#1
Bored Panda got in touch with u/inthe801 to talk about the Redditor's now-viral post (which, at this point, has nearly 20,000 upvotes) and they agreed to have a little chat about it.
"The idea for it popped into my head when some of my family secrets surfaced as a result of using those DNA genealogy websites," u/inthe801 told us. "A relative found out that the man she thought was her dad wasn't actually her biological father. Also, I knew someone who had cancer and asked his pastor to [forgive his internet browsing history] while laying in his deathbed."
#2
After going through the replies their post has received, u/inthe801 said it seems like most people have secrets about their sex life and the abuse they've endured.
"Judging from my personal experience, I think most people do not live with major secrets, but I do find it interesting to hear stories about those who do," the Redditor added. "Plus, there seems to be someone like that in pretty much every family."
#3
However, the next time someone asks you "Can I tell you a secret?", you may want to think twice before agreeing to hear it. According to social psychologist Michael Slepian, PhD, an associate professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School who studies the psychology of secrets, being confided in is a double-edged sword.
"The bad news is that when people share their secrets with us, we feel like we have to guard them. The more people are preoccupied by that secret, or feel they have to hide it on behalf of the confidant, the more burdensome it is," he said.
#4
But on the bright side, those shared confidences can be a boon to bonding. "When people confide in us, we take it as an act of intimacy that can bring us closer," Slepian added.
Secrets are universal. Almost everyone has something to hide (though, of course, not all secrets are of the deep and dark type). But until recently, psychological scientists hadn't spent much time exploring how keeping stuff from others affects us personally. Slepian himself got his start studying secrets indirectly—he had been researching metaphors; looking at the ways people use language about physical experiences to describe abstract concepts. Eventually, 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 said.
#5
"For decades, secrecy research focused on the effects of concealment. But I couldn't find any studies that systematically looked at what secrets people keep, how they keep them or how they experience secrets on a day-to-day basis," the social psychologist said. "So, we started at the beginning, with the most basic questions we could ask."
Slepian and his colleagues identified 38 common categories of secrets that people keep about themselves, ranging from infidelity and illegal behavior to pregnancy and planned surprises for others. And those categories held up across study populations, which included participants drawn from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and random picnickers recruited from New York City’s Central Park.
#6
"We all keep the same kinds of secrets," Slepian said. "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."
It's hard for people to get those secrets off their minds. The same research 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. "It's not how much you hide a secret that’s harmful, but how often you find yourself thinking about it," Slepian said.
Which makes deathbed confessions perfectly understandable. We get rid of our biggest burdens to leave this world in peace.
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