The Secret Life of Secrets

Everybody has secrets. You do. I do. Maybe even the President of the United States does. For better or worse, science can’t much help in revealing the details of any particular secret. But it is gaining a better handle on the nature of secrets generally. For instance, according to a recent study by Michael Slepian, a professor of management at Columbia Business School, and two of his colleagues, the average person keeps thirteen secrets, five of which he or she has never shared with anyone else. If the President is anything like this average person, there’s a forty-seven-per-cent chance that one of his secrets involves a violation of trust; a sixty-plus-per-cent chance that it involves a lie or a financial impropriety; and a roughly thirty-three-per-cent chance that it involves a theft, some sort of hidden relationship, or unhappiness at work.

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