Keeping Secrets

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. You're sitting in a school bus, next to your best friend. She tells you about the time she stole an eraser from the teacher's desk. You wonder whether you should tell her about the time you stole a plush toy from a store. As the bus rolls along, you go back and forth in your mind, and then decide against it. A few years later, you're at your high school prom. At the end of the evening, you share a kiss with your prom date, who turns out to have bad breath. This is not someone you are interested in long term. Do you share the information or withhold it? Or consider a much more serious situation later in life. You're in a long-term relationship, and you realize that for some years now, you have been questioning your own sexual orientation. Your partner would be crushed to hear about it. Things are generally going well in your relationship, and you don't have immediate plans to act on your secret feelings. Is it best to keep them to yourself? At every stage of life, we find ourselves confronted with dilemmas like this. There is a part of us that wants to share, to have the world see us as we truly are. And there is a part of us that sees how people are brought down by scandal and gossip. And a cautious voice inside us says, be smart, keep your mouth shut. In today's show and our episode next week, and also in a special episode of Hidden Brain Plus, we explore the psychological costs and benefits of self-concealment and self-disclosure. Keeping secrets, this week, on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Whole Foods Market. Whole Foods Market is the place to plan the perfect, indulgent and romantic evening at home. Skip the trip to the flower shop and explore the Whole Foods Market floral department. Start your evening in the kitchen with surf and turf made with quality, no antibiotics ever, steaks, plus seafood that must be sustainable while caught or responsibly farmed. Taste the love all month at Whole Foods Market. Support for Hidden Brain comes from ADT. Every second counts in an emergency. ADT delivers home security you can trust, backed by 24-7 monitoring, the most company operated monitoring centers in the industry and technology that verifies your alarms to send help faster compared to unverified alarms. ADT pros can install your customized home security system the right way so you feel secure from the start. When every second counts, count on ADT. Visit adt.com or call 1-800-ADT-ASAP. Support for Hidden Brain comes from homes.com. homes.com knows that when it comes to home shopping, it's never just about the house or condo. It's about the home. And what makes a home is more than just the house or property. It's the location and neighborhood. If you have kids, it's also schools, nearby parks and transportation options. That's why homes.com goes above and beyond to bring home shoppers the in-depth information they need to find the right home. Each listing features comprehensive information about the neighborhood complete with a video guide. They also have details about local schools with test scores, state rankings, and student to teacher ratio. They even have an agent directory with a sales history of each agent. So when it comes to finding a home, not just a house, this is everything you need to know all in one place. homes.com. We've done your homework. In the course of a day, countless thoughts and feelings enter our minds. We share some of these thoughts and feelings with others, but we keep most of them to ourselves. When is it smart to share? When is it smart to hide? Is there scientific evidence that can guide us on what we should do? At Harvard University, psychologist Leslie John has spent many years studying these questions. Leslie John, welcome to Hidden Brain.



Leslie John: Thank you so much for having me, Shankar.



Shankar Vedantam: Leslie, one of your favorite TV programs is the British comedy series, Mr.Bean.There's one particular episode that you enjoy, and for people who are unfamiliar with the show, who is Mr.Bean and what is he doing in the scene?



Leslie John: I love Mr. Bean. Mr. Bean is a comic mime, I would say, and his sweet spot is he finds these very relatable human situations, these quandaries we get ourselves in, and then he comes up with absurd, almost childlike solutions. So it's a really, really endearing and hilarious show. And also brings me back to my childhood, because my father and I are the jokers of the family, and we're huge Mr. Bean fans. So in this particular little sketch, Mr. Bean goes to a fancy schmancy restaurant and orders steak tartare, doesn't realize that that's essentially raw meat. And so the waiter comes up with his meal with great flair, opens up the silver cloche that's on top of the plate, and to Mr. Bean's horror, like his face, says it all, he's completely aghast, what have I done? But yet, the waiter, of course, asks, how's it doing? Is everything all right, sir? And Mr. Bean does this, like, is smiling, oh yes, everything is great. Oh yes. And then the waiter leaves, and then what Mr. Bean proceeds to do is grab little dollops of the steak, of the raw meat, and put it wherever he can to get rid of it, because you have to follow through with the lie, right? You have to show progress on eating it. So, yeah, so he, like, puts a little bit in the vase, and then he leans back, and he puts a little bit in the woman's purse behind him. He hollows out a dinner roll and shoves it in, and then he even takes a dollop, sticks it directly on the table, and sticks the plate to it, like cement. So good.



Shankar Vedantam: I understand that you had your own Mr. Bean moment some years ago. Can you set the scene for me and tell me what happened?



Leslie John: Yeah, so I was a baby academic, and I was invited out to give a talk at Berkeley. So totally swoon-worthy place. And two superstar scholars invited me out there married, and they invited me out to their house for dinner after the day. And so here I am, this googly-eyed junior academic, like walking through the Berkeley Hills, walking to their house. I get there, and they open the door, and they say, oh, we are so excited you're here. We went to the market today, and we're making steak tartare. It's our favorite. It's so special. They laid it on thick, and yeah, so I was like, oh my gosh, I want to be Mr. Mean right now. I want to do what he does, but obviously I couldn't. So I pretended I was too ashamed, embarrassed, trying to make a good impression, trying to pretend I like highfalutin things. And I ate it. I got through it. In fact, I've never told them this, so maybe they'll hear this and we'll have a good laugh over it. But yeah, that was my Mr. Bean moment.



Shankar Vedantam: So concealment can sometimes have bigger consequences, Leslie. You tell the story of two women you know, you call them Jennifer and Donna. When the story starts, Jennifer is preparing for an important event in her life. Paint a picture of the scene for me, Leslie.



Leslie John: Yeah, so Jennifer was about 28 years old, and she was on the cusp of a major life milestone. The next month, she was slated to marry her betrothed. Her fiance, Philip. The only thing was that she was starting to get these kind of nagging thoughts, these nagging doubts, and she didn't know, are these just like normal wedding jitters? Is that a thing? Or is this something I should pay more attention to? So she was really close with her mother, Donna, and she decided to give her mom a call. And so the phone, as the phone rings, Jennifer is transported back to her child at home where her parents still lived. And she's thinking about the living room where she and her brothers would do WWF wrestling matches. And then she thinks about the den where she envisions her mom to be at that time, sitting cozied up in the den with its faux wood paneling walls and all. And then suddenly, hello, and Jennifer says, hi, mom, it's me. Donna immediately senses something's up and says, what's up, my chick? And then Jennifer said to her mother, well, you know, I just, I don't know about these feelings I'm having. And when I think about it, I really love Philip, but I love him like my best friend. And I don't know that I have like passionate love for him. And I don't know, is that a problem? Because I really love him in a best friend kind of way. And Donna listened. And then Jennifer said, mom, how did you know that you wanted to marry dad? Because Jennifer always looked up to their marriage so much. They just seemed like they were amazing parents and they just seemed so happy. And that's all that Jennifer wanted was a really stable, loving, wonderful relationship. And her mom said, huh, it's funny, Jen, that you should ask because a month before I married your father, I was actually having similar doubts. And oh, I'm so glad I went ahead with marrying him because look how happy we are. Look at how great our marriage is. We work. And she said like, Jen, I know you. You're like me. You struggle to make decisions. You ruminate. You question everything. But sometimes you just, if it feels right, you got to go with it. And so Jennifer took a lot of comfort in that phone call. And what she thought was, yeah, I already have my love with Philip is already the mature kind. Passionate love fades. What's really special and important is the mature kind, the kind that my mother has always had with my father. And so a month later, Jennifer and Philip were married. Five very complicated years later, they were divorced.



Shankar Vedantam: So sometime after her divorce, Jennifer's brother sends her an email that changes everything. What's in this email, Leslie?



Leslie John: Yeah, it was an email chain that originated between Donna and her husband. So it was a private between the two of them. And they ended up, what they started talking about was a very private sensitive thing, but where they ended up in the email chain was talking about finances. And they brought Jennifer's brother. At this point, they added the brother to the email chain because the brother took care of their finances. And so then the brother forwards this to Jennifer. So Jennifer's sitting down in her bachelorette pad. She's got her lovely coffee in the morning. She's sitting down, she opens her inbox, and she gets this email from her brother. Hey, Jen, check this out. Seems like they forgot what was at the beginning of the chain. And so of course, Jennifer quickly scrolls down, down, down. And wow, what she found out, she can never unknow. And it's the kind of thing that is extremely shocking for someone to learn about their parents. What the initial exchange revealed was that Donna and her husband had an unusual relationship. It worked for them. It was an open relationship of sorts. And they were discussing that in the chain in a very amicable way. Like it was clear that it was a mutual agreement. And it was one that really worked for them. And they even celebrated it, you could tell in this email chain. So, I mean, Jennifer was a very open-minded person and she thought, wow, that's shocking. But you do you, and if that works for you, great. But the more dominant feeling that Jennifer had, her whole body filled with anger and rage. Like, you know, when you feel it super viscerally, that is how Jennifer felt. Because immediately, she goes back in time in her mind to that fateful call that was, you know, seven or so years ago between her mother, Donna, and herself, the pre-wedding jitters call, and how Jennifer had felt so assuaged. And Jennifer felt that Donna's words really, really did affect that decision. And the reason Jennifer was filled with rage, because she said to herself, wait, mom, you only told me half the truth. You didn't tell me that the way your kind of escape fell, the way you handle this fact that you have people that you, shall I say, enjoy your flirtations with, but maybe more than her father, was by having this release valve, this mutual agreement. And this would have been extremely pertinent for Jennifer to have known, because Jennifer was quite certain at that time that if she had known the full picture of what her parents' relationship was, she would not have married Philip, because she knew that although that worked for them, she knew it wouldn't work for her, and that's not what she wanted. And so she really felt like kind of betrayed by her mother. And she felt like it would have been better if her mother had said nothing, if her mother hadn't even picked up the phone, than to share only half the story.



Shankar Vedantam: Yeah, because Jennifer in some ways got comfort from what her mother was saying, but her mother in some ways was not sharing that the terms of her relationship with her husband involved seeing other people. And there was, as you say, a release valve in this marriage.



Leslie John: Exactly.



Shankar Vedantam: Did Jennifer ever confront Donna about what she had said previously?



Leslie John: Yes, she did. So years later, Jennifer, her anger faded because everything had turned out beautifully for her. She married the man of her dreams. She married her prince charming, who was, she was attracted to in all ways. They had two beautiful children. Like she was just living a slice of paradise. She was so happy, which made it easier for the old wounds to kind of heal. But they were replaced by curiosity and wanting to learn more. How did this start? Why did it start? Is it ever complicated? So one day, Grandma Donna was visiting and Jennifer's husband was out of town. So Jennifer's like, this is like, she had a good workout during the day. She's like, I can do this. Let's do it. And after dinner pours two, two large, large glasses of scotch. There is such a thing as liquid courage. Sits down with her mom and says, do you remember that phone call we had before my first marriage? And Donna said, like a wave of warmth, like motherly warmth smile came across her face and she said, yeah, I do. And I've often wondered whether I said the right thing. And that was just the perfect segue in. And then what preceded was probably the most meaningful conversation Jennifer had had definitely with her mother, potentially with anyone ever. And so that just really, really ended up it deepened their relationship.



Shankar Vedantam: All of us make choices in nearly every moment of our lives about what to share with others and what to keep private. These decisions have consequences for our health, our well-being and our relationships. When we come back, the psychology of self-concealment. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.



Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Leslie John is a psychologist at Harvard Business School. She studies self-concealment and self-disclosure. Leslie, most of us are keenly aware of the dangers of oversharing. We've all heard stories about someone who, you know, posted a photo of themselves at a drunken frat party and then they got turned down for a job years later. Talk for a moment about this. Our default position is often, when in doubt, say nothing?



Leslie John: Yes. You can think of even those sayings from wartime, loose lips sink ships, right? It feels like the default, the strong default we have is to stay silent if there's any doubt. And to your point, I mean, the public discourse is kind of obsessed with TMI moments, right? Of outing people. That's TMI. That's oversharing. And it is true. Of course, we can share too much at the wrong time with the wrong people that can bite us in all these ways. But in what I found in our research is that we don't pay attention, we don't pay enough attention to the other side of the coin, which is what I call TLI, too little information. And that there are very real harms to not opening up, to staying silent. And so I'm hoping that we can start adjudicating these decisions of whether to share or not in a more balanced, even-handed way, where we consider both TMI and TLI.



Shankar Vedantam: Let's look at some of the ways in which concealment can hurt us. You've talked about some shocking research into how much information people hide from their own doctors.



Leslie John: Oh, yeah. So there's some fascinating research by some scholars in the medical area where they have asked, interviewed patients, essentially, whether they've hid some really pertinent health information from their doctor, right? The very person who has taken an oath to protect them. And it's 80% of people admit to not being forthcoming. To hiding something from their physicians. And it's super relatable, right? But it's also bananas, on another hand, right? Because this person could help you. But it's understandable, because health stuff is often so sensitive.



Shankar Vedantam: Yeah, and someone is trying to quit smoking, for example, and their doctor has been urging them to quit smoking for a number of years. But they've, in fact, been sneaking a couple of cigarettes. So they're trying to drink a little less. But they haven't been successful. It's hard to come clean and tell your doctor this is what's actually going on in my life.



Leslie John: It really is. I had this really funny moment in college where I went to the clinic to get it. I wanted an STD test. And I get to the clinic. And I was so impressed because when you get there, they let you write down what your issue is. So you never have to say the words out loud. So I wrote it down on the sheet of paper. I handed it in. But then, when it was my turn, this is like a Larry David episode, when it was my turn, the nurse said, Leslie John, STD testing. Nightmare.



Shankar Vedantam: You tell the story of a physician named John Cullen, who was literally about to cut open a patient to take out their appendix, but then realized that the patient may in fact not have appendicitis after all.



Leslie John: Yeah, this is the, like, a super grand pooba as in the American Academy of Family Physicians president, Dr. John Cullen. Maybe that's what made it a little bit harder actually, because he was so high status. At any rate, he was literally about to cut open a patient to take out their appendix. But he had this kind of sixth sense that something, you know, you do enough reps of these things and you get a sixth sense and something wasn't right. And apparently, symptoms of drug abuse, specifically methamphetamines, they can actually resemble those of appendicitis. And so before he cut her open, Dr. Cullen gave it one final chance. He said, I quote, We're about to cut you open here. Are you sure you don't want to tell me anything else?



Shankar Vedantam: Wow.



Leslie John: Finally, the patient fessed up and the surgery was aborted.



Shankar Vedantam: I mean, it's kind of incredible, isn't it? People are willing to have themselves cut open instead of revealing something that they think is shameful. Yeah. You also tell another hospital story, this one involving a patient who was bleeding uncontrollably during surgery?



Leslie John: Yes. This one's even more shocking because it was a life-threatening situation. So before the surgery, the surgeon asks the patient, are you taking any medications? And the patient says, no. And then the surgeon comes out to the waiting room just before he's about to operate and says to the mom, are you sure she's not taking anything? Again, the surgeon had kind of a sixth sense. And then the mother said, nope, nothing. Finally, the surgeon asked again and is imploring her to be honest. Please, please, this is your daughter's life. And finally, and it wasn't even the daughter that revealed this, it was her mother that finally revealed that the child, the daughter, the grown daughter was taking weight loss supplements, but of course was too ashamed to say so. And I guess that interferes with bleeding or something. And that literally saved her life. The surgeon ran back in. It was that serious. So it's really, it's very real, the shame we feel around opening up, the apprehension, the worry that someone's gonna judge us is a very, very real concern. Because look at the lengths people go to to avoid it.



Shankar Vedantam: Besides complicating our medical care when we don't share things with our doctors, I understand there's research showing that secrecy negatively affects our immune functioning?



Leslie John: Yes, when you keep a secret, one of the tricky things is that your mind is very active. Keeping a secret is not an inner activity, it's not a neutral thing, yet we often think that that's a neutral thing, right? We think that not sharing is neutral. But in fact, it can be an incredibly active process. So when you keep a secret, think about keeping a secret. You have to constantly monitor, right? When you're in a conversation where it could be relevant, you gotta monitor your brain. And that's stressful. And so that literally can increase your cortisol, your stress hormones. It can affect you in this way. And it also, there have been lots of studies showing that when you are keeping a secret, you score lower on IQ tests. Because it literally preoccupies your brain. It takes away brain space.



Shankar Vedantam: You talk about one of the costs of self-concealment is that it can keep us from forming relationships or deepening relationships. You tell the story of perhaps a trivial encounter in an elevator when you were a young scholar on the job market. Tell me that story, Leslie.



Leslie John: Yeah, so one of the things, the principles, that's really important in new relationships, new friendships, new acquaintanceships, new romances, is mutual self-disclosure. It's like a ping pong pattern of reciprocity where you say something, the other person reciprocates with something just as deep. You don't start super deep. You start maybe on a more shallow, but then you go back and forth, ping pong back and forth, and you get increasingly more vulnerable with each other. This comes back to even Arthur Aaron's studies, right? The 36 questions where you get people to ask and answer questions to each other, and that makes them like each other and forge friendships. So this encounter, this is what I call a reciprocity fail. When one person puts out an olive branch, they put themselves out there and then they're shut down. So what happened to me, I was trying to get an academic job. I was on the academic job market. I'm in my Banana Republic black suit, which, fun fact, after the fact, I realized I still had the stitching and the double vent in the back. I had unstitched it. So rookie, so endearing. So in this rookie academic job market, what you do is there's a, is that a big hotel and all the different universities that are recruiting, they rent out different suites. And so every hour on the hour, there's this jamboree of rookie candidates moving from room to room to pitch themselves. So I found myself in the elevator. I get into the elevator and there's one, clearly a job candidate in there. The elevator doors close. So we're literally in a steel vault. And I say, I let my guard down. I just say, oh, I'm so exhausted. My whole body just was like exuded exhaustion. And then what did the fellow job candidate do? He straightened right up and he said, oh, this is such an exciting and fun opportunity to get senior faculty to weigh in on all of my research. It's so amazing. And then I like gave him the snake eye with my whole body. I just was like, in my mind, what I thought is like, really, we're literally in a steel vault and you can't, we can't just be real, like have a real moment of kind of shared feeling that would make us both feel more relaxed. And, you know, it's interesting, this idea that a reciprocity, the sting of a reciprocity failure lingers because we see each other regularly at conferences. He's very accomplished. And I'm sure he's a really nice guy, but I've never felt the urge to like go chat him up. And I think, I think I would attribute it to that.



Shankar Vedantam: In other words, you put yourself out there, he declined, and the point that you're making is not just that you didn't have an exchange in that elevator for 30 seconds, but in some ways, it's had ramifications. It's echoed, if you will, down the years, where you actually haven't tried to make a connection with him.



Leslie John: Exactly, and so imagine if we play the other route of, imagine if he had reciprocated and been like, I know, I just had this crazy interview, can you believe it, this person said that, blah, blah, blah. Like a moment, a moment like that. Imagine we could have been lifelong friends.



Shankar Vedantam: So, many of us, I think, intuit that self-concealment has costs, Leslie, and many of us, I think, intuit what those costs are. But one reason we hide is that we believe that we alone harbor shameful secrets. Talk about this idea that when it comes to the things that we hold secret, we somehow imagine that we are the only ones holding those secrets.



Leslie John: Yeah. So I think a big reason is that secrets are not visible. We don't see all of the secrets that people are holding. It makes us feel like we're the only ones that hold secrets, which makes them even more kind of clandestine, right? And they take an even bigger toll on us. It's interesting. Michael Slepian over at Columbia has done, and Malia Mason, they've done some really great work on a questionnaire to find out what people's common secrets are. And it turns out that there are lots of things that people tend to keep secret. It's a very normal thing.



Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering if social media in some ways compounds this, because now we not only don't hear our people's secrets, but we're constantly being presented this view of other people's lives that's always glamorous and excited and people having a great time at fancy restaurants. And now we feel, well, clearly the fact that I'm eating a reheated dinner from three days ago, it must show that I'm the only one who has this dirty secret. Everyone else is having a grand old time.



Leslie John: Right, exactly. Social media is so toxic for that reason. It's exactly as you said, people present a curated portrait of themselves. And logically, we know this, but we cannot, we have a hard time correcting for it, the visceral feeling. You see someone who looks gorgeous with their perfect children and their perfect life, and you think, oh my God, meanwhile, my children are screaming. And so it makes you feel badly about yourself, these kinds of comparisons.



Shankar Vedantam: When we come back, Leslie comes up with a survey asking people if they have ever cheated on their taxes, watched pornography, or called in sick when they wanted to spend a day at the beach. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.



Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Can you think of a secret you haven't shared with anyone? How does keeping the secret make you feel? What do you think would happen if you shared the secret with others? If you're willing to share your personal story with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, secrets. Again, that's feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Psychologist Leslie John is the author of Revealing, the Underrated Power of Oversharing. Leslie, as you dived into the world of embarrassing disclosures, you and an advisor once came up with survey questions, this turned out to be a very challenging exercise. How so?



Leslie John: I think I might hold the world record for the most awkward doctoral advisor advisee conversation. So when I was a doctoral student, I've been interested in this topic of revealing privacy, self-disclosure, secrets for a very long time now. And so when I was a doctoral student, I worked with my advisor to devise a series of surveys where we asked people sensitive questions and we varied different things to learn different things. And so we needed to come up with really sensitive things to ask people. And so we sat in his office. It's one of these like flashbulb memories for me. You know, you remember exactly what you were wearing and where you were seated. Yeah, so he just starts with a bang. And he says, what about bestiality? Oh man. And so yeah, I was like, the person that I'm most trying to impress said that. And so I was like, what do I do? Do I, do I go for something super sensitive like that in my, the things that I bring to the table brainstorming? I felt like everything I said then was like, maybe he's going to think I'm a prude or then if I said something really bad, like have you ever neglected to tell a partner about an SDD you had, then he'd think I was reckless and just even the thought of that, that I am worrying about my advisor, like it just, oh gosh, it was so cringy. But we got through it. We powered through and we came up with a great list. And I've since been using those questions and variations on those themes for kind of my career so far.



Shankar Vedantam: So the survey took the form of questions that start with have you ever? I'm wondering if you can read out a list of these questions, Leslie, and I want listeners to ask themselves if they have ever done any of these things.



Leslie John: Okay, so, yeah, the questions, be warned, they're doozies. If you have children around. Have you ever had sex with the current husband, wife, or partner of a friend? Have you ever had a fantasy of doing something terrible, e.g. torturing to someone? Have you ever stolen anything worth more than $100? Have you ever looked at pornographic material? Have you ever made a false insurance claim? Have you ever cheated on your tax return? Have you ever claimed to have education that you didn't actually have? While in a relationship, have you ever flirted with somebody other than your partner? Have you ever taken credit for someone else's work? Have you ever let a friend drive after you thought he or she had had too much to drink? Have you ever lied about your income to someone? Have you ever called in sick when you weren't sick? Have you ever pretended not to see a beggar to avoid being seen as stingy? Have you ever gone on a date only to make somebody else jealous? Have you ever drunk so much that you got a hangover? Have you ever littered in a public space? Have you ever failed to do chores in a shared house or apartment? And have you ever failed to tip a waiter in a country in which tipping is customary? These are the questions and these I've more or less said them in a decreasing order of sensitivity.



Shankar Vedantam: I'm sure people must clam up if someone asked them this question in a research setting.



Leslie John: That's what I would think too. But again and again, like across all of the research I've done, the one thing that really surprises me is how forthcoming people often are. It almost seems like people really want to reveal. And in fact, there's been subsequent research showing that we do have this kind of internal drive to reveal. And it's fascinating because some of these things are even illegal. Now, the way we ask matters, right? So if we had asked face to face in an interrogation room, I don't know that people would be forthcoming. But the way we asked these, we asked it on a pseudo-anonymous online survey. So it was done in the comfort of your home. You don't have someone staring there, watching you, judging you.



Shankar Vedantam: In one set of studies, Leslie has examined whether people think less of those who have revealed unsavory things about themselves. Obviously, the answer is yes, right?



Leslie John: Not necessarily, which is pretty shocking. So what we did in this study was we asked people, let's say, we asked, who would you rather hire? And candidate A, one of the questions they had been asked on this intake survey was, have you ever been reprimanded at work? Yes, no, choose not to answer. We, of course, constructed these profiles ourselves. So candidate A, to the question, have you ever been reprimanded at work, says yes, just goes out and says the worst thing. Candidate B, on the other hand, clicked the choose not to answer box. So here we have a choice. The participants had a choice. Would you prefer someone who admits something bad that they've been reprimanded at work, to someone who simply, but very conspicuously, refrains from answering, says, I'm not telling you, I'm opting out, I'm concealing, essentially. And it turns out that again and again, people prefer the revealer. They prefer the person who admits to the thing, even if it's a bad thing, relative to someone who opts out of answering, who very saliently says, I'm not doing this.



Shankar Vedantam: In fact, you find something along the same lines when it comes to romantic relationships as well.



Leslie John: Yes, so we did this, the first time we got these results, we thought, is this a false positive? >This is nutty noodle, as my late grandmother would say. >So we did it again with other questions, other samples, other scenarios. >And one of the ones we tried was in the realm of dating, where what we did was we asked people, which of these two people would you prefer to date? >Person A or person B? >And one of the questions was, have you ever filed a false insurance claim? >And person A ostensibly has said frequently. >So they're saying the worst possible thing. >The other person, person B, has clicked choose not to answer. >And again and again, people, they'd rather date someone. >Now, neither of these is fine specimens. >My father used to always say that. >That's a fine specimen. >Yeah, neither of them are someone you want to take home to your parents. >But if push came to shove, right? >If you're in this tight bind, which would you choose? >Because that's deeply revealing of human nature behind it. >And again and again, we prefer the revealer.



Shankar Vedantam: And what do you think this is telling us? Why is it that we are so averse to the hider, even when the only option is a revealer who tells us that they've done something wrong?



Leslie John: Yeah, it's a great question. And we did many, many studies to try to understand why this was happening and why it was not happening. In the end, what we discovered was that the preference for a revealer is driven by a global character judgment. The person who conceals is not to be trusted. So much so that we'd rather date someone, we'd rather employ someone, we'd rather even sit next to the subway beside someone who comes clean, even if it's not the greatest thing to say.



Shankar Vedantam: So researchers have found that several cognitive biases shape our desire to conceal. One of them is called the impact bias. What is the impact bias, Leslie?



Leslie John: Yeah, so the impact bias is how we tend to overestimate the longevity of emotional events. So we think that when we break up with someone, or if someone breaks up with us, we think we're gonna be down in the dumps for a very, very long time slash eternity. When reality, when that happens, we're often surprised to see, like, yeah, it sucks, but we're better sooner than we think. Similarly, we think the highs last longer than they do, like, we get a raise, we think we'll be feeling amazing for a really long time, but that we quickly adapt and it quickly subsides. So the impact bias refers to how we overestimate the duration and intensity of emotional events.



Shankar Vedantam: The impact bias ends up shaping what we regret, and also the difference between short-term regrets and long-term regrets. In one study, the psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec explored this difference.



Leslie John: It's really fascinating, because what they found was that in the short run, we tend to regret the things we did that resulted in bad outcomes, so-called sins of commission. So in disclosure language, it's you say something, maybe you're a little tipsy, you say something, you feel like you go a little bit too far to dinner party. The next morning, you have a massive disclosure hangover, where you're that gut-wrenching, oh, why did I do that? And you just want to hide. And that sucks. And so we regret that a lot. So in the short run, right after, we regret the things we do, the regrettable things that we did. But in the long run, the pattern flips, such that what we end up regretting much more over the course of our lives, the things that we didn't do, the sins of omission, the things that we didn't do that we should have done, those are the things that leave us thinking, what if, what if I had told my college crush that I was into him? Like, what if, why didn't I do that? What would be the harm? And what if the missed opportunities? Meanwhile, we don't ruminate at all over the long haul about, okay, maybe I was rebuffed by this person, but at least I found out, you get kind of closure and you don't continue perseverating.



Shankar Vedantam: There was a book by the hospice care nurse, Brawny Ware, titled The Top Five Regrets of the Dining. What were these regrets, Leslie?



Leslie John: Yes. So Brawny Ware, my hero, she has spent, as a palliative care nurse, she spent time, a lot of time, with people at the very end of their lives. So she gets to know them a lot. And she wrote a book where she collated her observations on what people tended to regret. So on their dying beds, what did they say they regret? And here are the top five regrets. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. Number two, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Number three, I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Number four, I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. Number five, I wish I had let myself be happier. And so you can see four out of five of them are regret over things we didn't do that we wish we had done. And one of them especially is that is one related to not sharing more of ourselves, not expressing our feelings.



Shankar Vedantam: You say that you yourself were inspired to engage in more self-disclosure by Bronnie Ware's book. Tell me about a recent incident with your mother where in some ways, you were made aware, if you will, of all the things that you hadn't told her.



Leslie John: Oh, geez. Yeah, this was a scary episode. It was Christmas Day and my husband and I had just finished spending a lot of the day cooking in the kitchen thanks to grandparents who took care of our little boys. And we were putting the turkey on the table and my mom looks gaunt. She says, I'm really not feeling well. Something's just come over me. I got to go lie down. So she went to go lie down. We serve the stuff and then I go upstairs to find her. And I find her in the bathroom, clearly having vomited and looking at me with this glazed look of like unclear who I was. And so I grabbed her and I held her in my arms like a baby. And as soon as I did that, her eyes rolled back in her head and she went limp. And I thought that she had died in my arms. And I just, I sprang up and I bolted out the door. I said, call 911. My husband's calling 911. I bolt out the door to our neighbor who's a nurse. And I bang, bang, I'm banging on their windows and she comes and she right away, she runs in. And then we get to the bathroom where my mom was. And my mom looks at us like, what's all the fuss about?



Shankar Vedantam: What are you doing?



Leslie John: I'm fine. She was fine. It turned out that she, we think it was food poisoning. And apparently when you vomit so violently, it can disrupt what's called your vagus nerve, which like overstimulates it. And then either way, you need to kind of reset your brain by passing out. That's my layperson version of it. But oh my gosh, that was so terrifying. But it really, it really reminded, like my mother at the time was 74, super spry. She's still super spry. It really reminded me that I know it's cliche to say, but it's so true that you never know when your time is coming. And so with disclosure, what that means is that like, don't hold back. Don't hold back telling someone all the ways you love them. And so I ended up writing this, like love list, this list of things to my mom about all the ways I love her and all the big things and all the little things. And yeah, it was really important to me.



Shankar Vedantam: Did you read the letter to her, or did you give her the letter?



Leslie John: I put it in her stocking. And it had all kinds of things in it, like big things, for example. I'm so grateful, and I love the way she and my father, they always, I mean, we are very lucky in that we had, you know, we weren't wealthy, but we definitely were comfortable. And so we were in a privileged position to be able to pursue our interests. And my parents really, really encouraged that, they said. Always pursue what you're interested in. And I feel that I got to this amazing place called Harvard doing what I love doing, because fundamentally, you know, I worked hard, but I pursued my interests, and I got a lot of luck in all those other things. But the kind of life, the important life lessons I'm so grateful for, and then the small stuff too, like, oh, I love how she this, oh my gosh, she, so I love gummy candies, and what my, but I'm very particular on the colors. I like the green ones, if they're lime, not apple. And I love the red ones. And so when she comes to visit us, she gives me a bag of Jujubes, gummy bears, with curated just the colors I like. She picks out the ones I don't, and eats the dregs, and then she gives her daughter, like, oh, yeah, it's amazing.



Shankar Vedantam: In our episode next week, we continue our exploration of the power of self-disclosure. Look for the episode titled, Coming Clean. We also look at when and where the scientific evidence suggests it may be best to withhold information and to play your cards close to the chest. That's in our Hidden Brain Plus episode titled, When to Hide the Truth. If you're a subscriber, that episode should be available in your podcast feed right now. If you're not yet a subscriber, please go to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co. slash hiddenbrain. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org and apple.co. slash hiddenbrain. Leslie John is a psychologist at Harvard University. She's the author of Revealing, the Underrated Power of Oversharing. Leslie, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.



Leslie John: It's been a delight.Thank you.



Shankar Vedantam: Can you think of a time when you came clean to someone else? Do you remember what happened and how it felt? If you are willing to share your personal story with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, secrets. Again, that's feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you like this episode, please tell your friends about it, in person or on social media. I'm Shankar Vedantam, see you soon.