Confiding Secrets and Well-Being

Abstract

How does confiding secrets relate to well-being? The current work presents the first empirical examination of mechanisms by which confiding diverse real-world secrets to known others predicts well-being. We examined over 800 participants with more than 10,000 secrets in total, finding that confiding a secret does not predict reduced instances of concealment. Rather, confiding a secret predicts higher well-being through perceived coping efficacy. Correlational and experimental studies find that through confiding a secret, people feel they obtain social support and are more capable in coping with the secret. Additionally, through perceived coping efficacy, confiding a secret predicts less frequent mind wandering to the secret. Confiding predicts higher well-being through changing the way and how often people think about their secret.

Thinking Through Secrets: Rethinking the Role of Thought Suppression in Secrecy

“…Yet a secret created during a laboratory session cannot capture the broader experience of living with a personally relevant secret day in and day out. In particular, research reveals that concealment within social interactions represents only a small slice of the broader experience of secrecy (Slepian et al, 2017; Slepian, Kirby, & Kalokerinos, 2019; Slepian & Moulton-Tetlock, 2019). More often people spend time alone thinking about their secrets, outside of social interactions (McDonald et al, 2019; Slepian et al, 2017; Slepian, Kirby, & Kalokerinos, 2019; Slepian & Moulton-Tetlock, 2019).…”

“…Moreover, it is not the frequency with which people conceal their secrets that uniquely predicts how much harm they report their secrets bring, but rather how much they mind-wander to their secrets (i.e., think about them outside of concealment contexts; Slepian et al, 2017; Slepian & Moulton-Tetlock, 2019). This research suggests that asking participants to conceal something in the laboratory does not reveal a complete picture of secrecy.…”

“…Through bootstrapping a prior dataset with a similar structure (with 10,000 iterations), we estimated the number of participants required to detect a small relationship ( b = 0.30 on a 1–7 scale and our measure of mind-wandering frequency, α = .05), which yielded 70 participants required to reliably detect this relationship (each with on average 13 secrets, per Slepian et al, 2017). We collected more than double this sample size (implementing the same sample size as prior secrecy studies; Slepian et al, 2017; Slepian, Kirby, & Kalokerinos, 2019; Slepian & Moulton-Tetlock, 2019).…”

Secretive and close? How sharing secrets may impact perceptions of distance

“…One line of research has investigated how disclosing a secret impacts the secret-sharer. Revealing personal secrets, even if only in writing, seems advantageous [6,9]: Disclosing secrets may ease worry [10], decrease distress when experiencing intrusive thoughts [5], increase self-esteem [11] and well-being [12], and lower discomfort and tension [13]. Another line of research has investigated a different perspective, namely the impact of sharing a secret on the receiver.…”

Holding Secrets While Living With Life-Threatening Illness: Normalizing Patients’ Decisions to Reveal or Conceal

“…There is much we do not know about the role and function of secrets people hold when living with life-threatening illness. Until recently, few social scientists or philosophers gave this topic much attention (Slepian, Moulton-Tetlock, 2018).…”