Keeping You A Secret Book Download
Alfonzo Liebenstein
A pre-study survey of 500 people found that 76% said the first thing they would do upon learning good news is share it with someone. But there are many positive life events that people may choose to keep secret, such as a marriage proposal, a desired pregnancy or splurging on a luxury purchase.
Researchers conducted five experiments with more than 2,500 participants to understand what motivates people to keep positive secrets, and how keeping a positive secret may affect someone compared with a secret they keep because they consider it to be unpleasant or embarrassing.
In one experiment, participants were shown a list of nearly 40 common types of good news, which included items such as saving up money, buying a gift for oneself or reducing a debt. The participants then indicated which pieces of good news they currently had and which they had kept secret. Some participants were asked to reflect on the good news they kept secret, while others reflected on good news that was not secret, and then rated how energized the news made them feel and whether they intended to share the news with someone else.
The researchers found that people held on average 14 to 15 pieces of good news, with an average of five to six that were kept secret. The participants who reflected on their positive secrets reported feeling more energized than the participants who thought about their good news that was not secret. People who reported that they intended to share their news with others also reported feeling more energized, whether the news was secret or not.
One of those experiments showed participants the list of common types of good news and asked them to select the piece of news that was most likely to happen to them in the near future. One group of participants then imagined that they kept the good news secret until they told their partner later that day while another group imagined that they were currently unable to reach their partner and so were not able to tell them until later in the day. When participants imagined wanting to hold the information back to make the revelation surprising, they were more energized than when they were unable to reveal the information.
Another experiment asked participants to recall a current positive secret (a secret they felt good about), a current negative secret (a secret they felt bad about) or simply a current secret. The researchers found that people keep positive secrets in particular for internal or personal reasons, rather than because they felt forced by outside pressures to keep the information secret.
In contrast to negative or embarrassing secrets, which are often governed by external pressures or fears, positive secrets made people feel enlivened when they could choose to keep the information secret, according to Slepian.
For the past 10 years, Slepian has conducted hundreds of studies on secrets. After asking 50,000 people to open up about what they keep hidden, he has found that when people keep secrets, they can suffer physical and emotional harm. People who keep more secrets report that their health is worse, they get less pleasure out of life, and their relationships are weaker than people who have fewer skeletons in their closets.
The most common secrets are about lying, sexual behavior, desires, and family. One out of every three people surveyed by Slepian admitted to infidelity, though not necessarily in a current relationship. One-third of that number said they would always keep their misdeed hidden. Another third said they shared it with a third party. The remainder confessed to their partner.
Most of the time, opening up turns out well because people tend to pick their confidants carefully, Slepian says. But choose someone who will not be scandalized. According to his studies, someone who will be morally outraged is more likely to gossip as a way of punishing the secret keeper.
Slepian knows from personal experience about the good that can come when people disclose deep secrets. For 26 years, his parents kept hidden from him and his younger brother the knowledge that they were conceived through donor insemination.
We consider designing public-key broadcast encryption schemes with constant-size secret keys and ciphertexts, achieving chosen-ciphertext security. We first argue that known CPA-to-CCA transforms currently do not yield such schemes. We then propose a ...
I'm working on a website that will allow users to log in using OAuth credentials from the likes of Twitter, Google, etc. To do this, I have to register with these various providers and get a super-secret API key that I have to protect with pledges against various body parts. If my key gets ganked, the part gets yanked.
Don't put your secret information in your code. Put it into a configuration file which is read by your code at startup. Configuration files shouldn't be put on version control, unless they are the "factory defaults", and then they shouldn't have any private information.
I put secrets into encrypted file(s) which I then commit. The pass phrase is provided when the system launches, or it is stored in small file that I don't commit. It's nice that Emacs will cheerfully manage these encrypted files. For example, emacs init file includes: (load "secrets.el.gpg"), which just works - prompting me for the password on those rare occations when I start the editor. I don't worry about somebody breaking the encryption.
Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who in 2013 leaked tens of thousands of classified documents to inform the public about secret U.S. surveillance activities, was also charged under another very similar section of the same statute before fleeing to Russia.
We all have secrets we keep locked away from others. For some, the secrets may be small and harmless, but for others, they may be great enough to cause damage to personal relationships. I often talk about the topic of secrets in therapy with my clients. What people tend to not realize is that harboring a secret could be hurting you just as much as revealing it, if not more. Secrets, even small ones, can prevent relationships and friendships from being truly close. We keep secrets for all different reasons, but is it ever okay?
Sarah, a wife and mother of a young and impressionable little girl, has a problem of shopping more often than she should. In order to continue going on shopping sprees without her husband knowing, she has secret credit card accounts, and makes an effort to hide her receipts and shopping bags. Of course, eventually her husband finds out and they fight about it, but Sarah continues her secret shop-a-holic behavior. Sarah fails to realize how destructive her secret shopping is to their relationship.
Over the past few years, I have surveyed more than 10,000 people about their secrets. I find that 97% of people are keeping a significant secret at any given time, with the average person having about 13 secrets. Relatively little research has examined how our secrets affect us despite secrecy being incredibly common and consequential, but research on this topic is rapidly growing.
And this is the bind. We keep secrets to protect ourselves and our relationships, and secrecy can achieve those effects. But keeping secrets can hurt us all the same. But how? How do our secrets affect us? Psychologists have long thought they knew the answer to this question, but my research suggests they were wrong.
For decades, psychologists assumed that, because concealing a secret requires a good deal of effort, concealment serves as a stressor, over time undermining our psychological well-being and eroding our health. Yet, we should have always been suspicious of this explanation. Concealing a secret does not typically require a great deal of effort. In the very moment that concealment is required, only children (and that one friend we all have) actually struggle with keeping a secret concealed.
My colleagues and I asked 1,000 people about a secret they were keeping, and from their responses, we identified 38 common categories of secrets. When we asked another 1,000 participants to describe a secret they were keeping, 92% of their secrets clearly fit one of those categories. We had clearly identified the major types of secrets that people keep. We then gave another 1,000 participants the list of the 38 kinds of secrets and simply asked each person whether they were currently keeping each kind. We found that 97% of people had at least one secret on that list, and the average person had 13 of the secrets.
In another study, we asked people how frequently they concealed their secrets during social interactions, and how frequently they thought about those secrets outside of those interactions. We found that people spontaneously thought about their secrets a great deal. In fact, their minds wandered to their secrets far more than they actually concealed their secrets during conversations.
Furthermore, how much people concealed their secrets was not related to their well-being. In contrast, how frequently people thought about their secrets was consistently related to lower well-being. Concealing secrets from others does not consistently harm well-being, but thinking about those secrets was associated with lower well-being. Why?
We do not often find ourselves in interactions that are related to our secrets, and when we do, we are usually prepared to navigate those treacherous waters. Even though concealment is sometimes taxing, we are usually able to keep our secrets safe. Yet, thinking about secrets does not typically have the same silver lining. The more people think about their secrets, the more ashamed, isolated, and inauthentic they feel. So, the more our minds wander to our secrets, the more this emotional distress undermines our well-being.
Slepian, M. L., Halevy, N., & Galinsky, A. D. (2019). The solitude of secrecy: Thinking about secrets evokes motivational conflict and feelings of fatigue. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45, 1129-1151.
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