Secrets are usually seen as a burden, but good secrets seem to work the other way. Across five experiments, people felt more energised when they thought about good news they were keeping to themselves than about good news others already knew.
The research was led by Michael L. Slepian of Columbia Business School, with Katharine H. Greenaway of the University of Melbourne, Nicholas P. Camp of the University of Michigan and Adam D. Galinsky of Columbia. It appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in November 2023.
Earlier work found secrets tiring, but most of those secrets were about bad things. The team wanted to know whether secrecy itself drains people, or whether it depends on what the secret is about.
Secret good news versus the same news shared
Good secrets are common. In a pilot survey, 76% of 500 people said the first thing they would do with good news is tell someone. Yet in Study 1, participants held an average of about 15 pieces of current good news from a list of 38 categories, and five to six of them were secret, from savings and self-bought gifts to job news, pregnancies and proposals.
The 200 participants were randomly assigned to rate either their secret or their non-secret good news. Those reflecting on secrets reported more energy on a standard vitality scale, an average of 3.75 against 3.33 on a seven-point scale. The effect held after accounting for how happy the news made people and whether they planned to share it.
Why a good secret energises
The authors argue that the key is motivation. People usually keep good news quiet by choice, to savour it, plan a surprise or act on personal values, rather than because someone forces them to. Psychology research has long linked freely chosen, intrinsically motivated activity to feeling alive and alert.
The later studies tested that idea. When participants imagined keeping good news hidden for their own reasons, it energised them; when the secrecy was imposed from outside, it was fatiguing. Positive secrets were more often freely chosen than negative secrets or secrets in general, and that difference explained their energising effect. Still, about 26% of real positive secrets were kept for external reasons, such as not being allowed to tell, and those were less energising.
In the final study, positive secrets were driven by noticeably less outside pressure than other secrets. Across all five experiments, the energy boost was not simply a matter of feeling good.
The limits of the samples
The studies were not preregistered, though the authors report every measure and share their data. Participants were recruited online through CloudResearch and Prolific, aged 18 to 78, and the authors say their conclusions are limited to Western people with internet literacy.
The practical upshot is modest but pleasant: the urge to blurt out good news is natural, and sharing it is energising too, but holding a happy surprise for a while carries its own lift.
Study Details:
- Title: The bright side of secrecy: The energizing effect of positive secrets
- Authors: Michael L. Slepian, Katharine H. Greenaway, Nicholas P. Camp, Adam D. Galinsky
- Journal: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Publication Date: November 2023
- DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000352