Unlocking the secrets of secrets: How can we learn about experiences that cannot be recreated in the laboratory?

Abstract

People keep secrets for years with significant ramifications if the information were ever revealed. How can we understand the effects of long-held secrets? The current paper presents a new perspective on secrecy and how it can be studied. By examining the multiple experiences people have with their multiple secrets, we can obtain a fuller view of how secrets affect people in daily life. Additionally, by examining a set of common secrets, across people, we can understand how secrets (i.e., exemplars) differ from one another, and we can study how those differences relate to important variables like well-being. That is, rather than study a specific secret or secrecy situation (which will have limited generalizability), we can seek to study the entire universe of secrets, both to make generalizations across that universe and to compare different secrets to one another. Using the question of whether secrecy causes lower well-being, we discuss this Multiple Exemplar Measurement approach alongside other methodologies. We highlight the many benefits of taking an exemplar-level perspective, both for understanding secrecy and other psychological phenomena more broadly.