Culture and Society
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A new study has looked into what kinds of secrets people are keeping and how this affects them in their day-to-day life.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.If you feel burdened by a secret, we hope you're consoled by knowing you aren't alone (unless it's a truly horrendous one, of course, in which case we hope you find no solace). It's thought that the average person harbors five secrets they haven't told a single other soul, and this study concludes that people hold around nine "moderately significant" secrets.
Secrets aren't just a problem for whoever is being kept out of the loop; they can weigh down the secret-holder, too, sometimes leading to symptoms of anxiety and depression. This motivated psychologists at the University of Melbourne to look into the phenomenon.
"Secrets are on people’s minds more than they are held back in conversation," the authors write in their study. "Research suggests that such mind-wandering to secrets can be problematic for well-being, yet the mechanisms behind this link are still unclear."
Previous research had shown that episodes of mind-wandering happen twice as often as the secret-holder having to conceal that secret from others, but this relied on estimates from participants based on their memory of the previous month or week. To investigate further, the team recruited 240 volunteers who filled out daily diaries and between them completed 2,764 daily surveys over the course of two weeks.
The average person in this study was found to be holding nine current secrets that they felt quite negative about and they rated as "moderately significant". Participants were asked about the types of secrets they held, with the most common being having lied (78 percent) and secretly feeling discontented with a physical attribute (71 percent). The next most common were a financial secret (70 percent), a secret romantic desire (63 percent), and a secret sexual behavior (57 percent).
However, we probably wouldn't extrapolate these figures to the general population. While recruiting, the researchers specified that volunteers must have at least one current secret to participate. So it could be that people who hold secrets tend to hold a lot of them, while a significant number of people hold no secrets at all. The research was more interested in how secrets affect people, rather than finding out how many they people held, interesting though that topic may be.
The study found that people's minds tended to wander to secrets spontaneously, rather than on purpose, and they thought of worries or concerns related to the secret more often when their minds spontaneously wandered to the topic. On days they thought about the secret deliberately, they worried about it less.
People who deliberately thought about their secret more than others in the study were more likely to fantasize about it, while those whose minds wandered more tended to worry more. Of course, the types of secrets people are holding could be a big factor in this.
Overall, the team found that spontaneous mind-wandering was not associated with positive feelings.
"If people are deliberately bringing a secret to mind to fantasize or daydream, they may feel positive," the team writes. "However, if people deliberately engage with thoughts of the secret to process its meaning or impact, these thoughts may be linked to feeling negative in the moment, even if such engagement can ultimately help people in gaining resolution in the long run."
As Aunt May taught us in The Amazing Spider-Man: "Secrets have a cost." So the team hopes to further investigate whether deliberate rumination on a secret, for example by a secret service operative, could be beneficial to the secret-holder.
"Our findings suggest that the well-being costs of having a secret may be the result of a vicious cycle concerning negative cognitive and emotional processes about the secret," the researchers add.
The study has been posted to the preprint server PsyArXiv.
