Kim Mills

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1,063 appearances 15 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 2 Sep

Kim Mills’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 15 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.

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Speaking of Psychology · Encore: How living with secrets can harm you, with Michael Slepian, PhD · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

And can other people tell when we're holding something back?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life.

I'm Kim Mills.

Our guest today is Dr. Michael Slepian, the Sanford C. Bernstein & Company Associate Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School.

He's a research psychologist who studies the psychology of secrets.

He examines the intersection of secrecy, trust, and motivation, including the consequences of secrecy and how we judge and develop trust.

His new book, The Secret Life of Secrets, How Our Inner Worlds Shape Well-Being, Relationships, and Who We Are,

is being released in june by penguin random house thank you for joining us today dr slepian thanks for having me so let's start with the number i quoted in the introduction that people keep about 13 secrets at any one time on average and five of them they've never told anyone those numbers come from your research can you tell us about that study how did you arrive at those numbers

So what are some of the most common secrets that people keep?

So how do you define a secret?

Is there a difference, for instance, between a secret and something that we just consider private?

So let's talk for a minute about the intersection between lying and keeping a secret.

For instance, I recently watched the movie Dear Evan Hansen, where Evan creates this whole complicated fiction about having been friends with a schoolmate who has killed himself.

The lies that Evan tells about the relationship, they're very much like secrets, and they appear to be a heavy burden on him, much like secrets tend to be, only maybe more so because he never was friends with the other boy.

So are lies just a different type

secret?

A lot of your work has to do with how secrets affect us, often in harmful ways.

There's a line in an essay you wrote that said, the real problem with having secrets is not that we have to hide them, but rather that we have to live with them.

So why is living with secrets so difficult?

Are there some types of secrets that are harder to live with at others?

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