Secrets That Kill

Product Information

Having a secret can feel exhausting. In fact, it is exhausting. With Nir Halevy, PhD, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Adam Galinsky, PhD, also at Columbia Business School, Slepian performed a series of experiments asking participants to recall either personal information they intended to keep secret or personal information they hadn’t shared but would be willing to discuss if it came up in conversation. The researchers found that people felt both more fatigued and more alone when they recalled their secrets than when they recalled the undisclosed information. One explanation, Slepian says, is that thinking about a secret can create a motivational conflict in which a person’s need to connect with others directly clashes with their desire to keep their secret to themselves ( Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 45, No. 7, 2019). “We want to confide and get the secret off our chests, but we also want to protect ourselves and our relationships. That conflict is what wears us down,” he says.

Can I tell you a secret?” The next time someone asks you that question, you may not want to say yes. Being confided in is a double-edged sword, says social psychologist Michael Slepian, PhD, an associate professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School who studies the psychology of secrets. Digging into the secrecy literature, he found that most existing research focused on the effort involved in keeping a secret. Typical studies looked at interactions between two people while one of them tried to hide something from the other. But he couldn’t find much research on how people thought about secrets outside those conversations. As much as I love Shelby in this novel I think it was Ramos who I loved the most. He is starting to really like Shelby and he shouldn't because..one she is married and two he is a mob bosses bodyguard. This one puts them together a lot and you get to see some of that chemistry between them and Ramos has fun with it. Who would believe that a family vacation and a simple favor could end up in a life or death battle and a murder? With Shelby Nichols involved? I would!

Research and Practice

Secrets are a universal human phenomenon. Almost everyone has something to hide (though, of course, not all secrets are of the deep, dark variety). Yet until recently, psychological scientists hadn’t spent much time exploring how keeping secrets affects us. Slepian got his start studying secrets indirectly. He had been researching metaphor—looking at the ways people use language about physical experiences to describe abstract concepts—and 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 says. Preliminary results from the research hint that people who score high on neuroticism, for instance, are less likely to confess to immoral activities they’ve engaged in. Ward and Slepian are also finding that particularly polite people may be more reticent to divulge the skeletons in their closets. By holding on to secrets, Ward says, such people “might be missing out on an opportunity to get comfort or relief from other people, which could alleviate their negative emotions.”

Some of his ongoing research, for example, is exploring the effects of having to keep secrets on behalf of an employer. Early results suggest that work secrets, like personal secrets, can be both good and bad. On the one hand, it can feel good to be entrusted with important information about one’s company. On the other, keeping that secret can feel like a burden. Slepian’s next goals include using his research to design possible interventions to help people unburden themselves to improve their well-being. Wendy Tremont King has now established herself as the quintessential Shelby Nichols. In fact, Wendy's voice is SO Shelby at this point that if I heard another actor I would say, "That's not Shelby!" The power and finesse of Ms. King is her understated realism. When she does Ramos's voice, or Uncle Joey's voice, you get the downplayed shift to a deeper more masculine voice, but more importantly you get the menace, the coldness, and the intonations that come with the different personalities. In a narrated audio book, I believe that there must be a symphony between the writer and the narrator. If the voices are not real and believable, the listener's attention could wander. With Wendy King and the Shelby Nichols Adventures, Wendy IS Shelby, and the depth and breadth of Wendy's capabilities makes this audio book incredibly real to the listener. I classify this as "not to be missed". 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,” he says. “So, we started at the beginning, with the most basic questions we could ask.” Secrecy basics I really enjoyed this book. It was great to find out a bit more about Ramos as he is such a great character and you are never sure what is going to happen when he is around. I also like the tension and teasing between him and the main character Shelby as she puts her mind reading skills to good use and learns a few secrets.In an extension of that work, he’s beginning to explore how to reduce shame around secrets. “We know the secrets people feel ashamed of hurt them the most. So how can we reduce the shame? Talking to another person might make all the difference,” he says. The burden of secrecy head of post production : Cutting Edge / head of post production: Cutting Edge (12 episodes, 2020-2022) post producer / post producer/post production producer: Cutting Edge / post production producer: Cutting Edge (12 episodes, 2020-2022) Slepian’s lab is housed in the management division of Columbia University’s business school, where researchers in fields such as psychology, sociology, economics and political science explore various ways that individual, interpersonal and institutional forces drive behavior.