The Lies We Tell and the Secrets We Keep, with Hidden Brain

Yeah.

This is All of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I'm really grateful that you're here. On today's show, we'll speak with 3 of the cast members behind the new Off-Broadway show, Burnout Paradise. We've got the director of the new documentary, Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Luna Chicks, as well as 2 band members. And we'll close things out our friend Nick Offerman, who joins us with his poetry series, A Wonder Is What It Is. That's the plan. So let's get this started with Hidden Brain. This month, when you've tuned into WNYC on the weekend, you may have noticed a new voice on the air. Hidden Brain is now part of our weekend programming. The show explores the deepest mysteries of our minds, reporting on the latest social science and psychological research. Hidden Brain is hosted by Shankar Vedantam. And today, we're going to welcome Shankar to the WNYC airwaves. But we're also going to focus specifically on a few Hidden Brain topics. Recently, the show reported a few episodes on the psychology behind keeping secrets, when or when it's not okay to lie, and the power of coming clean. So we want to We want to hear your stories about the biggest lie or the secret you've held and what it felt like to reveal it. Think about your answer and get ready to call in when I give the phone number in about 10 minutes. Hidden Brain, mark your calendar, it airs on Saturdays at 2:00 PM. I have now with me host and executive editor Shankar Vedantam. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Alison. I'm thrilled to be here.

And welcome to WNYC officially.

Thank you again. I'm really, really delighted to be on the air.

So for our listeners who haven't caught the show yet, on Saturdays at 2:00 PM, What is the idea behind Hidden Brain?

The idea of Hidden Brain each week is to take some element of human nature, human behavior, and try and unpack it. And by the end of the hour, the goal is to give people a new insight into their minds. I often notice and tell my colleagues, when we travel to another city or another country, we're often really alert and paying attention and taking photographs of the building and noticing everything around us. But if you look at the people who are walking around you, people who are residents of that city, they often are bored, or they have their faces in their phones, and they've stopped noticing what's around them. The goal with Hidden Brain is to become tourists in our own lives, to become tourists in our own mind, to see our minds with the kind of freshness that we bring when we're traveling abroad and visiting a city for the very first time.

Earlier this year, you aired an episode about keeping secrets. From kids to older adults, everybody keeps secrets from other people in their lives. Sometimes when in doubt, we choose to just be quiet. Why are we keeping secrets as a default for most people, even young children?

Well, at a very basic level, the answer is intuitive. We keep secrets because we are worried what other people will think of us, what other people will say about us. We're worried sometimes about our own conclusions and feelings. Maybe sometimes we have things to hide. We've done something wrong and we feel like we need to hide it. And in some ways, the fact that we are able to keep secrets, you know, from a— just from a biological biological and neurological point of view, it's actually an amazing property of the brain that we're able to keep secrets. Because simultaneously, what this means is that we keep in our heads a version of the truth. We know what happened. We know what we're actually thinking. But then we say something different, or we restrict what it is that we're saying so that the other person effectively is misled. Now, of course, lying and keeping secrets have enormous negative consequences in our lives. There are huge consequences for it. But I think for the most part, people keep secrets because they're It's really interesting on your show.

You talk to so many great experts. You interviewed Leslie John, author of the book Revealing the Underrated Power of Oversharing. What did you learn about why oversharing, rather than clinging to a secret, can actually be powerful?

Yeah, I think the work that Leslie and other researchers have done points to a very important insight, which is that, in general, our default position is often to hide. Our default position is to keep things to ourselves, to play things safe. close to our chest. And in general, what the research finds is that when people are more transparent, when they open up, when they share their stories, when they share their secrets, a number of positive things happen. So for one thing, people are seen as more authentic. And if you think about the people in your life who are— who say what they mean and mean what they say, you'll often recall them as being people who are authentic and people who are attractive because they're authentic. It's also the case that when we reveal things that we've done wrong or reveal mistakes that we've made or foibles or flaws in ourselves, it makes us more endearing. We endear ourselves to others because no one likes someone who is perfect in every way. This is sometimes called the pratfall effect. If someone comes across as very perfect and then they reveal something about themselves, an embarrassment, a slip-up, in some ways it humanizes them. It makes them more likable. So even though we in general default to basically keeping things close to the playing cards close to the vest, as they say. There are enormous psychological benefits that come from opening up to others.

There are unwritten rules about when it's acceptable to lie.

That's indeed the case. Some of this work comes from Emma Levine at the University of Chicago. And she asks the question, is it always a good idea to tell the truth? Now, it's interesting that, especially in the United States, we have We have national stories that are about truth-telling. One of the foundational, you know, stories in America that almost every kid learns is the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. And according to the story, George Washington cut down his father's favorite cherry tree. And when his father asked him, you know, who cut down the tree, young George is supposed to have said, you know, I cannot tell a lie. I was the one who did it. Now, what makes this very interesting, of course, is it turns out the story was made up. It was probably after George Washington died. And so one of our most famous stories about truth-telling, in fact, is— turns out to be fictitious. But Emma Levine's work and other work suggests that there are indeed times when, even though we might celebrate truth-telling and say that truth-telling is important, all of us recognize that there are boundaries to that condition. And so I can give you a few examples, but I think all of us can think of examples in our lives when Coming completely clean might not always be the smartest thing to do.

Could you give us an example so that people can understand?

Yeah, so I'll give you the most straightforward example that I think virtually everyone would agree with. Let's say you have an elderly parent. Your mom is suffering from dementia, and she's not doing very well. And when you see her in the morning, she tells you that your dad, her husband, has just gone out to the store to get some groceries. Now, you know that your dad passed away 16 years ago. And you've had this conversation with your mom, you know, last week and last month. And the first time she brought this up, you corrected her and you said, no, you know, Dad has been— has passed away for some years now. And she was very upset to hear about this. And she didn't sort of recall this. And so she was very upset to learn that her partner had died. And then the next day she says the same thing to you. Now the question is, do you come clean the next day and tell her again, you know, Dad is no longer with us and have her go through that period of suffering yet again. And you realize that with someone who has dementia, for example, coming clean and telling them the truth day after day after day, subjecting them to pain and suffering, that is not an act of compassion. And in some ways, it gets at the important idea that while honesty is a virtue, it is not the only virtue. And sometimes we have to trade virtues off against one another.

It's interesting. I did a story for CBS News many, many years ago about lying and when we learn to lie. And we learn to lie fairly young. Sort of as a way of protecting yourself from an uncomfortable outcome. And that really helped me with parenting later on in life. How did the show about lying, what did it teach you?

I mean, in some ways, I think one of the most interesting things it taught me was some research that Emma and others have done where people are asked, do you prefer someone who says they always tell the truth, or do you prefer someone who says that they lie occasionally? Generally accepts that there are times that you have to lie. But what was fascinating is that when Emma and her research colleagues asked people this question, people say they actually prefer someone who says, I tell the truth all the time. So think about it this way. Let's say you have 2 politicians running for office and one of them says, you know, I'm going to try and tell the truth most of the time, but there are going to be times when, in fact, telling the truth is not going to be helpful to you and not going to be good for our country. And I might shade the truth, or I might bend the truth, or even tell you a lie. So that's politician number 1. And politician number 2 says, you know, I believe that honesty is the bedrock of integrity, and I will always tell you the truth. Now, the interesting thing is that most people believe that both the politicians are probably going to behave in similar ways when they're in office. But even though that's the case, we prefer the politician who says, I am always going to tell the truth. So it's interesting. We are, hypocritical when it comes to our preferences regarding honesty. And one reason this might happen is that we're wary about people who say, you know, I sometimes shade the truth, or I sometimes tell a lie, because we're worried if this person explicitly is telling us that they're willing to tell a lie from time to time, is it possible that, you know, we're going to do away with the norm of honesty altogether? And people are very worried about that. So we prefer people to say they always tell the truth, even as we acknowledge that sometimes they're going to lie.

Listeners, now's your opportunity. Please be honest. What's a lie that you've told or a secret you've held? Again, this is a no-judgment zone. Give us a call or text us now at 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Maybe it was a lie or a secret you kept from your parents growing up or later in life. What did you notice about how it felt to lie or to keep a secret? Our phone number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. WNYC. My guest is Shankar Vedantam, host and executive editor of Hidden Brain, which this month began airing Saturdays at 2:00 PM on WNYC. We are welcoming him and the show to our airwaves. Sometimes people— I learned in the show that people self-conceal in spaces where it's important to be honest.

Mm-hmm.

In your episode about secrets, we learn about research that finds that 80% of people admit to not being forthcoming With their doctor, which was sort of stunning. What do you think this demonstrates about why we keep those kind of secrets, even if it's about someone whose priority is to care for us?

Yeah, my jaw dropped when I heard that statistic that 80% of people lie to their doctors, and these can sometimes be in situations where people are concealing or lying about things to their doctors that are very germane to their health. In other words, the doctor is deciding You know, do I choose this course of treatment or that course of treatment? And the doctor is looking to the patient to reveal things about himself or herself. And people are lying because— and that could prompt the doctor to go down the wrong course of treatment that could harm the patient. And what that tells you is how much we care about what other people think of us, right? So the doctor is playing sort of 2 roles in our lives. There's a doctor who is wearing the lab coat, and we want that person to give us the best possible medical guidance, the best possible medical medical advice. But the doctor is also another human being. There's another human being in the room with us. And this is a human being that we might like, that we might respect and look up to. And we want this person to think well of us. And if I tell the doctor, you know, I'm actually smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day, instead of what I say to the doctor, which is, you know, I, you know, yeah, I smoke a cigarette now and then, I'm worried that the doctor is going to think less of me. And even though my lying could have adverse consequences for my health, for my life, We care so deeply about the opinions of other people that sometimes we lie about it. And in some ways, I think doctors know this. At this point, I think many doctors assume that when someone says they smoke a cigarette now and then, that they're probably smoking a pack a day. So there's some adjustments that doctors are making mentally. But of course, doctors can't tell in all the ways and all the different forms in which we're lying.

Did you do any research, or did you speak to any researchers who did Talked about whether people will lie to technology?

You know, that's a really, really fascinating question, Alison. And this is one of the main reasons I think people are drawn to AI chatbots. You know, there have been lots of problems that have been raised with chatbots and the reliability of their medical diagnosis or their ability to serve as therapists to people. But I think one reason people are using these chatbots is because people are willing to be more transparent with the machine than they are with the other person. You don't have the same sense that there is another mind that is judging you. And so I think people are likely to be more transparent. And this does raise an important question, which is, is it possible in some future date that people in some ways can have exchanges with machines where they are being more transparent with the machines, but then you're integrating whatever the machine has learned with human expertise, human knowledge, to produce a more holistic and better form of treatment. But I think you're absolutely on point. You're absolutely right. I think part of the attraction that many people have in asking Dr. Google about their medical questions is that they're worried about revealing their concerns, their flaws to people who are their doctors, people who are their loved ones, even the people who are closest to them in their lives.

My guest is Shankar Vedantam, host and executive editor of Hidden Brain, which this month began airing on Saturdays at 2:00 PM on WGBH.

WNYC.

We are welcoming the show to our airwaves and also discussing recent episodes they produced about lies and secrets. We'd like to hear from you. What's a lie you've told or a secret you've held? What did you notice about how it felt to keep a lie or a secret? Our phone number is 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. We'll get to your calls after the break. You are listening to All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Shankar Vedantam, host and executive editor of Hidden Brain, which this month began airing Saturdays at 2:00 PM on WNYC. We're welcoming the show to our airwaves and also discussing recent episodes they produced about lies and secrets. We want to know what's the biggest lie you've ever told or a secret you've held? What did you notice about how it felt to keep that lie? Or secret. This is a no-judgment zone, by the way. Our phone number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Shankar, I wanna get to a few calls, but I did wanna ask you about social media because people are displaying the most attractive photos or them having the most, most fun ever. How do you think this complicates the way in which we're honest with people about our own lives?

Yeah, I think that's such a great question and an important insight, Alison, because I think when we look at social media, We all see people, other people living perfect lives. You know, everyone is happy. Everyone's eating at great restaurants. Everyone's going on great vacations. And when we see our own lives, we see flaws. We see that, you know, I'm not going on the great vacation, or I can't afford to go to that great restaurant, or my job is not going well, or my relationships are not going well. And there's a disconnect that we feel that prompts us to say, well, even more reason now for me not to tell other people what's going on in my life, because clearly everyone else else is doing so great. So I think the illusion that life is going well for everyone else that we get from social media becomes inadvertently a reason for secrecy. You know, some time ago, there was a researcher, I believe at Princeton University, who did something very unusual. He came up with a CV, a resume, but instead of listing all his accomplishments on his resume, which is what we do and which is what happens on social media, it's effectively the social media version of a resume. What this researcher did was he listed all his failures. He called it a CV of failures. And he listed all the jobs he'd applied to where he was turned down, all the papers he had written that were rejected, all the fellowships that he wanted, all the awards he didn't get, all his setbacks. And it was a fairly long list of failures, unsurprisingly. And one of the wonderful things that happened from this is it sent a very different message than the message that we usually hear, because this person was actually a very successful researcher, very successful professor. Again, I believe it was at Princeton University. And for this person to say, look, I've had a life that was filled with failures, gives people much more hope and confidence of saying, OK, so the failures that I'm experiencing in my life, this is not just me. Even people who are very successful have been through setbacks, and they've come through on the other side.

We recently got a text that says, I lied during a job interview, but I really have no qualms about doing it. In the last decade, lying, for the most part, has become normalized in our culture. I don't care if people think It's immoral. I'm just trying to survive. Let's also talk to someone who goes by the name Anonymous in the Hudson Valley. Hi, thank you so much for calling All of It.

Hi, thank you for having me. Longtime listener, a big fan of you both, and I want to welcome the Brain Show to WNYC. But so I'm Yeah. You know, this is really an interesting topic. I, I'm, you know, not surprised you're not getting a ton of people calling saying, oh yeah, I lied about this and that and the other. But I wonder, what if you're— what if you're privy to a lie? Or what, you know, and, and you're not necessarily in, uh, you know, have any part of it, but you're privy to a lie and, um, you know, and you're witness someone lying to, you know, to someone else. It's like you don't want to get involved, right? But, you know, you know all the parties, but you don't want to get involved. And if you do get involved, maybe if you did say the truth, that now you would be, you know, maybe there would be some repercussions, you know, coming your way.

Yeah.

And then what about like omitting, you know, details of the, of the entire story to You know, to make it seem like, you know, maybe, you know, some event wasn't, you know, as grandiose or as terrible as, you know, as it actually was.

Yeah, let's, let's, let's, let's get into that conversation. Is omitting the same as lying, Shankar?

You know, it's— these are wonderful, wonderful questions, Anonymous. Thank you. Thank you so much for calling in. Some of So, Leslie Johns' work on this has been fascinating because she asks people to think about 2 scenarios. One where people admit to doing something fairly bad. You know, people admit to, let's say, cheating on their taxes or lying about an insurance claim. You know, and these are people reviewing dating profiles. In other words, you're looking at this person who basically says, you know, I'm interested in a date, but I'm someone who has lied on my resume or I've lied on an insurance claim. claim. Versus another potential date who basically says, when asked the question, have you ever lied on your insurance— for an insurance claim or lied on a resume, they just say, you know, I'd rather not answer that question. And so, in one case, you have someone who's just silent, whom we don't know is lying or not. And the other case, someone who's coming clean about something that is unsavory. And remarkably, what Leslie John finds is that people prefer the person who has come clean Over the person who basically says, I'm not going to say anything. So I think we often make the mistake of assuming that saying nothing is better than coming clean with something that is problematic. And in fact, the research seems to suggest just the opposite, that when— I mean, I guess it depends on the context and who you're coming clean to. But in general, we tend to prefer people who are admitting the things that they did, who come clean about the things they did, because when people people don't reveal it, when they're silent, that allows our imaginations now to run riot. And we imagine the very worst things that people could do and say, okay, this is definitely not somebody whom I want to date. The other question that the listener raised, which is, you know, what do you do when you're privy to a secret that is someone else's secret? That is a very, very complicated ethical question, because in some ways, it might not be your secret to reveal. You know, let's say you oversee or overhear or you find out that a coworker of yours is having an affair with someone. Now, the coworker is a coworker, not a close friend. You don't really know the coworker's partner, but the coworker's having an affair. Do you take it upon yourself to reach out to the coworker's spouse and say, guess what, your partner's having an affair? Is that your secret to reveal? These are very complicated questions. And sometimes I think it's fair to say that a secret that is not ours to reveal might not be a secret that we should be revealing.

Let's talk to Valerie, who's a therapist calling in from SoHo. Hi, Valerie. Thank you for taking the time to call All of It.

Thank you for taking my call. I work with people— we run an organization for borderline personality disorder with substance abuse, with alcoholism, and many comorbidities. And over many, many years, we've discovered that the greatest reason for lying is to protect yourself from shame. And shame is a topic that is generally not discussed by most people, and shame creates enormous stress and emotional pain, and people will do things to avoid being in that situation, and they will hide things to avoid shame, how other people will view them and seeing themselves as a bad person. And I think when people are more aware of shame as a motivation, it helps them to forgive lies and to not hold them to be morally, you know, bad or something because they understand that they're avoiding pain. I wonder what your thoughts are about that.

I think this is such a valuable and important point, and I agree completely with you. Shame is often the driver of secrecy, and I think many of us underestimate the psychological costs of shame. So it's one thing to say I'm going to hold on to a secret, and the secret keeping itself has psychological costs. costs on us. But the shame that is driving the secret keeping probably has even greater costs on us. And it exerts a cost that we're often not even noticing. But it has mental health consequences for us. No question about it. One of the interesting things to keep in mind is something called the impact bias that Leslie John talked about. And the impact bias is that we often overestimate the longevity of emotional events. So in other words, when we imagine what it's like to come clean, to tell someone our secret, we imagine how shameful it will feel, that we're worried that the other person's going to judge us. We are, you know, we shirk, we shrink back in fear at sort of what's going to happen. And part of what's happening is we're imagining that however bad things are going to feel in that moment is how bad things will feel over the long term. But of course, if you just look at the news and you look at all the people who've done unsavory things in the news, you know, they're in the news one day and then a week later someone else shows up in the news having done something unsavory. And in fact, the emotional, you know, the valence, the strength of your feelings dissipate over time. And I think we underestimate how quickly our emotions can return to baseline. And that's one of the reasons that keeps us hiding things and as a result, holding on to our shame.

Let's talk to Julie, who's calling in from Ossining. Hi, Julie. Thanks for calling All of It. You're on the air.

Hi. Thanks, Alison. I just wanted to say I think one of the biggest lies that I ever came clean was it was not only to my partner but to myself, because we had been struggling in our relationship for a while and, you know, trying to understand what was going on. And I just kind of kept circling back to, you know, my own heart thinking, you know, this, this just isn't going to work. And I finally, you know, one day my husband said to me, you know, do you love me? And I remember like Really taking a moment and thinking, this is, this is, this is the time. And, you know, I had to admit it to myself at the same time as I admitted it to him. And, you know, and I didn't. And it was a real turning point for both of us. It was hard, and I know it was hurtful, but it was also hard and hurtful to go on, you know, telling somebody that you love them because you think that that's what they want to hear. And so anyway, I just thought that was a, you know, and I was thinking about that. I thought not only was I lying to someone else, I was lying to And it did feel much better when I was able to be honest in my head and my heart.

Thank you so much for sharing that. We really appreciate your candor. What about a brutal truth teller, someone who has something really, really difficult to share with someone else? How can this be helpful? And how can it do harm if not handled well, Shankar?

Yeah, I do think that when we are telling the truth, it's important to realize the truth, in fact, is a sword. And yes, there are values. values and they're important. It's important to be honest. It's important to be truthful. But it's also important to notice when our sword can genuinely harm people. And I think the question to really ask is, is my truth-telling designed to produce growth and learning? And if it is, it's almost always a good thing to do. If you're— even if there's pain, even if there's difficulty, you know, the story that Julie told involved pain and difficulty.

Yeah.

But undoubtedly, even in just in the telling of the story that she just shared with us a few seconds ago, there was growth and there was learning.

Hmm.

And I think in general, the unconscious rubric that many of us use and many of us accept is that if you're telling the truth and this helps you and the other party to get to a point of growth, to get to a point of learning, it's probably worth the pain. But if you're telling the truth and it does not produce growth, it does not produce learning, Then it's probably not worth the pain. And that gets to the example that I gave earlier about your elderly mom who has dementia. You know, you're telling her she's in pain, but there's no learning because she has dementia. And so the next day she has to do it all over again. That might be a case not to tell the truth. I just want to point out one other thing, if I may, Alison, with Julie's story, which is, you know, people— I think that many people who've experienced what Julie has experienced, but the fact that she called into the show she shared her story. You know, I can't imagine that there's anyone listening who does not feel compassion for Julie and admiration for her courage in being able to share the story with us. I feel closer to Julie just by virtue of the fact that she shared the story with us. And it's a small example of how coming clean and being transparent produces enormous benefits in our lives. It makes other people like us more, admire us more.

We're going to get to one more call. I'm going to go for Mallory. Mallory, thank you for calling in.

Hi. Yeah, I was moved by this conversation, and I— when I met my boyfriend, I told him that my father was dead, but actually we were just estranged. And— but I felt very deep, deep shame by that, and so I thought it would just be easier to you know, while I was doing a lot of online dating at the time, just tell people, oh yeah, father's dead. I feel— I felt like I didn't get any questions on first dates usually, versus if you say you're estranged, like it felt like embarrassing. And I don't know. So I've been— I'm married now to that man, and obviously he knows the truth, but it was— yeah.

Thank you so much for sharing that. And this text says, I have a child with autism, and his outlook on what constitutes a lie has changed. How I understand the concept. For him, anything less than total honesty is unacceptable, and there are no different levels. I no longer say we are stuck in traffic when running late, tell people we have a prior commitment, or try to give a palatable explanation for things. He keeps me more honest about everything small and large. Which is a very, very interesting topic. We need to wrap up, but I want to give people a preview of what we'll hear on Hidden Brain coming up. What's the subject of the show this week?

You know, we're working on a number of different topics right now. The one that I'm really— one of the topics I'm really excited about sort of looks at the rethinking sort of how we think about depression. It looks at the work of a researcher at Cornell University and looking at how— are there ways of thinking about depression beyond just being a straightforward mental illness? But our goal, I think, each week with Hidden Brain, Alison, is to is to allow people to see a mirror to their own lives. We want to hold up a mirror to people's lives. So as people listen to the show, they're not just listening to the show, they're also observing themselves. They're noticing themselves. And hopefully, they come to a more fresh and a more compassionate view of their own mental lives.

Hidden Brain airs on Saturdays at 2:00 PM on WNYC. Shankar Vedantam, thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you so much, Alison.