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. This illustration, "Captain William Kidd in New York Harbour, 1696," by Jean Leone Gerome Ferris, shows the infamous Scottish privateer charming women onboard his ship, the Adventure Galley. (Image credit: PhotoQuest/Getty) Being situated in a business school has practical perks: For one, the school fully funds his lab, so he doesn’t have to seek outside grants. He advises one primary graduate student, but he also co-advises graduate students and mentors postdoctoral fellows across the division. The multidisciplinary business perspective also means that Slepian keeps one eye turned toward the practical applications of his research. A digital rendering of the Ark of the Covenant. The bible has detailed descriptions of this holy object, but it was lost millennia ago and will likely never be recovered. (Image credit: jgroup via Getty Images)

Though the monument contains no encrypted messages, its purpose and origin remain shrouded in mystery. They were commissioned by a man who has yet to be properly identified, who went by the pseudonym of R.C. Christian.Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa went missing in 1975. The FBI is once again on the hunt for his body in a former New jersey landfill. (Image credit: Getty Images)

It’s not how much you hide a secret that’s harmful, but how often you find yourself thinking about it,” Slepian says. Some secrets are harder to put out of our minds than others. Slepian and his colleagues James Kirby, PhD, at the University of Queensland, and Elise Kalokerinos, PhD, now at the University of Melbourne, explored the negative emotions that often surround secrecy. They surveyed a diverse sample of 1,000 people on Mechanical Turk about more than 6,000 of their secrets and found that people dwelled more on secrets that made them feel ashamed than on those that made them feel guilty ( Emotion, Vol. 20, No. 2, 2020). “Shame, but not guilt, is associated with ruminating on secrets,” Slepian says.

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The Holy Grail, the cup that Jesus drank from at his last supper with his disciples before his crucifixion, has never been found and almost certainly never will be. In fact, it wasn’t until the Middle Ages that there was much interest in it, after those writing some of the King Arthur stories described the search for the Holy Grail as a quest that King Arthur and his knights took on. The signal lasted for 72 seconds, the longest period of time it could possibly be measured by the array that Ehman was using. It was loud and appeared to have been transmitted from a place no human has gone before: in the constellation Sagittarius near a star called Tau Sagittarii, 120 light-years away. Thousands of lichen-covered stone jars from the Iron Age, some standing close to 10 feet tall and weighing several tons, dot the mountainous landscape of northern Laos. Carved largely from sandstone and found in groups ranging from just one to 400, legend holds that giants used them as wine glasses. Many archeologists, on the other hand, believe they served as funerary urns, though much remains unknown about their purpose, about how they were moved into place, and about the civilization that produced them. Recent research dates at least some of the stone jars to as early as 1240 B.C., which would make them far older than the human remains buried nearby. Complicating matters is that many of the jars stand in fields of unexploded munitions, the vestige of a massive U.S. bombing campaign during the Vietnam War, and therefore cannot be safely studied. 3. Guanabara Bay The bad news is that when people share their secrets with us, we feel like we have to guard them. The more people are preoccupied by that secret, or feel they have to hide it on behalf of the confidant, the more burdensome it is,” he says.

However, if King Arthur did really exist, the reality was likely less magical. The earliest surviving accounts date to the ninth century and tell of a leader (perhaps not even a king) who fought several battles against the Saxons; even the accuracy of these accounts is debatable. Ancient writers claim that Cleopatra VII and her lover, Mark Antony, were buried together in a tomb after their deaths in 30 B.C. The writer Plutarch (A.D. 45 to 120) wrote that the tomb was located near a temple of Isis, an ancient Egyptian goddess, and was a "lofty and beautiful" monument containing treasures made of gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, ebony and ivory. 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 Many of the pictures of herbs and plants hint that it many have been some kind of textbook for an alchemist. The fact that many diagrams appear to be of astronomical origin, combined with the unidentifiable biological drawings, has even led some fanciful theorists to propose that the book may have an alien origin. One summer night in 1977, Jerry Ehman, a volunteer for SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, may have become the first man ever to receive an intentional message from an alien world. Ehman was scanning radio waves from deep space, hoping to randomly come across a signal that bore the hallmarks of one that might be sent by intelligent aliens, when he saw his measurements spike.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 Before his ignominious death, Kidd captured and plundered many ships. But the one of that got him in hot water was the Quedagh Merchant, a Moorish trading ship laden with gold, silver, silks, satins and other treasures from India. Kidd claimed it was a legitimate target, given it was controlled by the French. But it had an English captain and Indian merchandise, and the Moghul emperor at the time threatened to close off trade routes for the East India Company in response, Reuters reported.