Leslie John

And in fact, there's been subsequent research showing that we do have this kind of internal drive to reveal.

And it's fascinating because there's even, some of these things are even illegal.

Now, the way we ask matters, right?

So if we had asked,

face-to-face in an interrogation room, I don't know that people would be forthcoming.

But the way we asked these, we asked it on a pseudo-anonymous online survey, so it was done in the comfort of your home.

You don't have someone staring there watching you, judging you.

Not necessarily, which is pretty shocking.

So what we did in this study was we asked people, let's say we asked, who would you rather hire?

And candidate A, one of the questions they had been asked on this intake survey was, have you ever been reprimanded at work?

Yes, no, choose not to answer.

We, of course, constructed these profiles ourselves.

So candidate A, to the question, have you ever been reprimanded at work, says yes, just goes out and says the worst thing.

Candidate B, on the other hand...

clicked the choose not to answer box.

So here we have a choice.

The participants had a choice.

Would you prefer someone who admits something bad, that they've been reprimanded at work, to someone who simply but very conspicuously refrains from answering, says, I'm not telling you, I'm opting out, I'm concealing, essentially?

And it turns out that again and again, people prefer the revealer.

They prefer the person who admits to the thing, even if it's a bad thing, relative to someone who opts out of answering, who very saliently says, I'm not doing this.