Secrets That Kill

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Secrets are a universal human phenomenon. Almost everyone has something to hide (though, of course, not all secrets are of the deep, dark variety). Yet until recently, psychological scientists hadn’t spent much time exploring how keeping secrets affects us. Slepian got his start studying secrets indirectly. He had been researching metaphor—looking at the ways people use language about physical experiences to describe abstract concepts—and he became intrigued by the metaphor of being “weighed down” by a secret. “I wondered if it was just a linguistic thing that people do, or if it reflected something deeper,” he says. We all keep the same kinds of secrets,” Slepian says. “About 97% of people have a secret in at least one of those categories, and the average person is currently keeping secrets in 13 of those categories.” I really enjoyed this book. It was great to find out a bit more about Ramos as he is such a great character and you are never sure what is going to happen when he is around. I also like the tension and teasing between him and the main character Shelby as she puts her mind reading skills to good use and learns a few secrets. Slepian’s lab is housed in the management division of Columbia University’s business school, where researchers in fields such as psychology, sociology, economics and political science explore various ways that individual, interpersonal and institutional forces drive behavior.

Being situated in a business school has practical perks: For one, the school fully funds his lab, so he doesn’t have to seek outside grants. He advises one primary graduate student, but he also co-advises graduate students and mentors postdoctoral fellows across the division. The multidisciplinary business perspective also means that Slepian keeps one eye turned toward the practical applications of his research. Not everyone is inclined to confide in others. Slepian and postdoctoral researcher Sarah Ward, PhD, are studying how personality differences might make people more or less likely to share secrets. “Sharing secrets is often a way to build trust or closeness. Knowing which people tend to share can help to identify who is likely to build close relationships, and who might be missing opportunities to foster closeness and trust,” Ward says. As much as I love Shelby in this novel I think it was Ramos who I loved the most. He is starting to really like Shelby and he shouldn't because..one she is married and two he is a mob bosses bodyguard. This one puts them together a lot and you get to see some of that chemistry between them and Ramos has fun with it. Usually, I am in real trouble with a Shelby Nichols book (for exceeding my reading budget, and losing sleep!) and this audio book is no exception. As I have been travelling for a living for over four years, normally I need good books to keep me company on long airplane flights. With Secrets That Kill, I was looking for some more long flights, just so I could spend more time listening to the book!Can I tell you a secret?” The next time someone asks you that question, you may not want to say yes. Being confided in is a double-edged sword, says social psychologist Michael Slepian, PhD, an associate professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School who studies the psychology of secrets. While shame and guilt are both negative emotions, they have important differences, he says. “Guilt is more adaptive. When you feel guilty, you can make amends or decide to do something differently next time,” he explains. “Shame is more about feeling like a bad person. It can make you feel helpless or powerless.” And those feelings of helplessness can lead a person to revisit their shameful secrets over and over. Having a secret can feel exhausting. In fact, it is exhausting. With Nir Halevy, PhD, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Adam Galinsky, PhD, also at Columbia Business School, Slepian performed a series of experiments asking participants to recall either personal information they intended to keep secret or personal information they hadn’t shared but would be willing to discuss if it came up in conversation. The researchers found that people felt both more fatigued and more alone when they recalled their secrets than when they recalled the undisclosed information. One explanation, Slepian says, is that thinking about a secret can create a motivational conflict in which a person’s need to connect with others directly clashes with their desire to keep their secret to themselves ( Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 45, No. 7, 2019). “We want to confide and get the secret off our chests, but we also want to protect ourselves and our relationships. That conflict is what wears us down,” he says. Preliminary results from the research hint that people who score high on neuroticism, for instance, are less likely to confess to immoral activities they’ve engaged in. Ward and Slepian are also finding that particularly polite people may be more reticent to divulge the skeletons in their closets. By holding on to secrets, Ward says, such people “might be missing out on an opportunity to get comfort or relief from other people, which could alleviate their negative emotions.” Digging into the secrecy literature, he found that most existing research focused on the effort involved in keeping a secret. Typical studies looked at interactions between two people while one of them tried to hide something from the other. But he couldn’t find much research on how people thought about secrets outside those conversations.

head of post production : Cutting Edge / head of post production: Cutting Edge (12 episodes, 2020-2022)It’s hard for people to get those secrets off their minds. The same paper showed that people’s minds wander to their secrets far more often than they actively try to conceal their secrets from others. And although the frequency of concealment didn’t seem to have much effect on well-being, the more people’s minds wandered to their secrets, the worse off they were. post producer / post producer/post production producer: Cutting Edge / post production producer: Cutting Edge (12 episodes, 2020-2022) Who would believe that a family vacation and a simple favor could end up in a life or death battle and a murder? With Shelby Nichols involved? I would! On the bright side, those shared confidences can be a boon to bonding, he’s found ( Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 78, 2018). “When people confide in us, we take it as an act of intimacy that can bring us closer,” he adds.