0:03

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from

0:05

how Stuff Works dot com.

0:13

Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert

0:15

Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert,

0:17

you write a fiction. I do. I do occasionally

0:19

commit acts of fiction, right, and as a fiction

0:22

writer, I'm sure you have heard this

0:24

saying, though I can't remember where I heard it.

0:27

If you want to make a character interesting, what

0:29

should you do? You give him a secret

0:33

some broad advice because not all

0:35

secrets you created equally. Uh,

0:37

that you could give a character a secret

0:39

identity. You could give them a secret

0:41

past, a secret mission,

0:44

um, a secret mark

0:46

upon their body. Uh, Like

0:48

I always think back to um

0:51

a secret pet. Yes, well secret

0:53

pet. I don't know as has been a I

0:55

guess you could have like an illegal pet. But

0:58

I always think back to raising Arizone in

1:00

the The Bounty Hunter

1:02

character played by text

1:05

Cob and uh, and he has the

1:07

secret what like woody woodpecker

1:10

tattoo on his body that's revealed

1:12

in one of the scenes. And there's this moment between

1:14

which is the protagonist also has the protagonist

1:16

has it as well, and so it's the protagonist

1:18

Nicolas cave, which also has a woody woodpecker

1:21

tattoo. Yeah, and uh and it's a lovely

1:23

moment in the film because suddenly

1:25

these two characters share

1:27

a secret or a secret has been exposed and

1:30

uh and and there's not much made of it in the film.

1:32

There's just this this, this one pregnant

1:35

moment where where we just consider

1:37

the absurdity

1:39

and strange depth of

1:41

of what has happened. I would say, in general,

1:44

it's kind of hard to have a good story without

1:46

a secret. I mean, try try

1:48

to think. I'm sure you can come up with a few. But secret

1:51

secrets are always there in fiction because

1:54

good fiction is the act of discovery,

1:57

and if you want to make a discovery tantalizing,

1:59

you should know that there is something to be discovered,

2:01

but not know what it is. Yeah, I

2:03

mean, it instantly creates, creates

2:06

drama, tension, there's stuff that the character

2:08

has to hold back. The character may end

2:10

up then having to lie about things. Yeah.

2:13

It it opens up possibilities

2:15

there and conflict and inner conflict,

2:17

I should add, because that's another huge aspect of

2:19

secrets. So many of our our more weighty

2:21

secrets in life, and certainly in fiction, or secrets

2:24

that are tied to identity, So

2:26

you end up with a with a protagonist

2:28

or an antagonist who is um who

2:31

whose whole You know, personality and

2:33

identity is sort of a spun around

2:35

of this often dark secret about

2:38

who they really are, right, The tension

2:40

in their character is trying to keep all

2:42

that bottled inside. Yeah, now,

2:44

of course, Uh, you know, secrets have been a

2:46

part of our stories for a very long time. Secrets

2:49

factor into many myths and folk tales.

2:52

So you have like the secret names of demons,

2:54

come up right, Rumpel still skin,

2:56

you have you know, if you know an entity's

2:58

name, then you have some power over it.

3:01

Uh. You have secret betrayals, secret histories.

3:03

But I've always found one particular tale of secret

3:06

and secret keeping particularly compelling, and

3:08

that's the Japanese folk tale of

3:11

Yuki Onna the woman in the snow

3:14

Hit me with it all right, So this is the

3:16

this is the basic telling

3:18

of the tale. So a young man ventures

3:20

out into the woods with other woodcutters

3:22

and then they're caught in a terrible snowstorm,

3:24

and a terrifying figure finds them in

3:26

the cold, and then one by one she

3:29

drains the life from the woodcutters.

3:31

But then when she comes to the young man, she spares

3:33

him, and she tells him that she will let him

3:35

live. But there's one provision. He must

3:38

never tell a single living soul

3:40

what has happened here. He has to keep this

3:42

secret his entire life. And

3:45

if he tells anyone, she'll

3:47

come for him and take his life. So

3:49

it's like the opposite of natural

3:51

born killers, or or tell

3:53

them the North Remembers, or something like

3:55

that is saying like,

3:58

no, don't tell this story. I

4:00

got to keep it inside, even though it's I mean,

4:02

it's it's the most interesting thing that's ever

4:04

happened to you, young woodcutter. But

4:06

but you must never tell anyone. It's gonna define

4:09

who you are, it's going to change the course of your life.

4:11

But you have to keep it inside. And

4:13

so the young man survives the storm, He

4:15

ventures back to the village, and life moves

4:17

on. He keeps the secret. He meets a beautiful

4:19

woman and they marry. He and his wife have children,

4:22

and they settle into a happy and normal

4:24

life. But the whole time he has this secret

4:27

tugging at him. He feels it's weight, it's

4:29

chill, and and then finally, one

4:31

night, after the children are asleep,

4:33

he unburdens himself to his wife. He

4:35

tells her of this deadly encounter,

4:38

this deadly spirit in the woods, on

4:40

that that day so long ago. So

4:42

he feels a lot better than right, well maybe

4:45

for yeah, I think he does for a few

4:47

seconds there. But after he

4:49

unburdens himself, his wife

4:51

curses him for breaking his word and telling

4:53

the secret. And then she reveals her true

4:55

form, for she is the woman in the snow

4:58

and has lived these many years as his wife

5:00

and mother to his children. So she had a secret

5:02

to Yeah, yeah, I mean their whole

5:05

They're both wrapped up, their fates are

5:07

both wrapped up in this this one potent

5:10

secret. And you know, and obviously

5:12

there are you know, less defined

5:14

magical qualities here, the idea that this is

5:16

a secret um actually

5:19

has magical power to it. Now

5:21

what happens next varies with the telling, uh,

5:24

and the various versions make us ponder,

5:26

you know, what the weight of a secret is, what the weight

5:28

of a solemn vowel is, because

5:30

that's the other aspect here is the vow not to

5:32

tell. And uh. In

5:34

some cases and some tellings of this she melts

5:36

away into ice, water and others. She spares

5:39

him yet again, but promises

5:41

to come for him and show no mercy if he's

5:43

not a kind father to their children. And

5:46

then she you know, walks off into the snow. But

5:48

either way, the husband's heartbroken.

5:50

The children are gonna wake up the next morning and find

5:52

their mother gone. It's uh,

5:54

you know, it's it's heavy stuff no matter how you shake

5:56

it. Well, this place on our deepest fears and the

5:59

thing that motivates it's most secret keeping.

6:01

Now, there are a lot of different kinds of secrets you could keep.

6:03

You could be a spy and keep secrets in your

6:05

line of work, or you could be keeping a very

6:08

temporary, benign secret, like planning

6:10

a surprise party. But most of the secrets

6:12

that come to mind when you think about secrecy

6:15

are things you don't want other people

6:17

to know about you. And

6:19

that's that's the kind of thing that can be especially

6:22

damaging in a relationship, right, Like, if

6:24

there's something that you don't want your

6:26

life partner to know about

6:28

you, that's a fundamental flaw

6:30

in the most important relationship in your

6:33

life, right, I mean, it's some of the literature

6:35

we're looking at for this episode, they

6:37

got into this little bit. They're like, I'm

6:39

about their being a balance to right, how

6:42

because you end up in a situation where you don't want to

6:44

share all your secrets and then your beloved

6:46

turns into a snow monster and kills you. Like,

6:49

I mean, that's kind of one reading on the

6:52

Tale of Yukiola is that

6:55

he was a little too open with his secrets. He should

6:57

not have told that secret. That's one that should

6:59

have kept. The moral of the story is that he

7:01

should not have been honest. Yeah, But then there

7:03

there are some versions of that tale where

7:06

where she's completely forgiving because because

7:09

it was not a breaking of the vowel to share

7:11

that with his wife. So

7:14

yeah, and then's and then of course there's

7:16

there's one version where she right out right kills him.

7:19

Uh. And that's a nineteen nineties

7:21

retelling in Tales from the Dark Side

7:24

in the movie. I like that the chassis

7:26

of this story can be repurposed to

7:28

suit almost any moral you want people

7:30

to take away. So like, this story could

7:32

be about how you should not keep secrets,

7:35

or it could be about how you should keep secrets.

7:37

Yeah, and yeah, there's that's one of the things that I

7:39

think is so attractive about it. There's there's an ambiguity

7:42

a to the magic, like what's the what are the what's

7:44

the actual what are the actual magical mechanics

7:47

of what's going on here? And then uh

7:49

and then yeah, like was the guy

7:51

in the right because you have a you have a

7:53

guy who tells his secret for reveals

7:56

the secret for a seemingly very noble reason,

7:58

like it's weighing him down own, it's

8:00

it's causing him pain, and it's

8:02

something that's between him and the most important

8:04

person in his life. Also though the fact of

8:07

the secret is not an admission of

8:09

personal wrongdoing on his part or

8:11

something that that he should be ashamed

8:13

of, it's just about a thing that happened to him

8:15

that he can't talk about, right and and I can't.

8:18

I have to assume it's the kind of thing that like shapes

8:20

you, that's a connects the kind of thing that changes the person

8:23

watching a snow spirit murder

8:25

people before you. Uh So,

8:28

you know, it's it's it's sad, it's

8:30

it's it's it's depressing

8:32

to think that you would have a character that would be that affected

8:35

by something like it really it's a traumatic event,

8:38

and and he can never talk about it. And

8:40

I think that's something that a lot of and a lot of people can

8:42

relate to. That a lot of people have experienced

8:44

traumas that they either do

8:46

not feel they can talk about, or they

8:49

or they you know, they can talk about it very

8:51

rarely, or they spoke of it once, you

8:54

know, to you know, an appropriate authority,

8:56

and then they can't share it again. Right now.

8:58

Tales from the Dark Side of the movie V that's the one

9:00

where a cat jumps down a guy's throat. Yes,

9:03

that's the also a

9:05

Japanese legend. No, that's a Stephen King story.

9:08

But let's see. I'm

9:11

not gonna remember all the tales that are

9:13

retold in that one, but I know one

9:16

is a one is a retelling of the Mummy,

9:18

uh that I've I've referred to a few times because

9:20

that's one of the few terrifying Mummy tales in

9:22

my opinion. It's got Christians Slater in it, right

9:24

right, and the Mummy goes around pulling people's

9:27

brains out with a coat hanger, so it's it's

9:29

actually terrifying for a little bit. But

9:32

this one, in particular, it's

9:34

a retelling of of of the Snow

9:37

Woman The Woman in the Snow, except you

9:39

have it set in New York City with Gargoyles

9:42

the Monsters of Gargo instead of Snow Spirit,

9:44

and then you have James Ramar playing

9:47

the husband and Raydon Chong playing the

9:49

wife. And it's it's actually really good. It's uh. It

9:51

was written by the late novels and screenwriter

9:53

Michael McDowell. Now another

9:56

and far more literal telling of this uh

9:58

this tale is Masaki

10:00

Kabayashi's five film

10:02

Kaitan, which features this tale among

10:05

other Japanese traditional Japanese ghost

10:07

stories. And it's extremely beautiful.

10:09

It's really like a really there's a psychedelic

10:12

vision to this film. It's It's available

10:14

on Criterion Collection. This is one of

10:16

those I've been meaning to watch for years and haven't

10:18

gotten around too. I've got a good friend

10:20

of mine from Tennessee really loves this

10:22

one. Oh yeah, it's it's beautiful, it's hypnotic.

10:25

Um this one. I think I've actually referred to another

10:27

story that's featured in this where you have the

10:29

the reflection of a samurai's ghost

10:31

and a cup of tea. Yeah, So

10:34

in this one, what happens when he reveals the secret.

10:36

This one has the more traditional version where

10:38

she she spares him but makes

10:40

him promise to be a good father to the children.

10:43

Oh well that's sweet. Yeah, well, I

10:45

mean it's sweet, but again it's it's still heartbroken.

10:47

So if it's not obvious by now, we are

10:49

going to be talking about secrets today and we're gonna

10:51

try to get into some of the science of secrets,

10:54

talk about the psychological research that

10:56

exists on secrecy, the practice

10:59

of keeping secret it's and the effects

11:01

of secrecy. But I

11:03

was trying to think about the concept of secrecy

11:05

because it first it seemed like a

11:08

very straightforward idea. Right,

11:10

A secret is just what standard

11:13

definition is something kept from knowledge

11:15

or view? Right, Yeah, Like I

11:18

keep thinking of it in terms of my my

11:20

son, Like how did we introduce the concept

11:22

of a secret to him? And it's in the form of

11:25

giving gifts Christmas or birthdays?

11:27

Right, Because it comes down to what's in this box?

11:30

For your mother? You can't tell

11:32

her it's a secret. Like it's a very literal scenario.

11:34

There is an unseen quantity in this box.

11:37

You know what it is, and you can't say what it

11:39

is. You know, for the sake of

11:41

fun, and

11:44

that that's the nice version, right, But so,

11:46

yeah, something kept from knowledge or view. Okay,

11:48

that seems fairly straightforward. But the more I

11:50

thought about it, the more I thought, that's not really

11:54

a very accurate version of how

11:56

we use the word secret. It doesn't match

11:59

the usage. Because here's

12:01

an example. If I live alone and

12:03

I haven't had anybody over to my apartment

12:05

yet, and I have a green chair that I've

12:07

never told anybody about. Is that green

12:10

chair a secret? Not really,

12:12

right, you, You wouldn't use the word that way. So

12:15

nobody but me knows about it, but it's not a secret.

12:18

But say, imagine I'm living alone,

12:20

I haven't had anybody over to my apartment yet,

12:22

and I also have a vintage dock in poster

12:25

hanging up on the wall, and that poster

12:27

is the reason I haven't had anybody

12:29

over to my apartment. Is that

12:32

poster a secret? In

12:34

that case? I think maybe it is. Yeah,

12:36

I've been picturing in the scenario that you have

12:38

an entire room set aside for

12:40

this dock and poster and the green chair that you

12:42

sit in while you stare at it, right, And

12:45

I also sleep in the green Chair, so I have immediate

12:47

conscious access to the dream Warriors. Wait,

12:51

the Dream Warriors. That's stocking, right, I'm

12:53

not wrong about that, am I? Oh?

12:55

I'm not sure. I'm not a I'm not a huge dock and expert,

12:58

but this would be the theme song for um, the

13:01

The The, the Freddy Krueger movie. Yeah. I don't

13:03

want to dream no more anyway.

13:07

This makes me think that the idea of

13:09

secrecy it's something that we deploy

13:12

as a read on intent, right,

13:14

it's the intent to conceal. But

13:16

there are also things that

13:19

you don't want other people to know about

13:21

that aren't really secrets, right,

13:24

like uh, not to get too gross, but

13:26

descriptive details of your excretory

13:28

function. These are things you'd really

13:31

prefer your friends and colleagues not know.

13:34

But would you call them secrets? Not

13:37

really, right? No, I mean it's unless you're doing

13:39

it and you know aut in a

13:41

really novel fashion. You're probably doing it like

13:43

everybody else anyway, So exactly

13:45

so, you wouldn't want other people to know about this stuff,

13:47

but you wouldn't call it a secret. And I think the reason

13:50

is that you there's no reason to presume

13:52

that your friends and colleagues would have any

13:54

interest in knowing that information,

13:56

right, they don't know, You

13:59

don't want them to know, and they wouldn't want

14:01

to know. So there are a lot of things about

14:03

you that other people don't know, but they're not secrets.

14:05

I think secrets are the intersection

14:08

of things that people don't know, that

14:10

you suspect they might want to

14:12

know, and that you don't

14:14

want them to know. What do you think about that,

14:16

Robert m M. Yeah,

14:19

I would say, but that's

14:22

I think that's a good way of initially

14:24

defining it. But then you get into like what does

14:26

someone want to know? And there's like there

14:29

their things they consciously and

14:31

openly want to know, and there are things that they

14:34

they tell themselves they wouldn't want to know, but if they were

14:36

presented with an envelope or you

14:38

know, or a file or something, then

14:40

they might be tempted

14:43

to look inside that sort

14:45

of thing. And then uh, and then there's just varying

14:47

levels of like realistic

14:49

concern over the secret being

14:52

found out and just sort of anxiety, you

14:54

know, like building

14:56

up in your mind that something is some dreadful

14:58

secret or you know it would be terrible

15:00

of other people found out about it. Yeah. So

15:03

a lot of the experience of secrecy,

15:05

I think, necessarily hinges

15:07

on imagining what would

15:09

be going on in other people's minds. It

15:11

doesn't even necessarily depend on what

15:14

other people actually would care about

15:16

or how they would react. It's all about

15:18

how you imagine other people

15:20

would think about these details,

15:22

right. Yeah. And in many of these cases too, you're imagining,

15:25

like yourself being the one who

15:27

leaks the secret by accidentally letting

15:30

it leak. Now here's

15:32

an interesting take on this. I was reading about

15:34

Jacques dar Da who is twenty

15:37

century French philosopher and the father

15:39

of deconstructions, the high

15:41

priest of postmodernism.

15:43

Yeah. Yeah, and a lot of this boils

15:46

under the critique of the relationship between text

15:48

and meaning. But he had the following

15:50

insight to share on the nature of secrets

15:52

and this these basics come from

15:54

his work How to Avoid Speaking. So

15:57

breaks it down like this, A secret is something

15:59

that must not be spoken, Okay,

16:02

but I must possess it and not

16:04

give it away for it to be a secret. So

16:06

I must understand the secret, or at least grasp

16:09

the importance of it. But

16:11

to possess that that secret I

16:13

do have to tell one person, I have to

16:15

tell it to myself, like in

16:18

in containing the secret in my mind, I have

16:20

to tell myself that secret. If

16:22

I don't, I have forgotten it. And how can I keep a

16:24

secret that I've forgotten? Uho?

16:27

And also to keep that secret, I must

16:29

not keep the secret. Mm

16:31

hmm. So yeah, if you

16:33

could have a secret exercised from your

16:35

memory, it wouldn't be a secret anymore. So

16:39

my my advice is that have

16:42

this answer ready the next time someone asks

16:44

you if you can keep a secret for

16:46

them. Um, you know, and I

16:48

realized some of that probably sounds a bit like some you

16:50

know, academic nonsense, but

16:53

but think of it this way. Secrets have weight, and if I

16:55

ask you to keep a secret, you must

16:57

carry the weight of that secret, even

16:59

if it's slight, right, And if

17:01

the information is disturbing, frightening or sad

17:04

or what have you, you still have to roll

17:06

it around in your mind from

17:08

time to time in order to not share

17:10

it with someone else. Now, George

17:13

or would probably disagreed with

17:16

some of that. He said, if you want to keep a secret, you

17:18

must also hide it from yourself. But

17:21

again, part of keeping

17:23

the secret is knowing not to let it out.

17:25

And if you I mean, if you, I guess if

17:27

you can forget it, but then it's then you're not keeping

17:29

a secret then right right? Well, I mean

17:31

that's part of the fear. Like, if you were to actually

17:33

forget about a secret,

17:36

you would not be in the prime position

17:38

to defend against people finding out

17:40

about it, right, Like, if there's a

17:42

secret that people could discover about

17:44

you, you need to know about

17:47

it in order to steer people away

17:49

from discovering it. Right Like if

17:52

if you are not in if you're

17:54

not you're self aware of what people shouldn't

17:56

be finding out, you're not in a good defensive posture,

17:59

right And if you if you have to

18:01

be alive and keeping the secret to be a

18:03

secret keeper, if someone tells you the

18:05

secret and it murders you, that you're

18:07

not a secret keeper anymore. Um

18:10

so, And then again, well, I can see

18:12

what Orwell is getting at here, because

18:14

Orwell wrote about self deception a lot. You

18:16

know, nine four is full

18:18

of these ideas of double think and uh,

18:20

and the ability to can convince oneself

18:23

to believe what one knows isn't true,

18:25

right Uh, And that this is sort

18:27

of the final abjection of the self.

18:29

I get the feeling that

18:31

that Orwell ultimately is not painting

18:34

a nice picture of what secrets are here.

18:37

It's kind of gets down to the idea that so,

18:39

so to keep a secret, you have to tell a lie. And

18:41

maybe what Orwell is saying is if you can

18:44

make that lie the truth of your heart, then

18:46

you have become a true secret keeper. Right,

18:49

But you've also sacrificed your integrity.

18:51

Right. Uh. This reminds

18:54

me of another quote, and this one comes

18:56

from James Joyce, and this is from Ulysses

18:59

his His you know, he

19:01

says, secrets, silent stony,

19:03

sit in the dark palaces of both our

19:06

hearts, secrets weary

19:08

of their tyranny, tyrants willing

19:10

to be dethroned. Yeah, the secret

19:12

wants to escape, right like it

19:14

it's rain, cannot go on forever. It has a

19:16

self destructive impulse. And

19:19

I often do think of secrets this

19:21

way, that a secret is

19:24

like a bomb, right, It's

19:26

like a bomb in fiction, and

19:28

that it's possible that a bomb

19:30

will never go off, but the purpose of

19:32

a bomb is to go off, and

19:34

like a secret, almost psychologically

19:37

for me, plays the role of a

19:39

thing that will be probably

19:42

disclosed at some point in the future,

19:44

and you are just wondering

19:47

the entire time when and how that

19:49

will happen. And then when

19:51

it is revealed, you have to choose. Then

19:54

are you then are you gonna come clean and say, oh, yes, I knew

19:56

that all along. It was a secret

19:58

and I was its keeper, and

20:00

and and that brings various complications.

20:03

Or do you say you pretend that you didn't know, and

20:05

now you have a new secret. The

20:08

original secret has been has been

20:10

you know, declassified, but you've created the new

20:12

one, the idea that you were never this keeper

20:14

of this secret. Right, So here's a question.

20:18

What's the relationship of secrets to lying?

20:21

We were just talking about or well sort of gets into

20:23

this, Joyce sort of hints at this. Most

20:25

ethical systems would judge lying to

20:28

be an immoral act, barring, you know,

20:30

extreme extenuating circumstances, like

20:32

you might lie in the same kind of circumstances

20:34

where you would use violence to defend yourself

20:36

or others there something like that. But generally

20:39

lying is wrong. I think I feel

20:41

that way. Um, So if it's

20:43

wrong to lie, is it wrong to keep

20:45

secrets? In other words, is

20:47

it wrong to intentionally prevent other

20:50

people from discovering facts that

20:52

you suspect they would probably

20:54

want to know or might want to know.

20:57

Uh, I feel like the answer is probably not right.

21:00

So that exposes another tension in secrecy,

21:03

because some secrets are about things that are just

21:05

none of anybody else's business. You

21:08

know. It's not always like, well, I stole

21:10

something, or I cheated on my partner or

21:12

something like that. It might be things

21:14

like there's a fact about you that

21:17

you wouldn't naturally feel bad about,

21:19

but you feel that other people might judge

21:21

you unfairly if they knew it. Yeah,

21:24

Well, like the doc and example is good.

21:26

You know. I feel like a lot of us have these, uh,

21:28

these things in life we like, you know, you

21:31

know, be a a you know, a

21:33

TV show or an album or

21:35

something, and we're nostalgic for it. Yeah, and then there's

21:37

this, there's this idea that we need to keep it a secret

21:39

at least from certain circles, excluding

21:42

temporary tactical secrets

21:44

like planning a surprise party or something like

21:46

that. Does does this imply that

21:49

a secret is always something

21:51

that suggests an injustice. Either

21:54

you did something bad and you

21:56

don't want people to know, or

21:58

there's something about you that you think

22:00

people would treat you unfairly

22:03

or unreasonably if they knew.

22:05

Are there any exceptions to that? Um?

22:09

Well, I think you touched on strategic secrets,

22:11

right, the things that are not really something

22:13

you want to keep secret forever, but it's

22:16

just like you know, it's a planning a surprise

22:18

or giving a gift or something. Yeah, I mean, I guess

22:21

one of my my sticking points that I kept

22:23

coming across, and this was, is just the idea of

22:25

unnecessary secrets that people attempt

22:27

to burden you with. I've I

22:30

found I tend not to find these

22:32

in my own like social interactions, but

22:34

I know that others have. Where you're talking to somebody and

22:36

they say, oh, but don't tell anybody about this, And

22:38

maybe you know, maybe the secret they're sharing with you

22:41

is something lady, But a lot of times it's not,

22:43

and it's something that you're you're going to go and tell

22:46

somebody else about anyway. But

22:48

they've they've they've put the burden of

22:50

keeping the secret on you. Also, in in workplace

22:52

environments, I've encountered this where you

22:54

know someone's sharing just some really

22:57

unimportant bit of you know, short

22:59

term stragg G for the company. Right, don't

23:01

tell anybody. I don't tell anybody. I was like, why

23:03

did you tell me? Because because

23:06

it's a you had to share your crummy

23:08

secret with me, and now I have to keep it

23:10

or or break my vow over

23:13

something. So pitdling, you know, somebody should

23:15

start a website along the lines of post secret.

23:18

You know about post secret, right, pop

23:20

secret? Popcorn? No? No, post

23:22

secret. No. That this website where this

23:25

dude was collecting postcards of people

23:27

would anonymously write down secrets and send

23:29

them. Oh yeah, I do remember this. Yeah,

23:32

I mean so that was an interesting way of

23:35

of people sharing their secrets without

23:37

actually disclosing to people who would

23:39

know about them, you know, anonymous secret sharing.

23:42

Uh. And there are probably some good questions we can talk about

23:44

later in this episode when we talk about the science about

23:46

whether that properly relieves

23:48

any of the tension brought on by secret keeping.

23:51

But there should be an analogy

23:53

of that. It's a website that's just don't

23:56

tell anybody yet for all

23:59

work, Relay did secrets where

24:01

people as soon as you get an email

24:03

that says don't tell anybody yet or as

24:05

soon as you get out of that meeting, you anonymously

24:08

go and upload the facts. You

24:10

can even have the time released. I guess, um,

24:13

now these are these are all excellent points.

24:15

Now I do want to throw in one thing here too,

24:18

Like when you get into secrets, you also get into this idea

24:20

of confessionals, right, Like to to unburden

24:23

yourself with the secret is to make a confession.

24:25

And uh, confessions have

24:27

have played an important role, say in you know, in

24:30

Catholic tradition, like that instantly

24:32

comes to mind, and a lot of the studies that we looked at here

24:34

the idea of someone going and being

24:36

able to unburden themselves in an anonymous

24:38

or semi anonymous fashion. Likewise,

24:42

various self help hotlines. If

24:44

some if the secret that you're keeping

24:46

is something say bound up in personal

24:48

identity or or you know,

24:51

feelings of say suicide, you

24:53

might call a suicide hotline

24:56

or a um or say a sexual

24:58

abuse hotline. And these would be appropriate

25:01

places to unburden yourself with this information

25:03

and uh, you know, receive expert

25:07

advice on what to do about it. Now, that might

25:09

be a good example of an exception to what I was

25:11

talking about earlier because I can imagine you talked

25:13

about abuse like people who have undergone

25:15

a certain kind of trauma. Now,

25:17

obviously they didn't do anything bad. They

25:20

might suspect that other people would

25:22

react unreasonably or judge them,

25:24

but they might not too. In that case, they

25:26

might want to keep a secret for some other

25:29

reason. They didn't do anything wrong, They

25:31

don't think people will be mean to them about

25:33

it or think differently about them. They

25:35

just don't want people to know, right.

25:39

Yeah, I mean it just comes back

25:41

around again to this the very complex

25:43

and and you know,

25:45

a morphous quality

25:47

of secrets, like not all secrets are are

25:49

equal. Now, one of the things you mentioned earlier

25:52

about about the idea of a secret

25:54

being harmful or not. Um, it's

25:56

it's worth noting that you know there are many parents

25:58

out there argue you should not teach young kids

26:00

about secret keeping because it might

26:03

be exploited later on in

26:05

abusive scenarios or the

26:07

abuse or is saying hey, you have to keep this secret.

26:09

Uh. I actually ran ran across

26:12

some advice regarding this from the National

26:14

Crime Prevention Council, and they stressed

26:16

the following that you would want to

26:18

teach a small child. First of all, if a secret

26:20

can't hurt someone or something, you

26:23

keep it. If a secret

26:26

can hurt someone or something, you tell

26:28

an adult. And if you're not sure,

26:30

you're tell an adult. So

26:33

it's got like a default mode of tell

26:35

yeah yeah, which I think

26:37

is a that kind of breaks down when you

26:39

start bringing into the more complex adult

26:42

scenarios of say, you know state

26:44

secrets or workplace secrets, or

26:46

you know the secret desires of your

26:49

heart, but you know, for a childhood

26:51

scenario, I think those those guidelines seem

26:53

to make a lot of sense. I think that might be good guidelines

26:55

for adults. I mean, think about that. You if

26:58

you're not sure it it's

27:00

better to keep it a secret, you should

27:02

err on the side of telling. Yeah

27:05

yeah. I mean that seems logical

27:08

to me. I mean, it's the same reason

27:10

that you wouldn't normally endorse

27:12

lying, except in some extenuating circumstance

27:15

where you've got to, you know, do something defensive

27:17

or save lives or something like that. Generally,

27:20

it's better if people don't lie to each other. The

27:22

problem is that a child can tell

27:24

an adult. The adult is the default, you

27:27

know, authority figure. But who's an adult to tell

27:30

God the police obviously

27:33

called the cobs. Every time you've got a secret, I'd

27:37

like to report a doc and poster in my apartment.

27:41

Okay, well, I think it's about time to start getting into the

27:43

science and maybe we can transition there

27:45

by bringing up one last thing that

27:48

I think is also interesting. Why is it

27:51

so pleasurable to share

27:53

secrets with a person or a

27:55

small group. I'm sure you've had this experience,

27:57

Robert, right, Like sharing secret

28:00

it's a it's a well known bonding behavior.

28:02

You're a middle schooler and you get together with your

28:04

close friends and tell them who you've got a crush

28:07

on or when you have

28:09

you know, one way that you know you found

28:11

your soul made not to get too cheesy, is

28:14

that you confess thoughts and opinions

28:16

to them that you would never say in front

28:18

of anybody else. It's fun and delightful

28:21

to share your secrets with that person.

28:24

Yeah, you know, and it's also um

28:26

you know. The counterpoint is that it's disappointing,

28:29

isn't it When you go to share a secret with someone and

28:31

they already know the secret and you

28:33

know your Your disappointment is is it's

28:35

twofold. On one hand, you don't

28:38

get to share, be the share of the secret,

28:40

and they were maybe keeping it from you.

28:43

But but when the reaction is positive, and

28:45

when there's you know, mutual discovery between

28:49

two people or a small group of people, why

28:51

does that feel so good? It's intensely

28:53

socially pleasurable. Well, I

28:56

think I think a lot of it is you have to you have to boil

28:58

down all of this to sort of, um, you know, prehistoric

29:01

human scenarios, right, like what

29:03

we're secrets for For the vast majority

29:05

of human history, what did secrets consist

29:08

of. They had to do with what the location

29:10

of food and resources, um,

29:13

the you know, the the position

29:15

of dangers that you face, be the predators

29:17

or other human populations.

29:21

And therefore to share a secret was

29:23

to share survival with someone. I

29:25

feel like disclosure of secrets to

29:27

close companions. It's so it's sort

29:29

of like initiating Every time you do

29:31

it, it initiates a further traversal

29:34

into the boundaries of trust, Like

29:36

you're going deeper into the trust landscape,

29:39

which probably I think feels good for the

29:41

same reasons that starting a new romantic

29:43

relationship feels good. You know that feeling of

29:45

euphoria people often report when

29:47

they're dating somebody new. Um,

29:50

it's like you're you're going into new social

29:52

territory and it feels good to forge

29:55

newer, stronger, better relationships.

29:57

It's like playing like a card game and

30:00

in the opening hands like none

30:02

of the cards have been played, and every every

30:04

play is something substantially new.

30:06

Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. Um.

30:08

But also there there's an

30:10

analogy to that, I think that

30:13

is institutional secret

30:15

knowledge. It's that same principle of sharing

30:17

with a person or a small group and getting pleasure

30:19

out of that, but making it

30:21

part of an organization, like the secret

30:24

knowledge that forms the basis of attraction

30:26

to secret societies. And one

30:28

of my favorites gnostic religions.

30:31

Like if you go back to the first few centuries CE,

30:34

you see these gnostic forms of

30:36

Christianity, which were these strange

30:39

versions of Christianity. They seem very alien

30:41

to us now, but they're fascinating to study

30:43

because they were built all on the idea of

30:45

like you'd have a public version of

30:48

the religion that was accessible to the masses,

30:50

and then you'd have a private version of

30:52

the religion based on secret knowledge

30:54

that was only available to the insiders.

30:57

Oh yeah, I mean you should. You saw this in Greek traditions

31:00

as well, like you see it, you really see see

31:02

it. And I guess in most major religions, there's

31:04

there's there's the public religion, and then

31:06

there are various esoteric versions of

31:08

it, esoteric Buddhism, etcetera, and

31:11

then branching cults and whatever ehressies

31:14

from there on out. I get intense pleasure

31:16

just from thinking about that and

31:18

studying it. I can imagine it's so much

31:20

more intense to actually be

31:22

a part of that, to be one of the people

31:24

who gets let in on the secret. Yeah,

31:27

and then just you, and to be led by the secret,

31:29

to the idea that there are secrets that

31:31

will be revealed to you if you merely

31:33

click on this article and learn the learn

31:36

the ten secrets of toning your abs

31:38

or what have you, and that the great way

31:40

to clickbait you into submissions just to

31:42

promise the secret will be revealed. Yes.

31:46

So we talked a little bit about children

31:48

and secrets, and I started to think,

31:50

like, at what point do children

31:53

actually gain a sense of secrecy?

31:56

At what point do they understand secrets

31:58

and become capable of keeping them.

32:01

Uh. And I did find that there was a

32:03

study by Peskin and

32:05

Ardno in Social Development in two

32:08

thousand three that tried to study

32:10

the relationship between childhood development

32:12

of theory of mind and the

32:14

ability to do two things. One of them was play

32:16

Hyden's which is a kind of secret keeping,

32:18

but the other one was explicitly keeping

32:21

a secret. So they tested children

32:23

who were three, who were four, and were five

32:26

at playing hide and seek and keeping

32:29

a secret. And this was partially because

32:31

those are ages where there was some existing knowledge

32:33

about how much theory of mind

32:36

children generally have at those ages, And

32:38

in theory of mind is the concept of being

32:40

able to imagine the thoughts and intentions

32:43

of other people. Yeah,

32:46

it's interesting that hide and seek comes up, because

32:48

I've certainly played a lot of hide and Seek with my

32:50

son over the years, and he's five

32:52

now, and earlier

32:55

on hide and seek tended

32:57

to consist of of him

32:59

high and then running out

33:02

and kept him getting me Like it

33:04

was really hard to to, you know,

33:06

relate the ideas that you're supposed to hide and

33:08

wait for me to find it. Like the excitement would build

33:10

up and then he would just jump up and come to me,

33:13

right, I mean hide and seek. We requires

33:15

that you try to think from the seekers

33:17

perspective when you are a hider. Yeah.

33:19

And then likewise the keeping of secrets. You know, we

33:21

get a we you know, get

33:23

get a gift for someone, um,

33:26

you know, it's generally gonna be like a gift from me or a gift

33:29

from my wife and uh, and

33:31

he would he would really like reveal

33:33

the secret immediately when he was

33:35

when he was really young, or even like want to unwrap

33:37

the present right there, There was that the

33:40

idea of there being any kind of suspense, that

33:42

that there would be some pleasure and not knowing

33:44

and guessing was something that developed

33:47

over the years. Well that's what this study

33:49

found. So they found that across the span

33:51

of three to five, your ability to

33:54

do both of these activities changes drastically.

33:57

Three year olds just are terrible at

33:59

keeping secret. It's a playing hide and seek. They

34:01

couldn't really hack it, right, But by four,

34:04

by age four, most kids were

34:06

on on the secret train, and by five,

34:09

five year olds could keep a secret. Yes, yeah,

34:11

that and that that manches up with my experience pretty

34:14

well. And this brings me to the secrets

34:16

of kindergarten or kindergarteners anyway.

34:18

And then this is actually this is actually

34:21

really cool because today, as we're recording

34:23

this, this is my son's first day of kindergarten.

34:25

Congratulations, well, thank you. I mean,

34:28

you know, there's not much you can

34:30

say. You can't say, like, well'm he's the first person in

34:32

my family to go to kindergarten, you know, but um

34:35

no, no, it is. It is a big deal. But

34:38

but it was interesting to go through all of this with

34:40

these various studies in mind, because,

34:44

as you pointed out, various studies point to this

34:46

as a time, you know, age five, moving

34:49

in on six, when group

34:51

related attitudes and behavior begin to

34:53

manifest. Group membership begins

34:56

to influence their learning, their expectations,

34:58

and behavior. And this includes resource

35:01

sharing within their group. And this is where

35:03

we get into secrets, because the secret is a

35:05

resource. That's interesting. I think a

35:07

secret as like an informational resource,

35:10

has value. Yeah, I mean, like I said, you

35:12

take it back to a prehistoric analogy, and like

35:14

a secret is where where

35:16

the good hunting grounds, where the where the good berry

35:18

bushes? Where is their clean water? That's

35:20

sort of thing, right, So

35:23

the study that I was looking at here. This is comes

35:25

from Antonia Mish,

35:28

Harriet Over, and Melinda Carpenter

35:30

and it's titled I won't tell Young children

35:32

show loyalty to their group by keeping group

35:34

secrets. And this is published in the Journal of Experimental

35:37

Child Psychology in two thousand

35:39

sixteen. Now, I'm

35:41

sure this study sounds delightful, right Kindergartner's

35:44

interacting saying the darnedest things

35:46

keeping secrets. But but the paper

35:49

is actually quite disturbing read at times,

35:51

because, for instance, it touches on racial

35:54

bias. Oh like, so that's part of

35:56

in group variation on how children

35:59

keep or relate secrets. Yeah,

36:01

it ends up not playing as much into the study

36:04

as our because they ended up not they didn't record

36:06

any racial information about the kids, but they

36:08

do point out some some sobering

36:10

details here. Now, I I previously read that

36:13

implicit racial bias doesn't really rear

36:15

its ugly head uh and children until

36:17

around age seven or so. But

36:19

the researchers here, they point to a two thousand

36:21

seven study that found quote,

36:24

white children between four and seven

36:26

years of age favorite other white children who

36:28

positively interact with a racial in

36:30

group member, such as a white child

36:32

over white children who hadn't interact with a

36:35

racial outgroup member, such as a

36:37

black child. Oh no, that's sad. Yeah,

36:39

yeah, it's it's uh, it's like I

36:41

say, this is a quite quite

36:44

quite some details to have knocking around in your

36:46

head when you're doing your first day of kindergarden. Anyway,

36:48

for the purposes of this study, the researchers

36:51

didn't include any racial information. They set out

36:53

to assess children's loyalty by

36:55

testing their willingness to keep a group secret.

36:59

Previous studies cited in the article indicated

37:01

the children began to understand the idea of privileged

37:03

information around age four, and

37:06

that children can keep secrets in some

37:08

context at this point. So that

37:10

goes pretty much with what we were saying earlier.

37:12

Right right age four, most kids could do it right.

37:15

So here's how the study broke down. Children

37:17

were assigned to color groups, you know, like green,

37:20

red, yellow, and Sarah, and they

37:22

were told a secret by by

37:24

by two members of their own

37:26

group or a member of an out

37:28

group. So that's

37:31

the initial setup. And you have a new neutral character

37:33

who shows up and tries to buy secrets

37:35

with colorful stickers. So

37:38

loyalty means you get no stickers in

37:40

this scenario because because the Tempter

37:43

is coming around and uh, the and

37:45

I should point out that the Tempter here's a puppet

37:48

and the secret Shares are also puppets,

37:50

and the the the character

37:53

whose name is Siri, is attempting

37:55

to to buy your secrets

37:58

with these stickers. Siri is going

38:00

to have the gender of the child

38:02

that they're interacting with. And

38:05

the stickers are going to range from just like a

38:07

red sticker, green sticker, yellow

38:09

sticker, et cetera, to uh, there's also a

38:11

heart shaped red sticker, which

38:14

is you know, sounds like it's pretty cool.

38:17

Uh so, well, so one thing

38:19

I think we should say just to make clear if you're

38:21

like, how how motivated could you be?

38:23

I think when you're a little kids, stickers are. Stickers

38:26

are a hot commodity. I mean, the stickers are

38:28

what you get when you get a shot at the

38:30

at the doctor's office. Stickers are

38:33

what you get in as a prize for not

38:35

causing a disruption in the checkoutline.

38:37

Yes, stickers are a lot of fun. I mean I feel like when

38:39

you're four or five, stickers are basically

38:41

cut up hot dogs to an animal are

38:44

a dog. So uh. They

38:46

tested forty eight five year olds gender

38:49

split, and they also tested forty

38:51

eight four year olds. The prediction

38:54

was that we'd see more loyalty

38:56

in the five year olds. Uh. And the children

38:58

were just from day care centers in a midsized

39:01

city. Again, no racial or ethnic details

39:03

were recorded. A human served as a moderator.

39:06

The male female hand puppets acted as secret

39:09

keepers. The hand puppets Siri was

39:11

the briber and h you

39:13

also had a book of secrets factoring in the experiment,

39:16

and this was provided by the puppets.

39:18

So they conducted the experiment. And

39:20

oh and by the way, children who could not remember

39:23

their color group were kicked out. So some of the children,

39:26

well they had to, you know, they had to because a lot of it had to do.

39:28

You need to identify with group yellow or

39:30

group green. But if you're asked what group

39:32

you're in and you say, you know, oh, I'm in room

39:35

seven of the kindergarten or

39:37

whatever I'm in, you know, Mrs Williamson's

39:39

the class, that's not going to cut it because

39:42

you need to identify with the color group for

39:44

the experiment to work. So

39:47

the results were that overall across

39:49

both ages and conditions, the majority of children

39:52

kept the secrets, no

39:54

gender effects. Children were

39:57

more inclined to keep in group secrets

39:59

than alt group see crets. So among the

40:01

five year olds who

40:03

again performed better, you had twenty one who

40:05

kept in secrets within their group, thirteen

40:07

who kept out secrets. Among the four year olds,

40:09

fifteen kept in secrets, thirteen kept

40:12

out secrets. And you would be happy

40:14

to know, parents, that all the

40:16

children went home with two super

40:18

fancy stickers and not any of

40:20

the bribe stickers. So so hopefully

40:23

nobody went home thinking that ratting

40:26

out secrets was a profitable

40:28

venture. So this is kind of interesting

40:30

because it looks like at least within

40:33

this experiment, uh who knows

40:35

what would happened if you tried to repeat it, But within this

40:37

experiment, five year olds

40:39

had learned a lot more in group loyalty

40:42

than the four year olds. Like there was there

40:44

was less of a difference in the four year olds between

40:46

whether they kept secrets in group and out group,

40:49

but with the five year olds, significantly

40:51

more of them kept secrets in the group. Right

40:54

right, Yeah, so I guess, you know,

40:56

I guess we were seeing the you know, the the

40:58

the advancement they have alson of

41:00

the individual's ability to prioritize

41:04

secrets and prioritize

41:06

privileged information. To look at the Green team

41:08

and say you're not one of us, I'll betray you.

41:11

Uh. And I included a picture in our notes

41:13

here of the puppet, and maybe I can

41:15

throw this in the landing page for this episode of Stuff to Blow

41:18

your Mind dot com. But I should point out the

41:20

tempter. Is it a lifeful looking puppet and is

41:22

not a punch of strawberry

41:24

witch you have? But it's not like a Punch and Judy

41:26

Show Devil or anything. No,

41:29

this thing, it's going to be in the

41:31

next Annabel movie, the Annabel's

41:33

sidekick wave in. It's a little

41:36

cotton hands summoning

41:38

pizzoo zoo. Alright,

41:41

well we have we have one more study on small

41:43

children here, I think to reference before we take our

41:45

first break, and that is a study title

41:47

Secret Sharing Interactions between a Child

41:50

Robot and Adults. But yeah, and

41:52

this is by Cindy L. Bethel, Matthew

41:54

R. Stevenson, and Brian Ceciletti.

41:57

So in this one, it basically as a question,

42:00

Hey, how are children going

42:03

to deal with secrets if

42:05

they're um if they're interacting with a humanoid

42:07

robot as well as

42:09

say a human adult, if they're interacting and

42:12

specifically to with a a stuffed

42:14

animal dog or a robotic dog.

42:17

And this was this was a pretty interesting

42:19

study to look at. So there's just a quick quote

42:22

from it to give you an example. Here the

42:24

quote, the qualitative results from these

42:26

studies indicate that the children were readily

42:28

able to apply their interaction style

42:31

with an adult to their interactions

42:33

with the robot in both the pilot

42:35

and follow up studies. Future research needs

42:37

to be conducted, but it is expected

42:39

that with longer interactions with the robot,

42:42

the children will treat the robot more as a

42:44

peer, which would be beneficial and gathering

42:46

sensitive information. So I guess the idea

42:48

here is that maybe a

42:50

robot could be used to elicit

42:53

the sharing of secrets, especially

42:55

like if children have been abused or

42:58

something like that the children might be in

43:00

some cases able to admit

43:02

that to a humanoid robot. Yeah,

43:05

I think so. It makes me wonder though about like what

43:07

would be the applications for for

43:10

adults, Like could we gain

43:12

something by sharing our secrets with robots

43:14

who we have robot confessionals. I was

43:17

wondering the same exact thing, like, is

43:19

that the next step up from post secret

43:22

you can you can confess anonymously.

43:25

Maybe better than that, but not as destructive

43:27

as confessing to a person is confessing to

43:29

a non judgmental terminator. Well,

43:32

you know, it does remind me of various

43:34

I believe NASA studies that have looked into the idea

43:37

of creating like basically

43:39

a computerized therapist and uh

43:42

that a virtual therapist that one would

43:44

interact with on lengthy space missions

43:47

to check on your, uh psychological

43:50

well being. Isn't that in the movie Moon? Yeah

43:53

it is. That's right. That's a major plot point in that with the Kevin

43:55

Spacey voiced robot that he he speaks

43:57

to and relates to. So, yeah, it's

43:59

not it's not too far far off. I think,

44:01

all right, well, I think we should take a quick break and then

44:03

when we come back we will get into the

44:06

weeds with some complicated research

44:08

on the psychology of secrets. Than

44:13

alright, we're back, okay,

44:15

Robert. Now we're gonna get into

44:18

research on secrets in a couple

44:20

of areas that I want to admit.

44:22

At the outset, I think is thorny

44:25

and confusing. Um

44:27

So, one of the things that I want to focus

44:29

on is the research

44:31

on the health effects

44:33

of holding secrets and the

44:35

supposed health benefits of revealing

44:38

secrets. Maybe before

44:40

we get into this, Robert, just what would your

44:42

intuitions be, Would you just assume

44:44

that having secrets is bad for your health? Well,

44:48

my my initial reply is that, again,

44:50

not all secrets are created equally, and

44:54

but I also know that yes, even individuals carrying

44:56

a lot of the anxiety in themselves.

44:58

You know, if you if you can't leap at night because

45:01

of the secret you're keeping, like,

45:03

there are going to be some health effects there.

45:05

At the same time, I'm also

45:08

hesitant to like to make too many,

45:10

you know, firm declarations about

45:12

about the health effects there without looking at the research,

45:14

because you do get in you potentially

45:17

get into the gray area of

45:19

like, oh, negative thoughts cause disease

45:21

and and so forth that can

45:24

be taken to the extreme by

45:26

by pseudo scientific ideas. One

45:28

thing that I do think is interesting right now is

45:31

the body of scientific research on the mind

45:33

body connection. You know, to what extent your

45:36

mind affects physiological health.

45:38

There's lots of super solid

45:41

research indicating that there is an extremely

45:44

serious link between the two, and

45:46

yet that the whole mind body medicine

45:48

thing can definitely be taken to pseudo

45:50

scientific extremes like you say, and like people

45:53

can start to say like that you can you know, think

45:55

your cancer away and stuff like that, which,

45:58

uh, no evidence indicates that's

46:00

the case. But at the same time,

46:02

there are tons of studies that do seem to be reliable

46:04

and do show that mindset has measurable

46:08

health outcomes, right, I mean, like I

46:10

said, you can you can just look at an extreme

46:12

example and just imagine somebody having to keep

46:14

a secret and it's causing them such anxiety

46:16

that they have trouble either eating or sleeping,

46:19

a very realistic scenario, uh,

46:21

and one that you has very would have very

46:24

obvious health effects. Yeah, or just simply

46:26

causing stress. And we know that stress.

46:28

Stress causes the release of neurotransmitters

46:31

and hormones that can have effects

46:33

within the body. Having chronic

46:35

stress is bad for you. But anyway,

46:38

let's look at the research. So back

46:40

in two thousand two, the psychologist

46:42

Dr Anita Kelly, who is a professor

46:45

of psychology at Notre Dame published a

46:47

book called The Psychology of Secrets,

46:49

and she spent a lot of her career studying

46:51

the effects of secrecy and what happens when

46:54

people reveal secrets. So I

46:56

want to look at one particular paper of hers

46:58

from Current

47:00

Directions and Psychological Science, called Revealing

47:03

Personal Secrets, and I thought

47:05

this was interesting. So in this paper, Kelly

47:08

collects the research on the consequences

47:11

of revealing personal secrets. And a personal

47:13

secret here is a secret that directly

47:15

involves the secret keeper. So it's not one

47:18

of those don't tell anybody yet things at work,

47:20

right, It directly involves you. It's

47:22

a secret about you. And then she does

47:25

something fascinating. She begins to

47:27

develop a framework for win and

47:29

under what circumstances you should

47:31

reveal a secret. I don't

47:34

know if I've ever heard any advice along those

47:36

lines before. Well, I mean, aside from the National

47:39

Crime Prevention Council tips that we heard

47:41

earlier for children, all right, I've never heard

47:43

anything like this for adults. So she starts

47:46

by acknowledging something interesting. For

47:48

decades, at the time this had been published, had

47:50

been conventional wisdom among psychologists

47:52

and therapists that secret keeping

47:55

was bad for the mind and the body. Like we were just

47:57

talking about it, seems intuitive, right, uh,

47:59

And Kelly points out that research began

48:02

to bear this out. For example, UM

48:05

research up to that point indicated that people who tend

48:07

to conceal personal secrets had more

48:10

physical body complaints

48:12

like headaches, nausea, ulcers,

48:14

and back pain, and they also

48:17

tended to have more anxiety, shyness,

48:19

and depression than people who didn't conceal

48:21

information. She sites

48:24

research showing that disclosure of personal

48:26

information is associated with better health

48:28

outcomes, such as better immunological

48:30

function and fewer trips to

48:33

the doctor, and one

48:35

experiment showed that even simply writing

48:37

down a disclosure of facts about

48:39

a private traumatic event had an

48:41

effect. They like, they took medical

48:43

students and had them right

48:45

about personal traumas and then gave

48:48

them a hepatitis B vaccine, and

48:50

those students had significantly higher

48:52

antibody levels at four and six

48:54

months later than subjects who wrote

48:57

about control topics that had nothing to

48:59

do with deeply hell emotional

49:01

events and then received the same vaccine.

49:04

So if if true, that's very interesting.

49:07

And so if it's true that disclosing personal

49:09

secrets leads to better health outcomes on

49:11

average. Why is this the case?

49:14

Based on our own research, Kelly concludes

49:16

that the reason revealing a secret can

49:18

have positive effects is that it allows the

49:20

secret keeper to gain new

49:23

insights into the secret, leading to closure

49:25

on the subject. And in this model,

49:27

a kept secret it's you know, I

49:29

use the analogy earlier, it's like a bomb

49:32

that hasn't gone off yet. But maybe a better

49:34

way to think about it is that it kept secret is

49:36

an unsolved problem

49:38

or an unfinished task, and

49:40

thus it occupies an outsized space

49:43

in the mind and requires frequent attention

49:45

and mental energy. And Kelly

49:47

actually evokes the Zigarnic

49:50

effective. We've discussed

49:52

that in the show before, Yeah, we have. We talked about it

49:54

in our Tetris episodes. And one

49:56

of the reasons that Tetris might be so compelling

49:59

is that it's an eternally unfinished

50:01

project and it always wants to call

50:03

you back for more. Uh.

50:06

But so the terms Zigarnic effect.

50:08

It comes to us from the Russian psychologist

50:10

and psychiatrist Bluma Wolfovna

50:12

Zigarnic, who lived from nine to nine.

50:15

She first observed it in the nineteen twenties,

50:18

and there there's a quote from

50:20

Roy Baumeister and Brad Bushman in

50:23

their two thousand eight textbooks Social Psychology

50:25

and Human Nature that says, quote

50:27

zigarnic effect is a tendency to experience

50:30

automatic intrusive thoughts

50:32

about a goal that one has pursued,

50:35

but the pursuit of which has been interrupted.

50:38

That is, if you start working toward

50:40

a goal and fail to get there, thoughts

50:43

about the goal will keep popping into

50:45

your mind while you're doing other things, as

50:47

if to remind you to get back on track

50:49

to finish reaching that goal. So,

50:52

I mean, keeping a secret is a task,

50:55

yeah, and and and therefore it requires

50:57

requires mental energy to varying

50:59

degrees to uh to

51:01

to keep it. Like, I keep thinking

51:03

of

51:06

this analogy, and I'm

51:08

not the only one to come up with this, actually encountered

51:10

it in some of the studies. We're looking at the

51:12

idea of their being like a free flowing stream,

51:15

right, And then every secret you have to keep

51:17

is like putting a stone in there that

51:19

has to be navigated around, and it potentially

51:21

changes the flow of social interaction.

51:24

And uh, yeah, if you have if you throw some big

51:27

rocks in there, if you if you

51:29

throw a lot of little rocks in there. Then you're

51:31

gonna potentially alter

51:33

the flow of the river to you know, considerable,

51:36

You're gonna catastrophic levels. Well

51:38

I know it's just a metaphor, but yeah, exactly.

51:40

I mean you you you essentially

51:43

damn the river, and a damn con burst

51:45

right eventually will if there's nothing to relieve

51:47

the flow. Yeah, I think I think that makes perfect sense

51:49

that it would be tied in with sigonic effect.

51:52

Yeah, so this does feel very intuitive. Now. I

51:54

do think we might undercut

51:56

this with more research we talked about going forward,

51:58

but it certainly feel is intuitive. It's one

52:00

of those things. It's got that truthiness, right,

52:03

Yeah, but truthiness can be deceiving.

52:06

But so the idea here at least is that when

52:08

when people disclose a secret and talk

52:10

through it, and this is key for

52:12

for Kelly, it's not just that

52:15

you reveal the secret, but that you have the ability

52:17

to talk through it with someone and

52:20

gain insights on it that allow

52:22

you to achieve closure, to sort

52:24

of close the book and understand something.

52:28

And that's of course going to be more complicated

52:30

than it sounds, depending on what the secret is. I mean,

52:33

for instance, on one, on one hand, it would seem

52:35

to indicate that yes, seeking say professional

52:37

help for whatever

52:40

your quote unquote secret might

52:42

be. So, for instance, if if it has

52:44

some sort of you know, abuse connotation,

52:46

and then you you say, you know, call up

52:48

the rain hotline, you're able to

52:50

talk with someone who can steer you in the right direction

52:53

of how best to to deal with

52:55

this. But on the other hand, like closing

52:58

the book on it is easier said than done,

53:00

right right totally, So yeah,

53:03

well, in under what's you would to really

53:06

close the book on a secret? It has to

53:08

be a rather pointless secret, has

53:10

to be one of those dumb work secrets or or

53:12

you know, mildly interesting social

53:14

secrets. Well, close to the book is my language.

53:16

I mean that that might not be the best metaphor,

53:18

but what it is is that you want to achieve

53:20

some kind of resolution, You gain new

53:22

insights that make this no

53:25

longer an unsolved problem.

53:27

So I think one example would be if if someone

53:29

has has been keeping their

53:32

say, sexual orientation a a

53:34

secret there there closeted, and

53:36

therefore like coming out of the closet

53:39

even did like a select group

53:41

of people that would enable

53:43

you to then like own it and

53:46

deal with it. In a new way. But

53:48

it wouldn't mean that you're like you're done, you know,

53:50

like it's really the beginning of a

53:52

new phase in that particular journey. Yeah,

53:55

totally. And that that's, as we've said, not all

53:57

secrets are created equally. That that's a different

53:59

kind of secret them many other secrets,

54:01

like for example, and some of the research we've looked

54:04

at today shows that sexual orientation

54:06

is very often the kind of secret where

54:09

where a person feels they can reveal to

54:11

some people and not to others. So you have to

54:13

you have to play management of different

54:15

revelation groups and and to a

54:17

certain extent, manage been a different identity, different

54:19

versions of yourself. I mean, of course

54:21

that everyone does that to certain degrees,

54:24

I think, but but we're

54:26

talking about having to do it to an agree where

54:28

it would have potentially negative

54:32

effects on your on your

54:34

psyche. And that's a great point because revealing

54:36

a secret might not always lead to

54:38

positive outcomes, right, And and Kelly

54:40

acknowledges this. So she's trying to come up with the rubric

54:43

of when should you reveal a secret? You've

54:45

got a secret that's eating away at you, when

54:48

and where and how should you reveal

54:50

it. Uh, it appears that the circumstances

54:53

under which you reveal the secret are important.

54:55

So obviously you can imagine lots of revelations

54:57

that would make everything worse. You can iagine

55:00

a scenario where you

55:02

know you've been cheating on your spouse with an alien

55:04

robot from Enceladus, and

55:07

you know you're happy in your marriage,

55:10

but you know that happened. That happened

55:12

maybe maybe not say it's ongoing, but it happened

55:14

one time, and you reveal

55:17

it to your spouse and your spouse is not forgiving,

55:19

and he or she becomes angry,

55:21

and this leads to alienation in your

55:24

relationship, and maybe it ends the relationship.

55:27

Are you better off then? I

55:29

mean you might say maybe maybe

55:31

it was worth it to be honest, But then you could

55:33

also say, well what if it's destroyed the most important

55:36

relationship in my life. Um,

55:38

So there are a lot of questions. It comes back

55:40

to the woman in the snow, right, because on one

55:43

level, yeah, the husband gets to to live,

55:45

you know, secret free, but he no

55:48

longer has his wife and and he has to

55:50

tell his children in the morning that hey, sorry,

55:52

Mom's not here anymore because Dad's allowsy

55:54

secret keeper. Yeah, so it's confusing,

55:57

like it might better, might be better to be honest

55:59

in the long run, but it might not

56:01

be. I mean, it might be just destructive

56:03

to people's lives in the long run. And

56:06

so so taking into account

56:08

complications and consequences

56:11

is a real question. Another

56:13

complication. Kelly points

56:16

out, research is pretty clear people don't

56:18

usually keep your secrets when you share

56:20

them. One of one piece

56:22

of research she sites is from which

56:24

found the college students. So, okay, this is college

56:27

students. Maybe they don't keep secrets particularly

56:29

well, but at least in this group, when

56:31

students shared an emotional event

56:33

with a confidante, the confidante

56:36

reported telling at least one other

56:38

person about that disclosure in

56:40

sixty six to seventy eight percent of the

56:42

cases. So most of the

56:44

time, you're gonna go tell somebody else about

56:46

this deep emotional thing that somebody shared

56:49

with you. Again, that's why

56:51

we need the robots. The robot can be programmed to be

56:53

a secret keeper. You have a robot, it's only

56:55

purpose is to keep your secret.

56:58

Then do you have to destroy the robot or

57:00

is it important that the robot continue to exist.

57:02

Well, because we come back to our our initial

57:04

philosophical discussion

57:06

that the robot has to know the secret, understand

57:09

the secret. Otherwise the robot is not a secret keeper. It's

57:12

just it's it's deleted. It's the same as telling

57:14

somebody and then murdering them. Okay,

57:16

so we cut to the chase here. When should you

57:18

reveal a personal secret for maximum

57:21

benefit? Well, Kelly thinks in

57:23

in this paper at least, that you should

57:25

reveal a personal secret when you've been able

57:27

to identify a confidante who

57:29

can be trusted not to tell your

57:31

secret to others, and that's kind of rare,

57:34

who you can depend on to be non

57:36

judgmental, so they're not going to say, like you

57:39

monster, and who you can

57:41

expect to help you gain new insights

57:43

into your secret and bring you feelings of

57:46

closure. Uh So

57:48

that's interesting because that sounds to me like she's

57:50

basically describing a counselor therapist.

57:53

Yeah, yeah, exactly, have the same thought, Like that would

57:55

seem to line up with you know, a a

57:58

certified you know, self

58:00

help hotlines such as you know, suicide prevention

58:03

or rain or something like that, or

58:05

or like an individual counselor there. It's

58:07

like either way, it's somebody

58:09

who it's their job to not be judgmental,

58:12

but to just try to help you. Uh,

58:14

it's their job to try to help you find

58:16

insights and and understand

58:19

things about yourself and about what you're telling

58:21

them. And it's part of their job

58:23

to keep you keep everything confidential.

58:26

All right? So, well that sounds good. Then what's the what's

58:28

the possible downside? Well, you

58:30

know, so I mentioned a minute ago that

58:32

part of what went into her study

58:34

was the idea that their negative health consequences

58:37

for from keeping secrets, and I think the

58:39

picture on that is not entirely

58:42

clear. There have been plenty of studies

58:44

showing some kind of correlation

58:47

between negative health outcome from

58:49

keeping secrets, but just

58:52

the results are scattered and inconsistent.

58:55

Um, So, for example, what if it's not

58:57

keeping a secret that does my

59:00

charm to your health? But what if some

59:02

of these results are triggered by a different level

59:04

of correlation, meaning that the kind

59:06

of people who keep more secrets naturally

59:09

tend to be less healthy people to

59:11

begin with? M hm, Does

59:13

that make sense? So it's not that keeping a secret

59:16

makes you unhealthy, but that

59:18

unhealthy people are more likely to keep

59:20

secrets. Okay, I mean that's like

59:22

from a scientific standpoint, that's that's

59:25

that makes perfect synse. That would be something you'd want to explore.

59:27

Of course, it's hard to imagine a real

59:30

life, like conscious version

59:32

of this way, like, oh, that one looks sickly, that's

59:35

my that's my secret keeper. Well,

59:37

so, Anita Kelly was the same

59:39

author as the earlier study. She was one

59:42

of the authors of a later study along with Jonathan

59:44

Yip, called is keeping a secret or

59:46

being a secretive person linked

59:48

to UH Psychological Symptoms

59:50

in the Journal of Personality in two thousand six,

59:53

And this study tried to compare negative health

59:56

symptoms across time to figure

59:58

out whether keeping a specif effects secret

1:00:00

or generally being a secretive person had

1:00:02

a greater effect on health outcomes. And in

1:00:05

this study, keeping a specific secret

1:00:07

so when when they found people said yeah, I have

1:00:09

a secret I'm keeping, that did

1:00:11

not in fact correlate to worse health

1:00:13

outcomes. What they found

1:00:15

was, in fact that people who were generally

1:00:18

secretive people were more vulnerable

1:00:21

to more symptoms to begin with,

1:00:23

uh yeah. I also saw an article on

1:00:25

Psychology today with the uh with

1:00:28

with Kelly, and she she pointed out yet

1:00:31

the workshow that keeping the major secret did

1:00:33

not predict worse health at all, but that she did

1:00:35

say that you can argue that secret keeping is still an important

1:00:37

part of developing intimacy, etcetera.

1:00:40

So you have to factor in all these

1:00:42

other aspects of secret keeping,

1:00:45

you know, in addition to the health obviously, right.

1:00:48

Yeah. So this is not to say like, if if secrecy

1:00:50

doesn't actually affect your health, then there's

1:00:52

nothing to worry about. You know, it might affect

1:00:55

relationships and everything like that, but

1:00:57

then maybe it does affect health. And so

1:01:00

this is where things just continue to be messy.

1:01:02

Kelly is one of the authors of another paper

1:01:04

with Robert Rodriguez from two dozen six

1:01:07

called Health Effects of Disclosing Secrets

1:01:09

to Imagine Accepting versus

1:01:11

non Accepting Confidants

1:01:14

in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology,

1:01:17

And this one seems to go back in the other direction,

1:01:20

and just to be real quick, basically what

1:01:22

this study did is it had students write

1:01:24

down confessions of personal

1:01:26

secrets while imagining

1:01:29

three different conditions, either imagining

1:01:31

writing to an accepting confidante

1:01:33

somebody who is there listening

1:01:36

to you to what you confess and is

1:01:38

not judging you to a non accepting

1:01:40

confidant or to no confidant,

1:01:42

just writing into the void. And what they

1:01:44

found was that the students who wrote the confession

1:01:47

to an imagined accepting confidant

1:01:50

had reported fewer illnesses

1:01:53

after eight weeks than did

1:01:55

the ones who wrote to a non accepting confidant.

1:01:58

And if that that seems kind of believable.

1:02:00

But if that's true, that that makes

1:02:03

you think that just like the imagining

1:02:05

of having a secret accepted or rejected

1:02:08

is incredibly powerful and

1:02:10

and produces long running stress effects

1:02:12

on the body. Well, I mean it comes back down to the

1:02:14

idea of survival within groups.

1:02:17

You know, for the vast majority of human

1:02:19

history. So even in the study of the author's

1:02:21

pointed out that you know, if you're if you're keeping

1:02:23

personal secrets, you're basically running scenarios

1:02:26

about being ostracized for

1:02:29

for for the secret you're keeping, and

1:02:31

therefore you're kind of in a constant state

1:02:33

of fearing your survival. Because again,

1:02:35

nowadays, if you're ostracized from your social

1:02:37

group, it doesn't necessarily mean

1:02:40

you're going to starve to death in the wilderness.

1:02:42

But for the vast majority of human history

1:02:44

that was more of a reality that was that was more

1:02:47

of a legitimate possibility of

1:02:49

of being ostracized by your immediate

1:02:51

group. Yeah, so I

1:02:53

don't know. What. What do you think about the health effects of secrecy,

1:02:56

Robert, I'm getting a from the

1:02:58

research I've looked at, I'm getting a very jumbled

1:03:00

picture. I do think that there

1:03:02

is some kind of there does

1:03:05

appear to be some kind of correlation between

1:03:07

secrecy and some negative health

1:03:09

outcomes. But the

1:03:12

research does appear to go back and forth,

1:03:14

and it's not all always focused on the

1:03:17

same question asked the same way

1:03:19

every time. So this is one of those

1:03:21

areas where I don't feel super confident

1:03:23

to pronounce solid discoveries just

1:03:26

yet. Yeah, and again, it just it comes back

1:03:28

again to the unequal nature of secrets

1:03:30

and even like it's going to be relative

1:03:33

to the individual, because you could have one

1:03:35

individual that can can keep the secret

1:03:37

of what happened in the dark cave, uh,

1:03:40

you know, and they can just file it away with a lot more

1:03:42

ease, you know, maybe maybe maybe

1:03:44

due to some sort of unique wiring of their you

1:03:46

know, their cognitive equipment, but they're able

1:03:48

to sort of compartmentalize it

1:03:51

and keep that secret. Someone else they could

1:03:53

They could be in the scenario where they cannot sleep at night

1:03:55

because they keep remembering the glowing

1:03:57

red eyes from the cave. Well, yeah, definitely.

1:03:59

Because a secret, obviously,

1:04:02

in many of the cases where it's going to be most

1:04:04

destructive, is highly related to

1:04:06

the idea of guilt or shame. And

1:04:08

if you're a type of person who, say, has a

1:04:10

low guilt quotient, I don't want to say

1:04:12

you're a psychopath or something like that, but if

1:04:15

you don't tend to experience much

1:04:17

of a guilty conscience, I can't imagine

1:04:19

secrets bothering you all that much unless

1:04:22

you're just constantly worried about being

1:04:25

discovered, you know, not so much worried

1:04:27

about the original content of the secret.

1:04:30

Yeah, and U. And

1:04:32

one way to look at this might be to perform

1:04:34

an exercise where you look at your own life and like,

1:04:36

move your secrets out of the way, and then

1:04:38

think of things that you don't recognize

1:04:41

his secrets that but could be reclassified

1:04:44

as secrets if you cared enough about

1:04:46

them. You know what I'm saying, Give me

1:04:48

an example, what do you mean? Okay, so say,

1:04:52

let's let's see what would be an

1:04:54

example. Um, I guess we guess

1:04:56

one would be like what if I what if I stay up one

1:04:58

night my wife is gon to bed and I watch

1:05:01

say raw Head Rex or some

1:05:03

some horror movie of questionable

1:05:06

quality, and I'm not I'm not keeping

1:05:08

it a secret. It's just in the background.

1:05:10

Maybe I don't even tell her because she because I know that

1:05:12

she probably doesn't care and

1:05:14

doesn't want to hear about the plot of raw Head Rex

1:05:17

r um. But if

1:05:19

I were to, But but I could re classify

1:05:21

that information and say, no, this is a secret.

1:05:24

She cannot know about my watching raw

1:05:26

Head Rex. You know, if you start sort of tweaking

1:05:28

the reasoning for why you

1:05:31

didn't reveal this, Uh,

1:05:33

then it can it can take on new form. Yeah.

1:05:36

I mean, as we talked about earlier, it seems very

1:05:38

much that secrecy is in the mind

1:05:40

not of the beholder, but of the secret keeper. Uh.

1:05:43

And in what they want other people

1:05:45

to know. I mean, so you might

1:05:47

be a person who ate the whole sleeve of oreos

1:05:50

or whatever, or the whole sleeve of saltines

1:05:52

for some reason. Uh. And and

1:05:55

that's just you know, you're a comedian, and you

1:05:57

make it, you build a whole bit around that fact.

1:05:59

It's funny I the whole slave of oreos, or

1:06:01

you might be a person who's legitimately ashamed

1:06:03

and embarrassed and wouldn't want people to know. I

1:06:06

think that's a good example. Yeah, And

1:06:09

it doesn't have anything to do with the opinions

1:06:11

of other people as they exist outside

1:06:13

you. It's just what you think about them

1:06:16

and what kind of person am I. Yeah, alright,

1:06:18

we're gonna take a quick break and we come back. We're going

1:06:20

to get into the physical burdens

1:06:23

of secrecy and uh and at

1:06:25

the very end we'll briefly discuss nudity.

1:06:30

Than all right,

1:06:32

we're back. So, Robert, here's the thing. Do

1:06:34

you ever think about metaphorical perception,

1:06:38

Like, it's no surprise that when we

1:06:40

perceive physical quantities are

1:06:43

perceptions are colored by our thoughts,

1:06:45

right, Like, for example, if you're tired,

1:06:47

you might estimate that it's actually later

1:06:49

in the day than it is, right, something

1:06:51

like that makes sense. But one

1:06:54

odd way of thinking about influences

1:06:56

on our perception is when our metaphors

1:06:59

color perception. Here's an

1:07:01

example. A two thousand eleven

1:07:03

study by Schneider at all I

1:07:06

found that if you think the contents

1:07:08

of a book are important, you

1:07:11

judge the book to weigh more when

1:07:13

you hold it. Like so importance.

1:07:17

We have a metaphor that says something

1:07:19

that's important is heavy. It's a weighty

1:07:21

matter. So like someone who puts

1:07:24

a lot of faith and say

1:07:26

a Bible or a Koran or some of their

1:07:28

sacred text like holding it in their

1:07:30

hand, there on some level

1:07:32

perceiving it as being heavier than

1:07:34

an equal, you know, an equally

1:07:37

sized, equally weighted volume of

1:07:39

say vampire

1:07:41

romance romance books. Yeah.

1:07:44

Uh, And so I do want to point out that actually the

1:07:46

authors of the study I just cited do think

1:07:48

that the association between weight and importance

1:07:50

is actually deeper than just metaphorical association.

1:07:53

But clearly some amount of metaphorical

1:07:55

association is there. So,

1:07:58

if we conceive of secrets as a burden,

1:08:01

as we often have throughout the episode,

1:08:03

uh, you know, it's something you're carrying around with you,

1:08:06

does that exact a metaphorical

1:08:09

psychological toll on the body

1:08:11

and the mind? Does your body

1:08:13

treat you as if you're carrying

1:08:15

something when you're carrying a secret, carrying

1:08:18

something heavy? That's an

1:08:20

interesting idea. I mean, I've actually heard

1:08:22

people say, oh, so and so really

1:08:24

laid some heavy stuff on me, you know, like

1:08:27

bringing to mind the idea that you were you were on the

1:08:29

ground, and they have they have physically placed

1:08:31

a weight on your body, and now it is more difficult to

1:08:33

move because of it. I want to cite a scientifically

1:08:36

rigorous case study, which is that there's

1:08:38

a scene where there's a character on The Sopranos

1:08:41

who's uh, one of the early seasons,

1:08:43

who's constantly having back pain, and

1:08:45

it turns out this character is harboring a secret

1:08:48

betrayal, and the psychiatrist

1:08:50

character in the show, she says, you know, well, a secret

1:08:53

is a heavy load. It might cause

1:08:55

feelings like that. Now, of course that's fiction, but

1:08:58

I can see things like that happening in real

1:09:00

life. But of course that's

1:09:02

just our intuition. How about if we test

1:09:04

it. Well, some people have been testing

1:09:06

this and the answers are

1:09:09

complicated. This is another one, I'm sorry

1:09:11

to say where the answers are not clear.

1:09:14

Uh that there's gonna be some back and forth in

1:09:16

complications. So you've gotta stick with us for a minute.

1:09:18

So there's an original study from

1:09:21

two thousand twelve in the Journal of experimental

1:09:23

psychology by Michael Slapian

1:09:25

at All called the Physical Burdens of Secrecy,

1:09:29

in which the researchers found that people

1:09:31

who kept big secrets such as

1:09:33

marital infidelity or sexual orientation

1:09:36

made different judgments of physical

1:09:39

quantities having to do with

1:09:41

work. So, for example,

1:09:44

test subjects who were made to think about

1:09:46

a secret that they kept, either a big

1:09:48

secret or a small secret. They

1:09:50

were then asked to look at some pictures.

1:09:53

So the ones who had been thinking about

1:09:55

a big secret judged

1:09:58

a pictured hill to

1:10:00

be steeper. Just looking

1:10:02

at the photo of a head on hill slope,

1:10:05

People who had been thinking about

1:10:07

a quote big secret thought

1:10:09

that the incline was about forty six degrees,

1:10:12

as opposed to people who thought about a small

1:10:14

secret, who thought that it was about thirty

1:10:16

three degrees. They also apparently

1:10:19

judge distances to be farther.

1:10:21

Now, this was tested by having subjects toss

1:10:24

bean bags towards a target. Those

1:10:26

who thought about a big secret through

1:10:28

their bean bags farther, which

1:10:30

the researchers interpreted to mean that they judged

1:10:33

the distance to the target to be greater.

1:10:35

Also, in a separate test among subjects

1:10:38

who had cheated on their partner. They

1:10:40

found that the subjects who reported more

1:10:42

psychological burden from their

1:10:45

infidelity, meaning those who thought about

1:10:47

it more, judge tasks like

1:10:49

carrying groceries and helping someone

1:10:51

move to require more effort.

1:10:54

And then a final study found that

1:10:57

a test group who had to conceal their

1:10:59

sexual orientation was

1:11:01

less likely to help with physical work

1:11:04

like moving stacks of books than

1:11:06

a control group who had to conceal an uncontroversial

1:11:09

personality fact like your level of

1:11:11

extra version. So,

1:11:13

other studies have shown that people

1:11:16

carrying a heavy load judge

1:11:18

hills to be steeper and distances

1:11:21

to be farther, and that you

1:11:23

can kind of see why that would be, right. The implication

1:11:25

here is that the mind is interpreting the

1:11:28

secret as it would a literal burden.

1:11:31

Yeah, and I mean you could also take

1:11:33

it apart and say that it's almost

1:11:35

as if the individual knows

1:11:37

that it's going to not only there

1:11:39

gonna have to climb that hill, but they have to climb the hill while

1:11:42

thinking about this secret, like this

1:11:44

secret around in their head. Yeah, and sorry if that point

1:11:46

isn't clear. Like so one

1:11:49

thing that's been shown in researches. You put a heavy

1:11:51

backpack on. Somebody, once

1:11:53

they've got that heavy backpack on, they think

1:11:55

a hill looks steeper than the same person

1:11:58

without a backpack, or they think a distant

1:12:00

target looks farther away than

1:12:02

without that backpack on. And and that

1:12:04

that's physically, I mean, you can see

1:12:06

why that would be. You're factoring in the

1:12:09

expense of doing it with this

1:12:11

extra weight. And so the question is does

1:12:14

this psychological weight play

1:12:16

a similar role in the mind. Now,

1:12:18

none of these studies actually say you get

1:12:20

a better workout with a heavy seat, because otherwise

1:12:23

that's what you need in a personal training and be like, all right,

1:12:25

you're gonna really get out, You're gonna kill it today. And

1:12:27

speaking of killing, I want killed

1:12:29

a Doberman pincher. Now, go out, go

1:12:32

go go get it, go go go kill it. Uh,

1:12:35

none of the research is saying that. No. In

1:12:37

fact, you'd imagine it's probably the opposite, right,

1:12:39

Like, you're you're not getting the physical benefits

1:12:42

of of having you know, a weight belt

1:12:44

on in your workout, but you're having the mental

1:12:47

difficulty of getting through your workout

1:12:50

bearing this this load. Right. Yeah,

1:12:52

yeah, Now, I want to I want to stress,

1:12:54

as I said, going in that there's some complications

1:12:57

to this, and so we shouldn't just take these results

1:12:59

at face value. But before

1:13:01

we get to the complications, I want to talk about one

1:13:04

more follow up study by Slapy and Massa Campo

1:13:06

and Embody called Relieving the Burdens

1:13:08

of Secrecy. Revealing secrets

1:13:11

influences judgments of hill slant

1:13:13

and distance, and so this was a

1:13:15

follow up study, and the authors found that making

1:13:17

test subjects think about a secret caused

1:13:20

them to see distances is longer and hills

1:13:22

is steeper yet again, but that anonymously

1:13:25

revealing details of a secret seemed

1:13:27

to mostly eliminate this effect. And

1:13:29

as in the first study, estimates

1:13:31

were altered for perceptions of physical

1:13:34

space relating to body exertion,

1:13:36

but not to numerical estimates generally,

1:13:38

So you could have people estimate other kinds of things

1:13:41

that aren't related to how your body would need

1:13:43

to do some work, and it doesn't

1:13:45

seem to affect that, so it wouldn't make you

1:13:48

bad at math. It's

1:13:50

not just not just that having a secret makes

1:13:53

you generally estimate higher numbers.

1:13:56

It's that specifically would make things

1:13:58

that you might have to like distances

1:14:00

or slopes, you'd after traverse look more

1:14:02

difficult. Okay, so

1:14:04

that's the follow up study. It seems like that

1:14:07

they find that in addition to

1:14:09

their original findings, if you if

1:14:11

you reveal your secret, you might get

1:14:13

some relief. But it's

1:14:16

good to check for follow up research because in this

1:14:18

case, other studies attempted to replicate

1:14:20

slapians original research from two thousand

1:14:23

twelve and failed to get the same

1:14:25

results. Um, so

1:14:28

I wanna cite this one by perture

1:14:31

at all. The burden of secrecy,

1:14:33

no effect on hills land estimation, and

1:14:35

bean bag throwing. And this is in the Journal of

1:14:38

Experimental Psychology. Some

1:14:40

bean bag throwing in that in that that

1:14:43

article title. Though, yeah, yeah, it's

1:14:45

a little it might be a little bit salty. But they're also

1:14:47

very polite and that they thank Slapian

1:14:49

for they say he cooperated with them

1:14:51

and trying to help them replicate the experiments

1:14:53

exactly. So, yeah, they replicated

1:14:56

the experimental procedure as closely as they could

1:14:58

with the help of Michael Slapy, and they

1:15:01

failed to replicate the findings of the

1:15:03

original study, calling those results

1:15:05

into question. Also, it's worth noting

1:15:07

that these researchers had larger

1:15:09

sample sizes in their replications

1:15:11

study, giving their results greater statistical

1:15:14

weight. Uh. They also performed a meta

1:15:16

analysis combining with other existing

1:15:19

attempts to replicate the original results,

1:15:21

some of which claimed to find the

1:15:24

same results. But they found that when results were

1:15:26

combined across the existing studies,

1:15:28

the correlation between having a big secret

1:15:31

and the judgment of a steep looking hill

1:15:33

was not significant. However,

1:15:36

there may be some nuance here. So now

1:15:38

everything's up in the air, right, you have this original

1:15:40

study of claims to find this effect, people

1:15:42

look for it with even larger sample sizes

1:15:44

and don't find anything at all. Uh,

1:15:47

And so what's going on? Are

1:15:49

we just in bogus land here? Well, Slapian

1:15:52

did try to introduce some nuance with another

1:15:54

study, and this might get at what the

1:15:57

problem was. So what he claims

1:15:59

is in a study from that,

1:16:01

Maybe it's the problem was dealing

1:16:04

with this supposed size of the

1:16:06

secret, Right, they were dealing with these concepts

1:16:08

of a big secret versus a small

1:16:10

secret. And maybe

1:16:13

it's not actually that the size of the secret

1:16:15

has any effect on how you judge the steepness

1:16:18

of the hill, but that a person's level

1:16:20

of preoccupation with the secret

1:16:23

does more reliably predict how steep

1:16:25

the hill seems. In other words, it's not really

1:16:27

what the secret is, it's

1:16:29

how much the secret, larger or small,

1:16:32

is eating away at you and keeps intruding

1:16:34

on your mind. Okay, so here's a possible

1:16:36

example. Um, what

1:16:38

if I told you

1:16:42

do not tell Christian that I bought a new box

1:16:44

of pins and pins

1:16:48

of pens. Ink pens, Oh, ink pens, don't

1:16:50

tell. I was imagining like pins like a pincushion,

1:16:53

Like, what are you going to do with pens? Stick

1:16:55

them into the Christian doll? We'll see. That's

1:16:57

the thing. You wouldn't know, you, So you might find yourself running

1:16:59

this through your head. Why does he want me to keep the

1:17:01

secret of the inkpens and just a new box of ink pens?

1:17:04

What could what could possibly be going on? So, even

1:17:06

though there's no actual weight to it, you

1:17:08

might return to it again and again just trying

1:17:10

to figure out why it's a secret. So

1:17:13

that that's that's my one possible

1:17:15

take on that, because otherwise,

1:17:17

if it's not an important secret, why would you come back

1:17:19

to it unless there's something cantalizing about

1:17:22

it, you know, yeah, yeah,

1:17:24

yeah, or you're really proud of it. That could

1:17:26

be another example. So like the boss that

1:17:28

you're you know, really hoping to be in the ends with, they

1:17:31

share some just you know, dumb, sup work secret.

1:17:33

But then you keep thinking, oh, man, they

1:17:36

shared the secret with me. This is I'm on the inside.

1:17:39

Now I'm I'm I'm in the upper echelon, this

1:17:41

is I'm on my way up. Well

1:17:43

that that's another thing is that the

1:17:46

secrets in these studies are almost always

1:17:48

just assumed to be negative. I mean in those

1:17:50

few cases. And I think that's been our discussion

1:17:53

so far as that most secrets do have negative

1:17:55

connotations. But in those cases where you're keeping

1:17:57

some positive secret, would that have the

1:17:59

same kind of effect? Man, would

1:18:01

that also make you feel weighed down? Like

1:18:04

he like your secret is you were a part of

1:18:06

the surprise committee. You're a part of this the

1:18:08

surprise birthday party committee. Like

1:18:10

that's it's just full of fun. Christian

1:18:14

with pens, Yeah, yeah, he loves pens and these

1:18:16

I didn't mention that these were all you know that each

1:18:18

one's themed after his favorite uh, you

1:18:20

know, comic book character. So he's gonna love him.

1:18:22

Okay, is there like a pin man?

1:18:27

That's the brand pin Man pens Yes, okay,

1:18:30

well, anyway, one more thing about that study

1:18:32

that they also said that the effect seemed to be mediated

1:18:35

by the quote judged effort to keep

1:18:37

a secret. So people subjectively report

1:18:40

how much difficulty they're having keeping

1:18:42

a secret, how much it takes. Uh.

1:18:45

And so that may be a literal adaptation

1:18:47

for resource conservation, because you're saying

1:18:49

it's it's taking effort. Okay,

1:18:52

so where are we now? I mean, this

1:18:54

is frustrating because, as is often

1:18:56

the case I'm sure you've experienced before, Robert,

1:18:58

when you get into research, is especially in social

1:19:00

psychology, that there are

1:19:03

these these results that are

1:19:05

just messy and all over the place, and

1:19:07

I feel like methodologies are not always

1:19:10

unified. You always feel like I wish

1:19:12

people were asking the same question

1:19:14

instead of related questions. Yeah.

1:19:17

Well, it just it comes back again to

1:19:19

just the changing nature of the secret and you cannot

1:19:21

just put a secret in a Petri dish and

1:19:24

and and use it in your experiment. Yeah.

1:19:26

And you see that demonstrated time and time

1:19:28

again with these results. And that actually

1:19:30

is one of the things that feeds into the last

1:19:33

paper I want to talk about, which is more

1:19:35

work from Michael Slapian with Jen shock

1:19:37

Chun and Miliam Mason in

1:19:40

the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

1:19:42

I think this is just coming out called the Experience

1:19:44

of Secrecy, And so this isn't

1:19:46

following specifically on the burdensomeness

1:19:49

of secrecy, whether there's anything to that or

1:19:51

not. We can leave that up in the air for now. Yeah.

1:19:54

This this is more this team

1:19:56

trying to say, Okay, what is

1:19:58

secrecy really? We need a new redefined

1:20:01

theory of what secrecy is if we're going to study

1:20:03

it. And so they start by

1:20:05

saying, you know, attempts to describe secrecy

1:20:08

are hampered by some problems.

1:20:11

Why hasn't there been all that much research

1:20:13

on secrecy? Well, one of the things is it's

1:20:15

hard to study. By definition,

1:20:17

secrets are things that people try to hide.

1:20:20

So if you want to go with real secrets

1:20:23

that people hold that are about their

1:20:25

lives, it's difficult to reliably

1:20:27

coax those secrets out in

1:20:29

an experimental framework and manipulate

1:20:32

them. You always wonder like, are people

1:20:34

really being honest? Uh?

1:20:36

And are people and and different

1:20:38

secrets are going to have different weight to people

1:20:40

write like it's hard to manipulate the

1:20:43

secret variable yeah, it's

1:20:45

hard to You probably are not having a lot of bring your

1:20:47

own secret experiments here.

1:20:49

You know you're going to provide something. It's going to basically

1:20:51

come back to the kindergarten scenario where there's

1:20:54

a puppet with a book of secrets, and this is a stand

1:20:56

for secrets. Yes, that's what a lot of the research

1:20:58

does, is provides you secret. But when

1:21:00

you're provided with a secret in a research

1:21:03

environment, the secrets trivial. I mean, it just

1:21:05

doesn't really mean anything to you. So you're probably

1:21:07

not going to treat it like you would a secret

1:21:09

that's relevant to your personal life. And

1:21:12

if it's relevant to your personal life,

1:21:14

you might ask people, do you have a secret?

1:21:17

You know, for the purpose of an experiment, think about

1:21:19

that secret now, do X, Y and Z. One

1:21:21

person might be thinking about I cheated on

1:21:24

my spouse, and the other person might be thinking

1:21:26

about I secretly want

1:21:28

to write a comic book or something, you

1:21:30

know what I mean. They're just not really equivalent.

1:21:33

And if you were somehow able to draw in someone's

1:21:35

actual secrets into the experiment, it ceases

1:21:37

to be a scientific experiment. It becomes like a

1:21:39

like a jigsaw killer s right,

1:21:42

like that could basically be an entire horror movie,

1:21:44

right there, someone experimenting on people

1:21:47

and using their real dark secrets to

1:21:49

their advantage. Right. So, so there's all this difficulty

1:21:52

in this research area. Secrets are incredibly

1:21:54

important psychological phenomenon.

1:21:56

I think it totally matters to study them, but

1:21:58

they're just hard to study to you rigorously.

1:22:01

And another thing the author's point out is they

1:22:03

think prior research has defined secrecy too

1:22:06

narrowly. Uh So they

1:22:08

make this point, and I think this gets into something we've

1:22:10

actually been talking about throughout the episode. Now,

1:22:13

they say, you know, previous research is focused

1:22:15

almost entirely on secrecy as

1:22:17

deliberate interpersonal concealment,

1:22:21

preventing other people from finding

1:22:23

out something, either omitting information

1:22:26

or actively deceiving in order to hide

1:22:28

a piece of knowledge from another person or persons.

1:22:32

And the authors here propose a model of secrecy

1:22:35

that is instead intra personal.

1:22:37

While the ultimate goal of secrecy is

1:22:40

to prevent other people from knowing something,

1:22:42

the primary experience of secrecy,

1:22:45

what it's like to have a secret, is

1:22:47

mostly intra personal. It's

1:22:49

inside. Uh it's

1:22:52

again ala Lane and Wagner. I

1:22:54

think we mentioned this earlier secrecy

1:22:57

is something you can do alone in a room.

1:23:00

It's just you rolling the secret back and forth

1:23:02

in your head. Uh, you know, contemplating

1:23:05

the contents of the secret. But also you

1:23:07

know, what are they going to be effects if you

1:23:09

share the secret with someone else, either

1:23:12

intentionally or unintentionally, right,

1:23:14

or thinking about the contents

1:23:17

of the secret itself, not even just like the disclosures,

1:23:21

like you might be obsessing over whatever it

1:23:23

is that's bringing you trouble, how

1:23:25

people would react. I mean, yeah, there's

1:23:27

so much to roll through in your brain.

1:23:30

And so the authors here try to redefine

1:23:32

secrecy not as the act

1:23:35

of concealment from others, but is the state

1:23:37

of mind the intention to

1:23:39

conceal information from others. So,

1:23:42

and another thing they point out is that not every

1:23:44

act of inhibition and conversation

1:23:47

is secrecy. I think this is a very good point.

1:23:49

Actually, there are hundreds of ways that

1:23:51

you practice inhibition and

1:23:53

keep yourself from saying certain kinds

1:23:55

of things during interaction with others.

1:23:58

But most of these don't have to with

1:24:00

keeping specific personal information

1:24:02

a secret, right. Most of them have to do

1:24:04

with something like manners or

1:24:06

appropriateness. You're not trying

1:24:08

to prevent people from finding something out. You're

1:24:11

just trying not to say something that would be not

1:24:13

appropriate to say. Yeah,

1:24:16

And to come back to what we're talking earlier about four

1:24:18

or five and six year olds like you see all that coming

1:24:21

online as well, the gradual

1:24:23

realization that that not

1:24:25

everything is that is appropriate, uh,

1:24:28

you know, content for discussion. You know, you can't share

1:24:30

every detail of your your latest

1:24:32

bathroom break just because

1:24:35

it happened, and you're that kind of like

1:24:37

free sharing soul, right. So

1:24:39

yeah, So if it's possible that there's a personal

1:24:42

fact about you that you wouldn't

1:24:44

want other people to know, and

1:24:46

yet it never comes up in conversation

1:24:49

and nobody ever asks you about

1:24:51

it. If that's the case, is

1:24:54

it a secret, Well, I'd still say yes,

1:24:56

even if there's never any occasion

1:24:58

where you have to act to conceal it.

1:25:01

It's just because you don't want people to

1:25:03

know that it is a secret, I would agree

1:25:05

with that, yes. So yeah, in that case, it seems

1:25:08

like secrecy is defined primarily by

1:25:10

the intent of the concealer, not

1:25:12

by the behavior of the concealer.

1:25:15

I mean, for instance, your email

1:25:17

password or your bank account information

1:25:20

is essentially a secret, but

1:25:22

I don't think it necessarily. I mean, it might

1:25:24

bring a certain amount of physical or mental

1:25:27

anguish to remember those passwords,

1:25:29

but for the most part, you're not sitting around like anguishing

1:25:32

over this secret keeping that's taking place

1:25:34

regarding your Gmail password. That's

1:25:36

a good point. I mean, if secrets do, if

1:25:39

they are some kind of burden, or if they do have

1:25:41

some kind of effect on us, why does it

1:25:43

seem to be that these these studies are

1:25:45

only focused on the sort of negative

1:25:48

affect of facts about

1:25:50

ourselves as opposed to just like secret

1:25:52

information that has kept confidential

1:25:54

for totally utilitarian reasons. Yeah,

1:25:56

it's like most of the secrets tend to be story

1:25:59

shaped secrets as opposed to just coded

1:26:01

secrets or just informational secrets. Right.

1:26:03

That's a really good point. I mean, I wonder what the difference

1:26:06

is psychologically, How does your body react

1:26:08

differently to them, if at all? Um

1:26:11

So, Yeah, but we spend a lot of time alone with

1:26:13

our secrets, and they can surface

1:26:15

whenever the mind wanders, and of

1:26:17

course we probably all know

1:26:19

from experience that they often do. Right,

1:26:21

You've I'm sure you've had this experience, Robert. You're

1:26:24

alone, You're sitting in traffic or something like that.

1:26:26

And if you have any secrets, they tend to

1:26:28

just pop into your head uninvited.

1:26:31

And this can happen a whole lot. I wanna

1:26:34

cite just one study by a cane

1:26:36

at All from two thousand seven in

1:26:38

psychological Science where they were

1:26:40

attempting to judge how often people's

1:26:43

minds wandered off of whatever they were doing

1:26:45

in daily life. And they use this digital assistant

1:26:48

to prompt people throughout the day to see

1:26:50

what was on their mind. And they found that people

1:26:52

reported their minds were wandering almost

1:26:54

about a third of the time, about

1:26:57

thirty percent of the time. Uh

1:26:59

So, most to the time, they reported

1:27:01

that their minds were wandering to mundane day

1:27:03

to day thoughts. But the contents

1:27:06

of mind wandering vary from person to person.

1:27:08

Sometimes they were wandering to plan,

1:27:11

sometimes they're wondering, wandering to worries,

1:27:14

and secrets are among these

1:27:16

worries. So every

1:27:18

time your mind wanders to a secret, you

1:27:20

get to be reminded of your own lack

1:27:23

of honesty, your own lack of authenticity,

1:27:26

which can be very undermining to your sense

1:27:28

of self worth. Right, Yeah, and also

1:27:30

an incomplete task. Remember that as well, exactly

1:27:33

right. So back to this paper. Based

1:27:35

on the hypothesis of secrecy being primarily

1:27:38

intra personal, you know, inside

1:27:40

you instead of between you

1:27:42

and other people, they make two predictions.

1:27:45

Uh, they say, quote, first, people

1:27:47

catch themselves mind wandering to secrets

1:27:49

outside of relevant concealment settings

1:27:52

more frequently than they encounter

1:27:54

social situations that necessitate

1:27:56

active concealment of secrets.

1:27:58

So they're saying, bay stun their

1:28:00

new model, we should expect to find that people

1:28:02

think about their secrets way

1:28:05

more than they actually have occasion

1:28:07

to prevent people from finding out about

1:28:09

them. Right. And then the second

1:28:11

thing is quote the frequency with which

1:28:13

people mind wander to their secrets predicts

1:28:16

lower well being independent of

1:28:18

the frequency with which they actively conceal

1:28:20

their secrets. So here they're predicting,

1:28:23

the more your mind just intrusively

1:28:26

features secrets content, the

1:28:28

more secrets just pop into your head,

1:28:31

the lower your well being is going to be. Um.

1:28:34

So this paper had ten studies

1:28:37

throughout it, too many details to go into here,

1:28:39

just a few highlights, and

1:28:42

they came up with thirty eight categories

1:28:44

of secrets after a little pilot study,

1:28:47

and they would ask, you know, have you done this is

1:28:49

it a secret? The categories of secrets would be

1:28:51

things like uh, emotional

1:28:53

infidelity, sexual infidelity,

1:28:55

theft, uh, work

1:28:58

cheating, things like that uh

1:29:00

And across the multiple samples, consistently,

1:29:03

more than nine pc of people admitted

1:29:05

to having at least one secret. So it seems

1:29:07

like when you really drill down and give people

1:29:09

categories to choose from, most people

1:29:11

are keeping at least one secret, and lots

1:29:14

of people are keeping multiple secrets. The

1:29:16

most common types of secrets people had

1:29:18

that they reported never having shared

1:29:20

with anyone were sexual

1:29:23

behavior, lies, romantic

1:29:26

desires, and extra relational

1:29:28

thoughts. No

1:29:30

big surprises are right, Um?

1:29:33

So people did generally mind

1:29:35

wander to secrets they found much more

1:29:37

than they actively concealed them and interactions.

1:29:40

And this was true for all kinds of secrets

1:29:42

except for one, which was surprises,

1:29:45

which is kind of sweet. People spend more time actively

1:29:47

concealing surprises than than letting

1:29:50

their mind wander to them. Well that's

1:29:52

yeah, Well that that makes sense too, because

1:29:54

again those are like those are the positive as are the bright

1:29:56

spots in the secret keeping universe. Right,

1:29:58

So, according to self reports, the more people

1:30:01

mind wandered to their secrets, the more they

1:30:03

claim their secret harmed their well

1:30:05

being, and this was true for mind wandering,

1:30:07

but not for active concealment. So

1:30:10

the general findings here where that having a

1:30:12

secret leads to active

1:30:14

concealment and mind wandering of

1:30:16

the subject to the secret, but mind wandering

1:30:18

to the secret happens much more often,

1:30:21

and mind wandering to the secret appears

1:30:23

to have a negative effect on

1:30:25

well being. Now I had a big

1:30:27

question about this. Uh, I guess

1:30:30

we're we're going to wrap up in a minute

1:30:32

here, But I'm wondering in these mind

1:30:34

wandering events, what's the phenomenology

1:30:36

there? Because there you're just talking about the mind wandering

1:30:39

to a subject. When people's

1:30:41

mind wanders to a secret, what are they

1:30:43

generally thinking of? Are they thinking

1:30:45

about the subject of their secret,

1:30:48

like the thing it is they're they're keeping

1:30:50

secret, or they thinking about how

1:30:52

the secret would be perceived if it were

1:30:54

discovered, or are they thinking about

1:30:57

how to keep it from being discovered? Like

1:30:59

what is the prime merry feeling of your

1:31:01

mind wandering to a secret? I

1:31:03

mean, I imagine a lot of it's tied up in you

1:31:05

know, the nature of the default mode network,

1:31:08

and that we're sort of continually

1:31:11

worrying about the past and the future.

1:31:13

So it's going to basically

1:31:15

color like, what does this say about

1:31:18

who I am in the past or the future,

1:31:20

the keeping of this secret or the nature

1:31:22

of the secret? Right that would be my read on

1:31:24

it. Yeah, I think that's a really good read.

1:31:27

And the who I am is a big factor because

1:31:29

the the So in the study I just talked about,

1:31:31

the authors, they're presenting an

1:31:33

authenticity model of secrecy

1:31:37

that is interesting to me because it's

1:31:39

basing the whatever potential harmful

1:31:42

effects of secrecy there are, they

1:31:44

say are are maybe largely rooted

1:31:46

in not necessarily like a spending

1:31:49

cognitive resources thinking about the

1:31:51

secret, but in the secret undermining

1:31:53

our sense of authenticity and self

1:31:55

worth, Like it hurts our self esteem

1:31:58

to think about the fact that we have

1:32:00

to keep things secret. So in the study,

1:32:03

like I said, they define secrecy not as the act

1:32:05

of concealing information from others, but the

1:32:07

desire to conceal information from

1:32:09

others. And I wonder if you could take that a step farther

1:32:12

insofar as that information relates

1:32:14

to facts about yourself, could you

1:32:16

go even more basic and say that secrecy

1:32:19

is an intentional mismatch

1:32:22

between your public and private self.

1:32:24

Huh yeah,

1:32:27

I think you could, you know, and that that actually

1:32:30

naturally plays in within the final

1:32:32

example I want to bring up for our podcast episode

1:32:34

here. Oh yeah, well what is that? That's we're

1:32:36

talking about public and private itself? What is more

1:32:38

public and privateself than the clothed

1:32:42

self and then nakedself? The clothes

1:32:44

the version of you that is literally wearing clothes

1:32:46

and the version of you that is literally naked. Well, I guess

1:32:48

if you're never nude, even the privateself isn't

1:32:50

always clothed. Well, that's that's

1:32:53

true. The never nudes of arrested development

1:32:55

that they put an additional spin on this. I'm

1:32:57

not sure that Georgio Agambin actually

1:33:00

thought about this, but he is, Okay,

1:33:02

he is. He is an Italian philosopher of

1:33:04

the century. He

1:33:06

was born in two so he's still with

1:33:09

us, and he's written a good bit

1:33:11

on this idea of nudity

1:33:13

as a secret, so he uh,

1:33:16

it's really really fascinating stuff. He gets into

1:33:18

it at you know, far greater philosophic

1:33:21

depth than we have time to discuss here. But for

1:33:23

instance, he points to the myth of Adam

1:33:25

and Eve is the birth of shame and the beginning

1:33:27

of ethics. Uh He says, quote,

1:33:29

if nudity results in us being ashamed,

1:33:32

it is because we cannot hide that

1:33:34

which we would prefer to hide from

1:33:36

the glance of the eye, because the

1:33:38

unrestrainable impulse of escaping

1:33:40

from oneself is encountered by

1:33:42

an equal certain impossibility of evasion.

1:33:45

Now, can you translate that for me again?

1:33:48

He goes, He goes pretty deep into it. He talks about nudity

1:33:51

and clothing as metaphors for the original state

1:33:53

of humanity and divine grace. But his

1:33:56

basic argument for nudity here or denudation

1:33:59

is that uh quote forms

1:34:01

of human engagement can become

1:34:04

substantively democratic it

1:34:06

enacted through an unconcealed

1:34:08

disclosedness. So he's

1:34:11

saying that, you know, nudity is about like

1:34:13

it's like basically boils down to you

1:34:15

know, letting the absence of secrets be seen.

1:34:18

So like nudity is the ultimate honesty.

1:34:21

Yeah, in in a sense it is. If you're trying

1:34:23

to get to ultimate disclosure, ultimate

1:34:26

honesty, ultimate equality

1:34:29

of information, you should not only

1:34:31

tell all your secrets and never tell lies,

1:34:33

but you should take your clothes off. That's what we do with the voider

1:34:35

plates, right, we sent off images of naked

1:34:38

human beings to say and and that was of course

1:34:40

controversial. Uh, but

1:34:42

we were saying, this is what human beings are, these

1:34:44

naked ape creatures. But of

1:34:47

course that's a little dishonest because look

1:34:49

around you, you know, and maybe you're a

1:34:51

nudist colony listening to this, but or

1:34:53

you're in a traditional sauna. But

1:34:56

by and large it's probably is not the case.

1:34:58

People were probably wearing clothes around you. And

1:35:01

that's kind of a Gammon's argument here. He says

1:35:04

humanity for humanity, nudity has

1:35:06

become quote unevent not a

1:35:08

state. In the same way you could

1:35:10

basically say that, like secrets have

1:35:13

become the state. You know, we could

1:35:15

we possibly expend this off and say that the

1:35:17

keeping and trade of secrets has become the

1:35:19

state of humanity and the so

1:35:22

these secrets are the skins that we

1:35:24

have done as we march eternally out of

1:35:27

the garden of Eden. Wow. Well, I would

1:35:29

not have predicted that we were going to end

1:35:31

up with nudity Roberts, but I

1:35:33

think that's actually highly relevant.

1:35:35

Yeah, it's um,

1:35:38

I mean, clothing is sort

1:35:40

of the it's the

1:35:42

embodiment of one of the more benign

1:35:45

secrets, right, because you're when you when

1:35:47

you wear clothes, you're not really betraying

1:35:50

anyone, right, You're not like covering

1:35:52

up something horrible. I

1:35:54

don't know, maybe some of us are.

1:35:57

You're you're not covering up a crime or something

1:35:59

like that, something people should know about.

1:36:02

But I can see what he's saying that the enclothed

1:36:05

state is naturally an inauthentic

1:36:08

state. I guess yeah. And it has become the

1:36:10

norm, so that the actual like

1:36:13

physical honesty and openness

1:36:15

has become an event. It has become

1:36:18

like these rare occurrences in the timeline

1:36:20

of human existence. So what are people more

1:36:22

likely to give up their secrets or their clothing?

1:36:25

Oh, that's a great question. That's kind of kind

1:36:28

of comes down to like a you know, a jigsaw kind

1:36:30

of scenario. Give up your clothing and your secrets,

1:36:32

so you're gonna you're gonna walk down

1:36:34

the street. There's a whole other

1:36:36

thing too. He goes crazy on the Emperor's

1:36:38

new clothing and all the connotations there.

1:36:41

But yeah, would you get do you give up your your clothing

1:36:43

or your secret? I don't know. I would imagine

1:36:45

if the secret is weighty enough, you'd probably give

1:36:47

up the clothing. Man Horrobert,

1:36:50

this has been an interesting discussion, but I'm frustrated

1:36:52

by the science in this one. This is one where

1:36:54

I mean, this has happened before, especially when we

1:36:57

get into social psychology. I feel like it happens

1:36:59

all the time that they're The literature

1:37:02

is replete with studies that I'm

1:37:04

kind of skeptical of the reported results,

1:37:07

and then studies that fail to replicate,

1:37:09

and then studies that get conflicting results

1:37:12

or that aren't exactly asking the

1:37:14

same question but being applied to each

1:37:16

other. I don't know. It's one

1:37:18

of those where what's there seems interesting,

1:37:20

but I don't know what's true or what to make of

1:37:23

it. Well, welcome, welcome

1:37:25

to the modern age. That's that's

1:37:27

our in clothed age. But you

1:37:29

know the great thing about this topic is that everybody

1:37:33

is going to have some insight for this. People are gonna

1:37:35

have thoughts on, uh, your

1:37:37

children and their ability to keep secrets or not keep

1:37:39

secrets. The weight of secrets is an adult um.

1:37:42

The nudity scenario. I would love to hear

1:37:44

from any nudists out there, or individuals

1:37:46

who have you know, participated in nudist events

1:37:49

and how how that makes them feel

1:37:51

in terms of you know, uh, you

1:37:53

know personal psychic burdens that we've

1:37:55

been talking about here today. Yes, seriously,

1:37:58

you have got me wondering about this now. So like

1:38:00

for someone with the with the new dist orientation,

1:38:02

might you might you actually come

1:38:04

to see shedding

1:38:06

your clothing with the same kind of relief that a

1:38:08

person might feel admitting a secret

1:38:11

that they've kept for a long time. Yeah,

1:38:13

I mean I would imagine stuff. All

1:38:15

right, Well, hey, let us know. You can get in touch

1:38:17

with us all the usual ways. First of all, go to stuff to

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1:38:21

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1:38:23

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1:38:26

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1:38:28

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1:38:31

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1:38:33

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1:38:37

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1:38:40

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1:38:42

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1:38:44

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1:38:56

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1:38:59

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