Why researchers say you should spill your embarrassing secrets

People often keep unflattering information about themselves secret because they worry that others will judge them harshly, but those fears are overblown, according to a new peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. (Pexels)

How many embarrassing secrets are you keeping to yourself?

Studies have shown that in both personal and professional relationships, people often keep unflattering information about themselves secret because they worry that others will judge them harshly.

But those fears are overblown, according to a new peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Researchers at Oklahoma State University, the University of Texas and the University of Chicago wanted to measure the gap between what we believe others will think about our unflattering secrets, and what they actually think.

Through a series of 12 lab, field and anecdotal experiments, they found that not only are people's fears of judgment by others overblown, but sharing unflattering secrets can actually help strengthen relationships.

"When we’re thinking about conveying negative information about ourselves, we’re focused on the content of the message," stated study co-author Amit Kumar, assistant professor of marketing at Texas McCombs, in a media release. "But the recipients are thinking about the positive traits required to reveal this secret, such as trust, honesty and vulnerability."

NOT A SECRET

Previous research has already shed light on the distorted ways people think revealing their unflattering secrets will affect their relationships.

A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2001 found that people who made embarrassing blunders tended to overestimate how harshly they would be judged by observers. The authors of that study said subjects' exaggerated fears were produced, in part, by their tendency to be overly focused on their misfortunes and failed to consider the wider range of situational factors that tend to moderate other people's impressions of them.

On the other hand, a study from 2016 found that people tend to underestimate how negatively others will judge them for openly keeping certain information private, for example by electing not to answer a question.

In one experiment for that study, participants were asked to imagine that they had smoked marijuana and then consider how to answer the question, "Have you ever done drugs?" on a job application.

Participants were prompted to respond with either "Yes" or "Choose not to answer." The majority of participants — some 71 per cent — selected “Choose not to answer.” In the end though, participants in the experiment who were roleplaying as prospective employers said they were more interested in hiring a person who answered “Yes.”

For their own contribution to the study of secret-keeping, Kumar and his co-authors, researchers Michael Kardas and Nicholas Epley, focused on the consequences of revealing negative information in different types of relationships, including those with strangers and romantic partners.

"Our experiments are among the first to study the expected versus actual reputational consequences of revealing negative information that has been kept secret," the authors wrote.

12 EXPERIMENTS

Kumar, Kardas and Epley recruited more than 500 participants through Amazon's crowdsourcing website Mechanical Turk and put them through a series of 12 experiments. The experiments were a mix of hypothetical role playing scenarios where one participant, the "revealer" shared something unflattering with a "receiver"; controlled lab experiments; and field experiments where people revealed negative secrets to people they have actual relationships with.

In each experiment, researchers recorded the revealers' predictions about how their designated receivers would judge them based on the unflattering secret they revealed or the unflattering action they took. After the revealer performed the action or revealed the secret, researchers then recorded how the receiver felt about the revealer post-reveal.

They found that even though people were driven to reveal or conceal based on how they thought others would evaluate them, their disclosures had the opposite effect in controlled experiments.

Additionally, participants revealed a wide range of negative information, from admitting they had never learned to ride a bike to confessing infidelity. Although they predicted that more serious secrets would generate worse judgments, even for darker secrets, they still overestimated the impact.

"The magnitude of what you’re revealing can impact people’s evaluations, but it also impacts your expectations of those evaluations,” Kumar stated in a media release.