From: The Atlantic
The Worst Part of Keeping a Secret
The Atlantic:
The average person is keeping 13 secrets right now. Five of them are secrets they’ve never told another living soul.
These stats come from a new paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which looked at more than 13,000 secrets over 10 different studies. The researchers asked participants if they were keeping any of 38 different common categories of secrets which ranged from infidelity to financial secrets to secret hobbies. The most common secrets that people shared with no one else were: extra-relational thoughts (thinking something romantic or sexual about someone other than your partner), romantic desire, sexual behavior, and lies.
…
“We actually don’t encounter many situations where we have to hide our secrets relative to all the times a secret will just come into our thoughts, and intrude upon our thinking,” says Michael Slepian, a professor of management at Columbia Business School and the lead author on this paper.
Read the whole story: The Atlantic
More of our Members in the Media >
APS regularly opens certain online articles for discussion on our website. Effective February 2021, you must be a logged-in APS member to post comments. By posting a comment, you agree to our Community Guidelines and the display of your profile information, including your name and affiliation. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations present in article comments are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of APS or the article’s author. For more information, please see our Community Guidelines.
Please login with your APS account to comment.