an effect.
Speaker 1: They like, they took medical students and had them right
Speaker 1: about personal traumas and then gave them a hepatitis B vaccine,
Speaker 1: and those students had significantly higher antibody levels at four
Speaker 1: and six months later than subjects who wrote about control
Speaker 1: topics that had nothing to do with deeply hell emotional
Speaker 1: events and then received the same vaccine. So if if true,
Speaker 1: that's very interesting. And so if it's true that disclosing
Speaker 1: personal secrets leads to better health outcomes on average. Why
Speaker 1: is this the case? Based on our own research, Kelly
Speaker 1: concludes that the reason revealing a secret can have positive
Speaker 1: effects is that it allows the secret keeper to gain
Speaker 1: new insights into the secret, leading to closure on the subject.
Speaker 1: And in this model, a kept secret it's you know,
Speaker 1: I use the analogy earlier, it's like a bomb that
Speaker 1: hasn't gone off yet. But maybe a better way to
Speaker 1: think about it is that it kept secret is an
Speaker 1: unsolved problem or an unfinished task, and thus it occupies
Speaker 1: an outsized space in the mind and requires frequent attention
Speaker 1: and mental energy. And Kelly actually evokes the Zigarnic effective.
Speaker 1: We've discussed that in the show before, Yeah, we have.
Speaker 1: We talked about it in our Tetris episodes. And one
Speaker 1: of the reasons that Tetris might be so compelling is
Speaker 1: that it's an eternally unfinished project and it always wants
Speaker 1: to call you back for more. Uh. But so the
Speaker 1: terms Zigarnic effect. It comes to us from the Russian
Speaker 1: psychologist and psychiatrist Bluma Wolfovna Zigarnic, who lived from nine
Speaker 1: to nine. She first observed it in the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: and there there's a quote from Roy Baumeister and Brad
Speaker 1: Bushman in their two thousand eight textbooks Social Psychology and
Speaker 1: Human Nature that says, quote zigarnic effect is a tendency
Speaker 1: to experience automatic intrusive thoughts about a goal that one
Speaker 1: has pursued, but the pursuit of which has been interrupted.
Speaker 1: That is, if you start working toward a goal and
Speaker 1: fail to get there, thoughts about the goal will keep
Speaker 1: popping into your mind while you're doing other things, as
Speaker 1: if to remind you to get back on track to
Speaker 1: finish reaching that goal. So, I mean, keeping a secret
Speaker 1: is a task, yeah, and and and therefore it requires
Speaker 1: requires mental energy to varying degrees to uh to to
Speaker 1: keep it. Like, I keep thinking of this analogy, and
Speaker 1: I'm not the only one to come up with this,
Speaker 1: actually encountered it in some of the studies. We're looking
Speaker 1: at the idea of their being like a free flowing stream, right,
Speaker 1: And then every secret you have to keep is like
Speaker 1: putting a stone in there that has to be navigated around,
Speaker 1: and it potentially changes the flow of social interaction. And uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you have if you throw some big rocks in there,
Speaker 1: if you if you throw a lot of little rocks
Speaker 1: in there. Then you're gonna potentially alter the flow of
Speaker 1: the river to you know, considerable, You're gonna catastrophic levels.
Speaker 1: Well I know it's just a metaphor, but yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean you you you essentially damn the river, and
Speaker 1: a damn con burst right eventually will if there's nothing
Speaker 1: to relieve the flow. Yeah, I think I think that
Speaker 1: makes perfect sense that it would be tied in with
Speaker 1: sigonic effect. Yeah, so this does feel very intuitive. Now.
Speaker 1: I do think we might undercut this with more research
Speaker 1: we talked about going forward, but it certainly feel is intuitive.
Speaker 1: It's one of those things. It's got that truthiness, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but truthiness can be deceiving. But so the idea here
Speaker 1: at least is that when when people disclose a secret
Speaker 1: and talk through it, and this is key for for Kelly,
Speaker 1: it's not just that you reveal the secret, but that
Speaker 1: you have the ability to talk through it with someone
Speaker 1: and gain insights on it that allow you to achieve closure,
Speaker 1: to sort of close the book and understand something. And
Speaker 1: that's of course going to be more complicated than it sounds,
Speaker 1: depending on what the secret is. I mean, for instance,
Speaker 1: on one, on one hand, it would seem to indicate
Speaker 1: that yes, seeking say professional help for whatever your quote
Speaker 1: unquote secret might be. So, for instance, if if it
Speaker 1: has some sort of you know, abuse connotation, and then
Speaker 1: you you say, you know, call up the rain hotline,
Speaker 1: you're able to talk with someone who can steer you
Speaker 1: in the right direction of how best to to deal
Speaker 1: with this. But on the other hand, like closing the
Speaker 1: book on it is easier said than done, right right totally,
Speaker 1: So yeah, well, in under what's you would to really
Speaker 1: close the book on a secret? It has to be
Speaker 1: a rather pointless secret, has to be one of those
Speaker 1: dumb work secrets or or you know, mildly interesting social secrets. Well,
Speaker 1: close to the book is my language. I mean that
Speaker 1: that might not be the best metaphor, but what it
Speaker 1: is is that you want to achieve some kind of resolution,
Speaker 1: You gain new insights that make this no longer an
Speaker 1: unsolved problem. So I think one example would be if
Speaker 1: if someone has has been keeping their say, sexual orientation
Speaker 1: a a secret there there closeted, and therefore like coming
Speaker 1: out of the closet even did like a select group
Speaker 1: of people that would enable you to then like own
Speaker 1: it and deal with it. In a new way. But
Speaker 1: it wouldn't mean that you're like you're done, you know,
Speaker 1: like it's really the beginning of a new phase in
Speaker 1: that particular journey. Yeah, totally. And that that's, as we've said,
Speaker 1: not all secrets are created equally. That that's a different
Speaker 1: kind of secret them many other secrets, like for example,
Speaker 1: and some of the research we've looked at today shows
Speaker 1: that sexual orientation is very often the kind of secret
Speaker 1: where where a person feels they can reveal to some
Speaker 1: people and not to others. So you have to you
Speaker 1: have to play management of different revelation groups and and
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, manage been a different identity, different
Speaker 1: versions of yourself. I mean, of course that everyone does
Speaker 1: that to certain degrees, I think, but but we're talking
Speaker 1: about having to do it to an agree where it
Speaker 1: would have potentially negative effects on your on your psyche.
Speaker 1: And that's a great point because revealing a secret might
Speaker 1: not always lead to positive outcomes, right, And and Kelly
Speaker 1: acknowledges this. So she's trying to come up with the
Speaker 1: rubric of when should you reveal a secret? You've got
Speaker 1: a secret that's eating away at you, when and where
Speaker 1: and how should you reveal it. Uh, it appears that
Speaker 1: the circumstances under which you reveal the secret are important.
Speaker 1: So obviously you can imagine lots of revelations that would
Speaker 1: make everything worse. You can iagine a scenario where you
Speaker 1: know you've been cheating on your spouse with an alien
Speaker 1: robot from Enceladus, and you know you're happy in your marriage,
Speaker 1: but you know that happened. That happened maybe maybe not
Speaker 1: say it's ongoing, but it happened one time, and you
Speaker 1: reveal it to your spouse and your spouse is not forgiving,
Speaker 1: and he or she becomes angry, and this leads to
Speaker 1: alienation in your relationship, and maybe it ends the relationship.
Speaker 1: Are you better off then? I mean you might say
Speaker 1: maybe maybe it was worth it to be honest, But
Speaker 1: then you could also say, well what if it's destroyed
Speaker 1: the most important relationship in my life. Um, So there
Speaker 1: are a lot of questions. It comes back to the
Speaker 1: woman in the snow, right, because on one level, yeah,
Speaker 1: the husband gets to to live, you know, secret free,
Speaker 1: but he no longer has his wife and and he
Speaker 1: has to tell his children in the morning that hey, sorry,
Speaker 1: Mom's not here anymore because Dad's allowsy secret keeper. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's confusing, like it might better, might be better
Speaker 1: to be honest in the long run, but it might
Speaker 1: not be. I mean, it might be just destructive to
Speaker 1: people's lives in the long run. And so so taking
Speaker 1: into account complications and consequences is a real question. Another complication.
Speaker 1: Kelly points out, research is pretty clear people don't usually
Speaker 1: keep your secrets when you share them. One of one
Speaker 1: piece of research she sites is from which found the
Speaker 1: college students. So, okay, this is college students. Maybe they
Speaker 1: don't keep secrets particularly well, but at least in this group,
Speaker 1: when students shared an emotional event with a confidante, the
Speaker 1: confidante reported telling at least one other person about that
Speaker 1: disclosure in sixty six to seventy eight percent of the cases.
Speaker 1: So most of the time, you're gonna go tell somebody
Speaker 1: else about this deep emotional thing that somebody shared with you. Again,
Speaker 1: that's why we need the robots. The robot can be
Speaker 1: programmed to be a secret keeper. You have a robot,
Speaker 1: it's only purpose is to keep your secret. Then do
Speaker 1: you have to destroy the robot or is it important
Speaker 1: that the robot continue to exist. Well, because we come
Speaker 1: back to our our initial philosophical discussion that the robot
Speaker 1: has to know the secret, understand the secret. Otherwise the
Speaker 1: robot is not a secret keeper. It's just it's it's deleted.
Speaker 1: It's the same as telling somebody and then murdering them. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we cut to the chase here. When should you
Speaker 1: reveal a personal secret for maximum benefit? Well, Kelly thinks
Speaker 1: in in this paper at least, that you should reveal
Speaker 1: a personal secret when you've been able to identify a
Speaker 1: confidante who can be trusted not to tell your secret
Speaker 1: to others, and that's kind of rare, who you can
Speaker 1: depend on to be non judgmental, so they're not going
Speaker 1: to say, like you monster, and who you can expect
Speaker 1: to help you gain new insights into your secret and
Speaker 1: bring you feelings of closure. Uh So that's interesting because
Speaker 1: that sounds to me like she's basically describing a counselor therapist. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: have the same thought, Like that would seem to line
Speaker 1: up with you know, a a certified you know, self
Speaker 1: help hotlines such as you know, suicide prevention or rain
Speaker 1: or something like that, or or like an individual counselor there.
Speaker 1: It's like either way, it's somebody who it's their job
Speaker 1: to not be judgmental, but to just try to help you. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's their job to try to help you find insights
Speaker 1: and and understand things about yourself and about what you're
Speaker 1: telling them. And it's part of their job to keep
Speaker 1: you keep everything confidential. All right? So, well that sounds good.
Speaker 1: Then what's the what's the possible downside? Well, you know,
Speaker 1: so I mentioned a minute ago that part of what
Speaker 1: went into her study was the idea that their negative
Speaker 1: health consequences for from keeping secrets, and I think the
Speaker 1: picture on that is not entirely clear. There have been
Speaker 1: plenty of studies showing some kind of correlation between negative
Speaker 1: health outcome from keeping secrets, but just the results are
Speaker 1: scattered and inconsistent. Um, So, for example, what if it's
Speaker 1: not keeping a secret that does my charm to your health?
Speaker 1: But what if some of these results are triggered by
Speaker 1: a different level of correlation, meaning that the kind of
Speaker 1: people who keep more secrets naturally tend to be less
Speaker 1: healthy people to begin with? M hm, Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: So it's not that keeping a secret makes you unhealthy,
Speaker 1: but that unhealthy people are more likely to keep secrets. Okay,
Speaker 1: I mean that's like from a scientific standpoint, that's that's
Speaker 1: that makes perfect synse. That would be something you'd want
Speaker 1: to explore. Of course, it's hard to imagine a real life,
Speaker 1: like conscious version of this way, like, oh, that one
Speaker 1: looks sickly, that's my that's my secret keeper. Well, so,
Speaker 1: Anita Kelly was the same author as the earlier study.
Speaker 1: She was one of the authors of a later study
Speaker 1: along with Jonathan Yip, called is keeping a secret or
Speaker 1: being a secretive person linked to UH Psychological Symptoms in
Speaker 1: the Journal of Personality in two thousand six, And this
Speaker 1: study tried to compare negative health symptoms across time to
Speaker 1: figure out whether keeping a specif effects secret or generally
Speaker 1: being a secretive person had a greater effect on health outcomes.
Speaker 1: And in this study, keeping a specific secret so when
Speaker 1: when they found people said yeah, I have a secret
Speaker 1: I'm keeping, that did not in fact correlate to worse
Speaker 1: health outcomes. What they found was, in fact that people
Speaker 1: who were generally secretive people were more vulnerable to more
Speaker 1: symptoms to begin with, uh yeah. I also saw an
Speaker 1: article on Psychology today with the uh with with Kelly,
Speaker 1: and she she pointed out yet the workshow that keeping
Speaker 1: the major secret did not predict worse health at all,
Speaker 1: but that she did say that you can argue that
Speaker 1: secret keeping is still an important part of developing intimacy, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So you have to factor in all these other aspects
Speaker 1: of secret keeping, you know, in addition to the health obviously, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this is not to say like, if if secrecy
Speaker 1: doesn't actually affect your health, then there's nothing to worry about.
Speaker 1: You know, it might affect relationships and everything like that,
Speaker 1: but then maybe it does affect health. And so this
Speaker 1: is where things just continue to be messy. Kelly is
Speaker 1: one of the authors of another paper with Robert Rodriguez
Speaker 1: from two dozen six called Health Effects of Disclosing Secrets
Speaker 1: to Imagine Accepting versus non Accepting Confidants in the Journal
Speaker 1: of Social and Clinical Psychology, And this one seems to
Speaker 1: go back in the other direction, and just to be
Speaker 1: real quick, basically what this study did is it had
Speaker 1: students write down confessions of personal secrets while imagining three
Speaker 1: different conditions, either imagining writing to an accepting confidante somebody
Speaker 1: who is there listening to you to what you confess
Speaker 1: and is not judging you to a non accepting confidant
Speaker 1: or to no confidant, just writing into the void. And
Speaker 1: what they found was that the students who wrote the
Speaker 1: confession to an imagined accepting confidant had reported fewer illnesses
Speaker 1: after eight weeks than did the ones who wrote to
Speaker 1: a non accepting confidant. And if that that seems kind
Speaker 1: of believable. But if that's true, that that makes you
Speaker 1: think that just like the imagining of having a secret
Speaker 1: accepted or rejected is incredibly powerful and and produces long
Speaker 1: running stress effects on the body. Well, I mean it
Speaker 1: comes back down to the idea of survival within groups.
Speaker 1: You know, for the vast majority of human history. So
Speaker 1: even in the study of the author's pointed out that
Speaker 1: you know, if you're if you're keeping personal secrets, you're
Speaker 1: basically running scenarios about being ostracized for for for the
Speaker 1: secret you're keeping, and therefore you're kind of in a
Speaker 1: constant state of fearing your survival. Because again, nowadays, if
Speaker 1: you're ostracized from your social group, it doesn't necessarily mean
Speaker 1: you're going to starve to death in the wilderness. But
Speaker 1: for the vast majority of human history that was more
Speaker 1: of a reality that was that was more of a
Speaker 1: legitimate possibility of of being ostracized by your immediate group. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I don't know. What. What do you think about
Speaker 1: the health effects of secrecy, Robert, I'm getting a from
Speaker 1: the research I've looked at, I'm getting a very jumbled picture.
Speaker 1: I do think that there is some kind of there
Speaker 1: does appear to be some kind of correlation between secrecy
Speaker 1: and some negative health outcomes. But the research does appear
Speaker 1: to go back and forth, and it's not all always
Speaker 1: focused on the same question asked the same way every time.
Speaker 1: So this is one of those areas where I don't
Speaker 1: feel super confident to pronounce solid discoveries just yet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again, it just it comes back again to the
Speaker 1: unequal nature of secrets and even like it's going to
Speaker 1: be relative to the individual, because you could have one
Speaker 1: individual that can can keep the secret of what happened
Speaker 1: in the dark cave, uh, you know, and they can
Speaker 1: just file it away with a lot more ease, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe maybe due to some sort of unique wiring
Speaker 1: of their you know, their cognitive equipment, but they're able
Speaker 1: to sort of compartmentalize it and keep that secret. Someone
Speaker 1: else they could They could be in the scenario where
Speaker 1: they cannot sleep at night because they keep remembering the
Speaker 1: glowing red eyes from the cave. Well, yeah, definitely. Because
Speaker 1: a secret, obviously, in many of the cases where it's
Speaker 1: going to be most destructive, is highly related to the
Speaker 1: idea of guilt or shame. And if you're a type
Speaker 1: of person who, say, has a low guilt quotient, I
Speaker 1: don't want to say you're a psychopath or something like that,
Speaker 1: but if you don't tend to experience much of a
Speaker 1: guilty conscience, I can't imagine secrets bothering you all that
Speaker 1: much unless you're just constantly worried about being discovered, you know,
Speaker 1: not so much worried about the original content of the secret. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and U. And one way to look at this might
Speaker 1: be to perform an exercise where you look at your
Speaker 1: own life and like, move your secrets out of the way,
Speaker 1: and then think of things that you don't recognize his
Speaker 1: secrets that but could be reclassified as secrets if you
Speaker 1: cared enough about them. You know what I'm saying, Give
Speaker 1: me an example, what do you mean? Okay, so say,
Speaker 1: let's let's see what would be an example. Um, I
Speaker 1: guess we guess one would be like what if I
Speaker 1: what if I stay up one night my wife is
Speaker 1: gon to bed and I watch say raw Head Rex
Speaker 1: or some some horror movie of questionable quality, and I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm not keeping it a secret. It's just in
Speaker 1: the background. Maybe I don't even tell her because she
Speaker 1: because I know that she probably doesn't care and doesn't
Speaker 1: want to hear about the plot of raw Head Rex
Speaker 1: r um. But if I were to, But but I
Speaker 1: could re classify that information and say, no, this is
Speaker 1: a secret. She cannot know about my watching raw Head Rex.
Speaker 1: You know, if you start sort of tweaking the reasoning
Speaker 1: for why you didn't reveal this, Uh, then it can
Speaker 1: it can take on new form. Yeah. I mean, as
Speaker 1: we talked about earlier, it seems very much that secrecy
Speaker 1: is in the mind not of the beholder, but of
Speaker 1: the secret keeper. Uh. And in what they want other
Speaker 1: people to know. I mean, so you might be a
Speaker 1: person who ate the whole sleeve of oreos or whatever,
Speaker 1: or the whole sleeve of saltines for some reason. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and that's just you know, you're a comedian, and
Speaker 1: you make it, you build a whole bit around that fact.
Speaker 1: It's funny I the whole slave of oreos, or you
Speaker 1: might be a person who's legitimately ashamed and embarrassed and
Speaker 1: wouldn't want people to know. I think that's a good example. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it doesn't have anything to do with the opinions
Speaker 1: of other people as they exist outside you. It's just
Speaker 1: what you think about them and what kind of person
Speaker 1: am I. Yeah, alright, we're gonna take a quick break
Speaker 1: and we come back. We're going to get into the
Speaker 1: physical burdens of secrecy and uh and at the very
Speaker 1: end we'll briefly discuss nudity. Than all right, we're back. So, Robert,
Speaker 1: here's the thing. Do you ever think about metaphorical perception, Like,
Speaker 1: it's no surprise that when we perceive physical quantities are
Speaker 1: perceptions are colored by our thoughts, right, Like, for example,
Speaker 1: if you're tired, you might estimate that it's actually later
Speaker 1: in the day than it is, right, something like that
Speaker 1: makes sense. But one odd way of thinking about influences
Speaker 1: on our perception is when our metaphors color perception. Here's
Speaker 1: an example. A two thousand eleven study by Schneider at
Speaker 1: all I found that if you think the contents of
Speaker 1: a book are important, you judge the book to weigh
Speaker 1: more when you hold it. Like so importance. We have
Speaker 1: a metaphor that says something that's important is heavy. It's
Speaker 1: a weighty matter. So like someone who puts a lot
Speaker 1: of faith and say a Bible or a Koran or
Speaker 1: some of their sacred text like holding it in their hand,
Speaker 1: there on some level perceiving it as being heavier than
Speaker 1: an equal, you know, an equally sized, equally weighted volume
Speaker 1: of say vampire romance romance books. Yeah. Uh, And so
Speaker 1: I do want to point out that actually the authors
Speaker 1: of the study I just cited do think that the
Speaker 1: association between weight and importance is actually deeper than just
Speaker 1: metaphorical association. But clearly some amount of metaphorical association is there. So,
Speaker 1: if we conceive of secrets as a burden, as we
Speaker 1: often have throughout the episode, uh, you know, it's something
Speaker 1: you're carrying around with you, does that exact a metaphorical
Speaker 1: psychological toll on the body and the mind? Does your
Speaker 1: body treat you as if you're carrying something when you're
Speaker 1: carrying a secret, carrying something heavy? That's an interesting idea.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've actually heard people say, oh, so and
Speaker 1: so really laid some heavy stuff on me, you know,
Speaker 1: like bringing to mind the idea that you were you
Speaker 1: were on the ground, and they have they have physically
Speaker 1: placed a weight on your body, and now it is
Speaker 1: more difficult to move because of it. I want to
Speaker 1: cite a scientifically rigorous case study, which is that there's
Speaker 1: a scene where there's a character on The Sopranos who's uh,
Speaker 1: one of the early seasons, who's constantly having back pain,
Speaker 1: and it turns out this character is harboring a secret betrayal,
Speaker 1: and the psychiatrist character in the show, she says, you know, well,
Speaker 1: a secret is a heavy load. It might cause feelings
Speaker 1: like that. Now, of course that's fiction, but I can
Speaker 1: see things like that happening in real life. But of
Speaker 1: course that's just our intuition. How about if we test it. Well,
Speaker 1: some people have been testing this and the answers are complicated.
Speaker 1: This is another one, I'm sorry to say where the
Speaker 1: answers are not clear. Uh that there's gonna be some
Speaker 1: back and forth in complications. So you've gotta stick with
Speaker 1: us for a minute. So there's an original study from
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve in the Journal of experimental psychology by
Speaker 1: Michael Slapian at All called the Physical Burdens of Secrecy,
Speaker 1: in which the researchers found that people who kept big
Speaker 1: secrets such as marital infidelity or sexual orientation made different
Speaker 1: judgments of physical quantities having to do with work. So,
Speaker 1: for example, test subjects who were made to think about
Speaker 1: a secret that they kept, either a big secret or
Speaker 1: a small secret. They were then asked to look at
Speaker 1: some pictures. So the ones who had been thinking about
Speaker 1: a big secret judged a pictured hill to be steeper.
Speaker 1: Just looking at the photo of a head on hill slope,
Speaker 1: People who had been thinking about a quote big secret
Speaker 1: thought that the incline was about forty six degrees, as
Speaker 1: opposed to people who thought about a small secret, who
Speaker 1: thought that it was about thirty three degrees. They also
Speaker 1: apparently judge distances to be farther. Now, this was tested
Speaker 1: by having subjects toss bean bags towards a target. Those
Speaker 1: who thought about a big secret through their bean bags farther,
Speaker 1: which the researchers interpreted to mean that they judged the
Speaker 1: distance to the target to be greater. Also, in a
Speaker 1: separate test among subjects who had cheated on their partner.
Speaker 1: They found that the subjects who reported more psychological burden
Speaker 1: from their infidelity, meaning those who thought about it more,
Speaker 1: judge tasks like carrying groceries and helping someone move to
Speaker 1: require more effort. And then a final study found that
Speaker 1: a test group who had to conceal their sexual orientation
Speaker 1: was less likely to help with physical work like moving
Speaker 1: stacks of books than a control group who had to
Speaker 1: conceal an uncontroversial personality fact like your level of extra version. So,
Speaker 1: other studies have shown that people carrying a heavy load
Speaker 1: judge hills to be steeper and distances to be farther,
Speaker 1: and that you can kind of see why that would be, right.
Speaker 1: The implication here is that the mind is interpreting the
Speaker 1: secret as it would a literal burden. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: mean you could also take it apart and say that
Speaker 1: it's almost as if the individual knows that it's going
Speaker 1: to not only there gonna have to climb that hill,
Speaker 1: but they have to climb the hill while thinking about
Speaker 1: this secret, like this secret around in their head. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and sorry if that point isn't clear. Like so one
Speaker 1: thing that's been shown in researches. You put a heavy
Speaker 1: backpack on. Somebody, once they've got that heavy backpack on,
Speaker 1: they think a hill looks steeper than the same person
Speaker 1: without a backpack, or they think a distant target looks
Speaker 1: farther away than without that backpack on. And and that
Speaker 1: that's physically, I mean, you can see why that would be.
Speaker 1: You're factoring in the expense of doing it with this
Speaker 1: extra weight. And so the question is does this psychological
Speaker 1: weight play a similar role in the mind. Now, none
Speaker 1: of these studies actually say you get a better workout
Speaker 1: with a heavy seat, because otherwise that's what you need
Speaker 1: in a personal training and be like, all right, you're
Speaker 1: gonna really get out, You're gonna kill it today. And
Speaker 1: speaking of killing, I want killed a Doberman pincher. Now,
Speaker 1: go out, go go go get it, go go go
Speaker 1: kill it. Uh, none of the research is saying that. No.
Speaker 1: In fact, you'd imagine it's probably the opposite, right, Like,
Speaker 1: you're you're not getting the physical benefits of of having
Speaker 1: you know, a weight belt on in your workout, but
Speaker 1: you're having the mental difficulty of getting through your workout
Speaker 1: bearing this this load. Right. Yeah, yeah, Now, I want
Speaker 1: to I want to stress, as I said, going in
Speaker 1: that there's some complications to this, and so we shouldn't
Speaker 1: just take these results at face value. But before we
Speaker 1: get to the complications, I want to talk about one
Speaker 1: more follow up study by Slapy and Massa Campo and
Speaker 1: Embody called Relieving the Burdens of Secrecy. Revealing secrets influences
Speaker 1: judgments of hill slant and distance, and so this was
Speaker 1: a follow up study, and the authors found that making
Speaker 1: test subjects think about a secret caused them to see
Speaker 1: distances is longer and hills is steeper yet again, but
Speaker 1: that anonymously revealing details of a secret seemed to mostly
Speaker 1: eliminate this effect. And as in the first study, estimates
Speaker 1: were altered for perceptions of physical space relating to body exertion,
Speaker 1: but not to numerical estimates generally, So you could have
Speaker 1: people estimate other kinds of things that aren't related to
Speaker 1: how your body would need to do some work, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem to affect that, so it wouldn't make
Speaker 1: you bad at math. It's not just not just that
Speaker 1: having a secret makes you generally estimate higher numbers. It's
Speaker 1: that specifically would make things that you might have to
Speaker 1: like distances or slopes, you'd after traverse look more difficult. Okay,
Speaker 1: so that's the follow up study. It seems like that
Speaker 1: they find that in addition to their original findings, if
Speaker 1: you if you reveal your secret, you might get some relief.
Speaker 1: But it's good to check for follow up research because
Speaker 1: in this case, other studies attempted to replicate slapians original
Speaker 1: research from two thousand twelve and failed to get the
Speaker 1: same results. Um, so I wanna cite this one by
Speaker 1: perture at all. The burden of secrecy, no effect on
Speaker 1: hills land estimation, and bean bag throwing. And this is
Speaker 1: in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Some bean bag throwing
Speaker 1: in that in that that article title. Though, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a little it might be a little bit salty.
Speaker 1: But they're also very polite and that they thank Slapian
Speaker 1: for they say he cooperated with them and trying to
Speaker 1: help them replicate the experiments exactly. So, yeah, they replicated
Speaker 1: the experimental procedure as closely as they could with the
Speaker 1: help of Michael Slapy, and they failed to replicate the
Speaker 1: findings of the original study, calling those results into question. Also,
Speaker 1: it's worth noting that these researchers had larger sample sizes
Speaker 1: in their replications study, giving their results greater statistical weight. Uh.
Speaker 1: They also performed a meta analysis combining with other existing
Speaker 1: attempts to replicate the original results, some of which claimed
Speaker 1: to find the same results. But they found that when
Speaker 1: results were combined across the existing studies, the correlation between
Speaker 1: having a big secret and the judgment of a steep
Speaker 1: looking hill was not significant. However, there may be some
Speaker 1: nuance here. So now everything's up in the air, right,
Speaker 1: you have this original study of claims to find this effect,
Speaker 1: people look for it with even larger sample sizes and
Speaker 1: don't find anything at all. Uh, And so what's going on?
Speaker 1: Are we just in bogus land here? Well, Slapian did
Speaker 1: try to introduce some nuance with another study, and this
Speaker 1: might get at what the problem was. So what he
Speaker 1: claims is in a study from that, Maybe it's the
Speaker 1: problem was dealing with this supposed size of the secret, Right,
Speaker 1: they were dealing with these concepts of a big secret
Speaker 1: versus a small secret. And maybe it's not actually that
Speaker 1: the size of the secret has any effect on how
Speaker 1: you judge the steepness of the hill, but that a
Speaker 1: person's level of preoccupation with the secret does more reliably
Speaker 1: predict how steep the hill seems. In other words, it's
Speaker 1: not really what the secret is, it's how much the secret,
Speaker 1: larger or small, is eating away at you and keeps
Speaker 1: intruding on your mind. Okay, so here's a possible example. Um,
Speaker 1: what if I told you do not tell Christian that
Speaker 1: I bought a new box of pins and pins of pens.
Speaker 1: Ink pens, Oh, ink pens, don't tell. I was imagining
Speaker 1: like pins like a pincushion, Like, what are you going
Speaker 1: to do with pens? Stick them into the Christian doll?
Speaker 1: We'll see. That's the thing. You wouldn't know, you, So
Speaker 1: you might find yourself running this through your head. Why
Speaker 1: does he want me to keep the secret of the
Speaker 1: inkpens and just a new box of ink pens? What
Speaker 1: could what could possibly be going on? So, even though
Speaker 1: there's no actual weight to it, you might return to
Speaker 1: it again and again just trying to figure out why
Speaker 1: it's a secret. So that that's that's my one possible
Speaker 1: take on that, because otherwise, if it's not an important secret,
Speaker 1: why would you come back to it unless there's something
Speaker 1: cantalizing about it, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, or you're
Speaker 1: really proud of it. That could be another example. So
Speaker 1: like the boss that you're you know, really hoping to
Speaker 1: be in the ends with, they share some just you know, dumb,
Speaker 1: sup work secret. But then you keep thinking, oh, man,
Speaker 1: they shared the secret with me. This is I'm on
Speaker 1: the inside. Now I'm I'm I'm in the upper echelon,
Speaker 1: this is I'm on my way up. Well that that's
Speaker 1: another thing is that the secrets in these studies are
Speaker 1: almost always just assumed to be negative. I mean in
Speaker 1: those few cases. And I think that's been our discussion
Speaker 1: so far as that most secrets do have negative connotations.
Speaker 1: But in those cases where you're keeping some positive secret,
Speaker 1: would that have the same kind of effect? Man, would
Speaker 1: that also make you feel weighed down? Like he like
Speaker 1: your secret is you were a part of the surprise committee.
Speaker 1: You're a part of this the surprise birthday party committee.
Speaker 1: Like that's it's just full of fun. Christian with pens, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he loves pens and these I didn't mention that these
Speaker 1: were all you know that each one's themed after his
Speaker 1: favorite uh, you know, comic book character. So he's gonna
Speaker 1: love him. Okay, is there like a pin man? That's
Speaker 1: the brand pin Man pens Yes, okay, well, anyway, one
Speaker 1: more thing about that study that they also said that
Speaker 1: the effect seemed to be mediated by the quote judged
Speaker 1: effort to keep a secret. So people subjectively report how
Speaker 1: much difficulty they're having keeping a secret, how much it takes. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so that may be a literal adaptation for resource conservation,
Speaker 1: because you're saying it's it's taking effort. Okay, so where
Speaker 1: are we now? I mean, this is frustrating because, as
Speaker 1: is often the case I'm sure you've experienced before, Robert,
Speaker 1: when you get into research, is especially in social psychology,
Speaker 1: that there are these these results that are just messy
Speaker 1: and all over the place, and I feel like methodologies
Speaker 1: are not always unified. You always feel like I wish
Speaker 1: people were asking the same question instead of related questions. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: it just it comes back again to just the changing
Speaker 1: nature of the secret and you cannot just put a
Speaker 1: secret in a Petri dish and and and use it
Speaker 1: in your experiment. Yeah. And you see that demonstrated time
Speaker 1: and time again with these results. And that actually is
Speaker 1: one of the things that feeds into the last paper
Speaker 1: I want to talk about, which is more work from
Speaker 1: Michael Slapian with Jen shock Chun and Miliam Mason in
Speaker 1: the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. I think this
Speaker 1: is just coming out called the Experience of Secrecy, And
Speaker 1: so this isn't following specifically on the burdensomeness of secrecy,
Speaker 1: whether there's anything to that or not. We can leave
Speaker 1: that up in the air for now. Yeah. This this
Speaker 1: is more this team trying to say, Okay, what is
Speaker 1: secrecy really? We need a new redefined theory of what
Speaker 1: secrecy is if we're going to study it. And so
Speaker 1: they start by saying, you know, attempts to describe secrecy
Speaker 1: are hampered by some problems. Why hasn't there been all
Speaker 1: that much research on secrecy? Well, one of the things
Speaker 1: is it's hard to study. By definition, secrets are things
Speaker 1: that people try to hide. So if you want to
Speaker 1: go with real secrets that people hold that are about
Speaker 1: their lives, it's difficult to reliably coax those secrets out
Speaker 1: in an experimental framework and manipulate them. You always wonder like,
Speaker 1: are people really being honest? Uh? And are people and
Speaker 1: and different secrets are going to have different weight to
Speaker 1: people write like it's hard to manipulate the secret variable yeah,
Speaker 1: it's hard to You probably are not having a lot
Speaker 1: of bring your own secret experiments here. You know you're
Speaker 1: going to provide something. It's going to basically come back
Speaker 1: to the kindergarten scenario where there's a puppet with a
Speaker 1: book of secrets, and this is a stand for secrets. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's what a lot of the research does, is provides
Speaker 1: you secret. But when you're provided with a secret in
Speaker 1: a research environment, the secrets trivial. I mean, it just
Speaker 1: doesn't really mean anything to you. So you're probably not
Speaker 1: going to treat it like you would a secret that's
Speaker 1: relevant to your personal life. And if it's relevant to
Speaker 1: your personal life, you might ask people, do you have
Speaker 1: a secret? You know, for the purpose of an experiment,
Speaker 1: think about that secret now, do X, Y and Z.
Speaker 1: One person might be thinking about I cheated on my spouse,
Speaker 1: and the other person might be thinking about I secretly
Speaker 1: want to write a comic book or something, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. They're just not really equivalent. And if
Speaker 1: you were somehow able to draw in someone's actual secrets
Speaker 1: into the experiment, it ceases to be a scientific experiment.
Speaker 1: It becomes like a like a jigsaw killer s right,
Speaker 1: like that could basically be an entire horror movie, right there,
Speaker 1: someone experimenting on people and using their real dark secrets
Speaker 1: to their advantage. Right. So, so there's all this difficulty
Speaker 1: in this research area. Secrets are incredibly important psychological phenomenon.
Speaker 1: I think it totally matters to study them, but they're
Speaker 1: just hard to study to you rigorously. And another thing
Speaker 1: the author's point out is they think prior research has
Speaker 1: defined secrecy too narrowly. Uh So they make this point,
Speaker 1: and I think this gets into something we've actually been
Speaker 1: talking about throughout the episode. Now, they say, you know,
Speaker 1: previous research is focused almost entirely on secrecy as deliberate
Speaker 1: interpersonal concealment, preventing other people from finding out something, either
Speaker 1: omitting information or actively deceiving in order to hide a
Speaker 1: piece of knowledge from another person or persons. And the
Speaker 1: authors here propose a model of secrecy that is instead
Speaker 1: intra personal. While the ultimate goal of secrecy is to
Speaker 1: prevent other people from knowing something, the primary experience of secrecy,
Speaker 1: what it's like to have a secret, is mostly intra personal.
Speaker 1: It's inside. Uh it's again ala Lane and Wagner. I
Speaker 1: think we mentioned this earlier secrecy is something you can
Speaker 1: do alone in a room. It's just you rolling the
Speaker 1: secret back and forth in your head. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: contemplating the contents of the secret. But also you know,
Speaker 1: what are they going to be effects if you share
Speaker 1: the secret with someone else, either intentionally or unintentionally, right,
Speaker 1: or thinking about the contents of the secret itself, not
Speaker 1: even just like the disclosures, like you might be obsessing
Speaker 1: over whatever it is that's bringing you trouble, how people
Speaker 1: would react. I mean, yeah, there's so much to roll
Speaker 1: through in your brain. And so the authors here try
Speaker 1: to redefine secrecy not as the act of concealment from others,
Speaker 1: but is the state of mind the intention to conceal
Speaker 1: information from others. So, and another thing they point out
Speaker 1: is that not every act of inhibition and conversation is secrecy.
Speaker 1: I think this is a very good point. Actually, there
Speaker 1: are hundreds of ways that you practice inhibition and keep
Speaker 1: yourself from saying certain kinds of things during interaction with others.
Speaker 1: But most of these don't have to with keeping specific
Speaker 1: personal information a secret, right. Most of them have to
Speaker 1: do with something like manners or appropriateness. You're not trying
Speaker 1: to prevent people from finding something out. You're just trying
Speaker 1: not to say something that would be not appropriate to say. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And to come back to what we're talking earlier about
Speaker 1: four or five and six year olds like you see
Speaker 1: all that coming online as well, the gradual realization that
Speaker 1: that not everything is that is appropriate, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: content for discussion. You know, you can't share every detail
Speaker 1: of your your latest bathroom break just because it happened,
Speaker 1: and you're that kind of like free sharing soul, right.
Speaker 1: So yeah, So if it's possible that there's a personal
Speaker 1: fact about you that you wouldn't want other people to know,
Speaker 1: and yet it never comes up in conversation and nobody
Speaker 1: ever asks you about it. If that's the case, is
Speaker 1: it a secret, Well, I'd still say yes, even if
Speaker 1: there's never any occasion where you have to act to
Speaker 1: conceal it. It's just because you don't want people to
Speaker 1: know that it is a secret, I would agree with that, yes.
Speaker 1: So yeah, in that case, it seems like secrecy is
Speaker 1: defined primarily by the intent of the concealer, not by
Speaker 1: the behavior of the concealer. I mean, for instance, your
Speaker 1: email password or your bank account information is essentially a secret,
Speaker 1: but I don't think it necessarily. I mean, it might
Speaker 1: bring a certain amount of physical or mental anguish to
Speaker 1: remember those passwords, but for the most part, you're not
Speaker 1: sitting around like anguishing over this secret keeping that's taking
Speaker 1: place regarding your Gmail password. That's a good point. I mean,
Speaker 1: if secrets do, if they are some kind of burden,
Speaker 1: or if they do have some kind of effect on us,
Speaker 1: why does it seem to be that these these studies
Speaker 1: are only focused on the sort of negative affect of
Speaker 1: facts about ourselves as opposed to just like secret information
Speaker 1: that has kept confidential for totally utilitarian reasons. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like most of the secrets tend to be story shaped
Speaker 1: secrets as opposed to just coded secrets or just informational secrets. Right.
Speaker 1: That's a really good point. I mean, I wonder what
Speaker 1: the difference is psychologically, How does your body react differently
Speaker 1: to them, if at all? Um So, Yeah, but we
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time alone with our secrets, and
Speaker 1: they can surface whenever the mind wanders, and of course
Speaker 1: we probably all know from experience that they often do. Right,
Speaker 1: You've I'm sure you've had this experience, Robert. You're alone,
Speaker 1: You're sitting in traffic or something like that. And if
Speaker 1: you have any secrets, they tend to just pop into
Speaker 1: your head uninvited. And this can happen a whole lot.
Speaker 1: I wanna cite just one study by a cane at
Speaker 1: All from two thousand seven in psychological Science where they
Speaker 1: were attempting to judge how often people's minds wandered off
Speaker 1: of whatever they were doing in daily life. And they
Speaker 1: use this digital assistant to prompt people throughout the day
Speaker 1: to see what was on their mind. And they found
Speaker 1: that people reported their minds were wandering almost about a
Speaker 1: third of the time, about thirty percent of the time.
Speaker 1: Uh So, most to the time, they reported that their
Speaker 1: minds were wandering to mundane day to day thoughts. But
Speaker 1: the contents of mind wandering vary from person to person.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they were wandering to plan, sometimes they're wondering, wandering
Speaker 1: to worries, and secrets are among these worries. So every
Speaker 1: time your mind wanders to a secret, you get to
Speaker 1: be reminded of your own lack of honesty, your own
Speaker 1: lack of authenticity, which can be very undermining to your
Speaker 1: sense of self worth. Right, Yeah, and also an incomplete task.
Speaker 1: Remember that as well, exactly right. So back to this paper.
Speaker 1: Based on the hypothesis of secrecy being primarily intra personal,
Speaker 1: you know, inside you instead of between you and other people,
Speaker 1: they make two predictions. Uh, they say, quote, first, people
Speaker 1: catch themselves mind wandering to secrets outside of relevant concealment
Speaker 1: settings more frequently than they encounter social situations that necessitate
Speaker 1: active concealment of secrets. So they're saying, bay stun their
Speaker 1: new model, we should expect to find that people think
Speaker 1: about their secrets way more than they actually have occasion
Speaker 1: to prevent people from finding out about them. Right. And
Speaker 1: then the second thing is quote the frequency with which
Speaker 1: people mind wander to their secrets predicts lower well being
Speaker 1: independent of the frequency with which they actively conceal their secrets.
Speaker 1: So here they're predicting, the more your mind just intrusively
Speaker 1: features secrets content, the more secrets just pop into your head,
Speaker 1: the lower your well being is going to be. Um.
Speaker 1: So this paper had ten studies throughout it, too many
Speaker 1: details to go into here, just a few highlights, and
Speaker 1: they came up with thirty eight categories of secrets after
Speaker 1: a little pilot study, and they would ask, you know,
Speaker 1: have you done this is it a secret? The categories
Speaker 1: of secrets would be things like uh, emotional infidelity, sexual infidelity, theft, uh,
Speaker 1: work cheating, things like that uh And across the multiple samples, consistently,
Speaker 1: more than nine pc of people admitted to having at
Speaker 1: least one secret. So it seems like when you really
Speaker 1: drill down and give people categories to choose from, most
Speaker 1: people are keeping at least one secret, and lots of
Speaker 1: people are keeping multiple secrets. The most common types of
Speaker 1: secrets people had that they reported never having shared with
Speaker 1: anyone were sexual behavior, lies, romantic desires, and extra relational thoughts.
Speaker 1: No big surprises are right, Um? So people did generally
Speaker 1: mind wander to secrets they found much more than they
Speaker 1: actively concealed them and interactions. And this was true for
Speaker 1: all kinds of secrets except for one, which was surprises,
Speaker 1: which is kind of sweet. People spend more time actively
Speaker 1: concealing surprises than than letting their mind wander to them.
Speaker 1: Well that's yeah, Well that that makes sense too, because
Speaker 1: again those are like those are the positive as are
Speaker 1: the bright spots in the secret keeping universe. Right, So,
Speaker 1: according to self reports, the more people mind wandered to
Speaker 1: their secrets, the more they claim their secret harmed their
Speaker 1: well being, and this was true for mind wandering, but
Speaker 1: not for active concealment. So the general findings here where
Speaker 1: that having a secret leads to active concealment and mind
Speaker 1: wandering of the subject to the secret, but mind wandering
Speaker 1: to the secret happens much more often, and mind wandering
Speaker 1: to the secret appears to have a negative effect on
Speaker 1: well being. Now I had a big question about this. Uh,
Speaker 1: I guess we're we're going to wrap up in a
Speaker 1: minute here, But I'm wondering in these mind wandering events,
Speaker 1: what's the phenomenology there? Because there you're just talking about
Speaker 1: the mind wandering to a subject. When people's mind wanders
Speaker 1: to a secret, what are they generally thinking of? Are
Speaker 1: they thinking about the subject of their secret, like the
Speaker 1: thing it is they're they're keeping secret, or they thinking
Speaker 1: about how the secret would be perceived if it were discovered,
Speaker 1: or are they thinking about how to keep it from
Speaker 1: being discovered? Like what is the prime merry feeling of
Speaker 1: your mind wandering to a secret? I mean, I imagine
Speaker 1: a lot of it's tied up in you know, the
Speaker 1: nature of the default mode network, and that we're sort
Speaker 1: of continually worrying about the past and the future. So
Speaker 1: it's going to basically color like, what does this say
Speaker 1: about who I am in the past or the future,
Speaker 1: the keeping of this secret or the nature of the secret?
Speaker 1: Right that would be my read on it. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that's a really good read. And the who I
Speaker 1: am is a big factor because the the So in
Speaker 1: the study I just talked about, the authors, they're presenting
Speaker 1: an authenticity model of secrecy that is interesting to me
Speaker 1: because it's basing the whatever potential harmful effects of secrecy
Speaker 1: there are, they say are are maybe largely rooted in
Speaker 1: not necessarily like a spending cognitive resources thinking about the secret,
Speaker 1: but in the secret undermining our sense of authenticity and
Speaker 1: self worth, Like it hurts our self esteem to think
Speaker 1: about the fact that we have to keep things secret.
Speaker 1: So in the study, like I said, they define secrecy
Speaker 1: not as the act of concealing information from others, but
Speaker 1: the desire to conceal information from others. And I wonder
Speaker 1: if you could take that a step farther insofar as
Speaker 1: that information relates to facts about yourself, could you go
Speaker 1: even more basic and say that secrecy is an intentional
Speaker 1: mismatch between your public and private self. Huh yeah, I
Speaker 1: think you could, you know, and that that actually naturally
Speaker 1: plays in within the final example I want to bring
Speaker 1: up for our podcast episode here. Oh yeah, well what
Speaker 1: is that? That's we're talking about public and private itself?
Speaker 1: What is more public and privateself than the clothed self
Speaker 1: and then nakedself? The clothes the version of you that
Speaker 1: is literally wearing clothes and the version of you that
Speaker 1: is literally naked. Well, I guess if you're never nude,
Speaker 1: even the privateself isn't always clothed. Well, that's that's true.
Speaker 1: The never nudes of arrested development that they put an
Speaker 1: additional spin on this. I'm not sure that Georgio Agambin
Speaker 1: actually thought about this, but he is, Okay, he is.
Speaker 1: He is an Italian philosopher of the century. He was
Speaker 1: born in two so he's still with us, and he's
Speaker 1: written a good bit on this idea of nudity as
Speaker 1: a secret, so he uh, it's really really fascinating stuff.
Speaker 1: He gets into it at you know, far greater philosophic
Speaker 1: depth than we have time to discuss here. But for instance,
Speaker 1: he points to the myth of Adam and Eve is
Speaker 1: the birth of shame and the beginning of ethics. Uh
Speaker 1: He says, quote, if nudity results in us being ashamed,
Speaker 1: it is because we cannot hide that which we would
Speaker 1: prefer to hide from the glance of the eye, because
Speaker 1: the unrestrainable impulse of escaping from oneself is encountered by
Speaker 1: an equal certain impossibility of evasion. Now, can you translate
Speaker 1: that for me again? He goes, He goes pretty deep
Speaker 1: into it. He talks about nudity and clothing as metaphors
Speaker 1: for the original state of humanity and divine grace. But
Speaker 1: his basic argument for nudity here or denudation is that
Speaker 1: uh quote forms of human engagement can become substantively democratic
Speaker 1: it enacted through an unconcealed disclosedness. So he's saying that,
Speaker 1: you know, nudity is about like it's like basically boils
Speaker 1: down to you know, letting the absence of secrets be seen.
Speaker 1: So like nudity is the ultimate honesty. Yeah, in in
Speaker 1: a sense it is. If you're trying to get to
Speaker 1: ultimate disclosure, ultimate honesty, ultimate equality of information, you should
Speaker 1: not only tell all your secrets and never tell lies,
Speaker 1: but you should take your clothes off. That's what we
Speaker 1: do with the voider plates, right, we sent off images
Speaker 1: of naked human beings to say and and that was
Speaker 1: of course controversial. Uh, but we were saying, this is
Speaker 1: what human beings are, these naked ape creatures. But of
Speaker 1: course that's a little dishonest because look around you, you know,
Speaker 1: and maybe you're a nudist colony listening to this, but
Speaker 1: or you're in a traditional sauna. But by and large
Speaker 1: it's probably is not the case. People were probably wearing
Speaker 1: clothes around you. And that's kind of a Gammon's argument here.
Speaker 1: He says humanity for humanity, nudity has become quote unevent
Speaker 1: not a state. In the same way you could basically
Speaker 1: say that, like secrets have become the state. You know,
Speaker 1: we could we possibly expend this off and say that
Speaker 1: the keeping and trade of secrets has become the state
Speaker 1: of humanity and the so these secrets are the skins
Speaker 1: that we have done as we march eternally out of
Speaker 1: the garden of Eden. Wow. Well, I would not have
Speaker 1: predicted that we were going to end up with nudity Roberts,
Speaker 1: but I think that's actually highly relevant. Yeah, it's um,
Speaker 1: I mean, clothing is sort of the it's the embodiment
Speaker 1: of one of the more benign secrets, right, because you're
Speaker 1: when you when you wear clothes, you're not really betraying anyone, right,
Speaker 1: You're not like covering up something horrible. I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe some of us are. You're you're not covering up
Speaker 1: a crime or something like that, something people should know about.
Speaker 1: But I can see what he's saying that the enclothed
Speaker 1: state is naturally an inauthentic state. I guess yeah. And
Speaker 1: it has become the norm, so that the actual like
Speaker 1: physical honesty and openness has become an event. It has
Speaker 1: become like these rare occurrences in the timeline of human existence.
Speaker 1: So what are people more likely to give up their
Speaker 1: secrets or their clothing? Oh, that's a great question. That's
Speaker 1: kind of kind of comes down to like a you know,
Speaker 1: a jigsaw kind of scenario. Give up your clothing and
Speaker 1: your secrets, so you're gonna you're gonna walk down the street.
Speaker 1: There's a whole other thing too. He goes crazy on
Speaker 1: the Emperor's new clothing and all the connotations there. But yeah,
Speaker 1: would you get do you give up your your clothing
Speaker 1: or your secret? I don't know. I would imagine if
Speaker 1: the secret is weighty enough, you'd probably give up the clothing.
Speaker 1: Man Horrobert, this has been an interesting discussion, but I'm
Speaker 1: frustrated by the science in this one. This is one
Speaker 1: where I mean, this has happened before, especially when we
Speaker 1: get into social psychology. I feel like it happens all
Speaker 1: the time that they're The literature is replete with studies
Speaker 1: that I'm kind of skeptical of the reported results, and
Speaker 1: then studies that fail to replicate, and then studies that
Speaker 1: get conflicting results or that aren't exactly asking the same
Speaker 1: question but being applied to each other. I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's one of those where what's there seems interesting, but
Speaker 1: I don't know what's true or what to make of it. Well, welcome,
Speaker 1: welcome to the modern age. That's that's our in clothed age.
Speaker 1: But you know the great thing about this topic is
Speaker 1: that everybody is going to have some insight for this.
Speaker 1: People are gonna have thoughts on, uh, your children and
Speaker 1: their ability to keep secrets or not keep secrets. The
Speaker 1: weight of secrets is an adult um. The nudity scenario.
Speaker 1: I would love to hear from any nudists out there,
Speaker 1: or individuals who have you know, participated in nudist events
Speaker 1: and how how that makes them feel in terms of
Speaker 1: you know, uh, you know personal psychic burdens that we've
Speaker 1: been talking about here today. Yes, seriously, you have got
Speaker 1: me wondering about this now. So like for someone with
Speaker 1: the with the new dist orientation, might you might you
Speaker 1: actually come to see shedding your clothing with the same
Speaker 1: kind of relief that a person might feel admitting a
Speaker 1: secret that they've kept for a long time. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I would imagine stuff. All right, Well, hey, let
Speaker 1: us know. You can get in touch with us all
Speaker 1: the usual ways. First of all, go to stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mothership. That's
Speaker 1: where we'll find all the podcast episodes, as well as
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