A secret is an odd thing. You can’t see or touch it, and it doesn’t take up space in the physical world. Yet you can carry it around for years, decades even, until it “weighs you down” so palpably that you need to “get it off your chest.” Pretty heavy words for the ethereal contents of your mind.
Michael Slepian, an associate professor at Columbia Business School and one of the world’s leading experts on secrecy, was first drawn to the subject via these metaphors. Were they mere figures of speech? Or, he wondered, do the things we hide truly feel like a sack of rocks, a tangible burden?
The question is how an idea acquires such mass. The answers offer a roadmap for all of us, who must decide every day what to withhold and what to disclose — and how to live with our decisions.
Studying Secrets
Slepian asked two groups of people to think about a secret (big in one case, small in the other). Then, he showed them an image of a grassy hill and asked how steep it appeared.
