The secret lives of us

“EVERYBODY'S UP TO SOMETHING … HIDING SOMETHING.”

Perry Mason, SERIES 1, EPISODE 1

In the first half of 1941, British prime minister Winston Churchill was keeping more than his leader’s share of secrets. He was up to his ears in military planning as Europe fell to Hitler’s Third Reich and Britain’s cities faced bombing thunderstorms. He was desperate to get the United States into the war and he still had his critics.

He was also keeping a secret from his son. Randolph Churchill was serving as an intelligence officer in the Middle East. Back in London, Randolph’s 21-year-old wife Pamela Digby Churchill was having an affair. If Winston Churchill didn’t know for sure, though others close to him certainly did, he definitely knew his daughter-in-law, the mother of his baby grandson, was spending a lot of time with another man. So was Winston.

The British prime minister not only didn’t warn his son, according to author Christopher Ogden in his biography of Pamela, Life of the Party, he asked Randolph to look after Pamela’s new lover when the lover visited Egypt in June.

It seems astonishing behaviour in a father. But Winston had important matters on his mind. If the powerful US didn’t soon enter the war, he was convinced Germany would win. There were already plans to shift the royal family north and then to Canada. The crown jewels were buried below Windsor Castle, with the most precious secreted in a biscuit tin.

Pamela’s lover could help save the British. He was Averell Harriman, a tough-minded American millionaire businessman chosen by president Franklin D. Roosevelt as special envoy to Britain. His liaison with Pamela brought him into Winston’s close circle, exactly what the PM and Britain needed.

We know what happened next. The Japanese bombed America’s Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbour in December 1941, Churchill danced in glee around his Chequers dining-room, and Roosevelt, already influenced by Harriman and key pro-British Americans, could finally overrule his country’s isolationists and go to war. But what about Randolph and Pamela?

Randolph was no prize husband, nor a faithful one. He drank too much, spent too much and gambled what was left. It had never been a good marriage and ended in divorce in December 1945. Histories and memoirs about the period, and Pamela’s affair – one of several she had with Americans – tend to dispatch Randolph and his feelings in a few sentences.

But he was still a son, the only son. The other secret about Randolph, now well known, is that his mother, Clementine, disliked him. Dear God.

That’s not a bad exclamation in a story about secrets. In his international self-help bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson put as Rule 8: “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.” He wrote of the nirvana we might achieve: “Truth reduces the terrible complexity of a man to the simplicity of his word.”

YouTube videos and articles about Peterson, whose book has sold more than two million copies, have headings like, “Jordan Peterson’s Secret to Overcome Chaos Within Yourself.”

Then it was revealed he was nursing a bloody great secret himself. He had become physically dependent on the anti-anxiety drug Clonazepam. Peterson has many enemies because of his conservative stance on issues like identity politics. Several delighted online in the revelation. I couldn’t see much reason for joy.

As The New Republic commented, “A drug problem is neither a dragon to be slain nor a sin to be ashamed of. It’s a mundane health problem to be treated scientifically …”

In May this year, former AFL player and coach Dean Laidley was publicly humiliated after an arrest for stalking. Police officers shared photos that leaked into the social media maw showing the sportsman dressed in a wig and women’s clothing. Laidley’s case will be heard later this year, but I don’t know anyone who wasn’t dismayed by the online photographs and sympathetic to him.

If your secret hurts no one but yourself we will, unless we’ve had a compassion bypass, be more likely to commiserate than jeer.

But did anyone feel sorry for movie mogul Harvey Weinstein when his secret finally leaked that he was a serial sexual harasser and rapist? He had got away with it for years, kept aloft on a tsunami of Hollywood success and seeming riches. He could make people’s careers and unbreak them, as actor Ashley Judd attested. A New York judge sentenced him to 23 years in jail and he faces more charges in California.

Without ever articulating it, society has made a judgment call. If your secret hurts no one but yourself – and, of course, the people who care about you and don’t want to see you suffer – we will, unless we’ve had a compassion bypass, be more likely to commiserate than jeer. But if your secrets benefit you at a cost to others, or give you power over people, or allow you to trick, humiliate or abuse them, we will feel very differently.

While I was researching this story, the secrets of Labor Party powerbrokers and alleged branch-stacking efforts in Victoria erupted. The Australian ran what it claimed were private texts from federal Labor MP Anthony Byrne that said he wanted a man’s head cut off after which he would “piss on his corpse”, and hoped Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews would die politically.

I was also watching the BBC dramatisation of the 1963 Profumo-Keeler political imbroglio that involved the then British secretary of state for war, two pretty young women and a Russian spy.

In one truly horrible scene, John Profumo (played by Ben Miles) stands stalwart before the House of Commons and tells his fellows, and watching wife in her pearls and sapphires, that he had not committed any impropriety with the then 19-year-old Christine Keeler.

It should be reassuring for the average person to know that no matter what their secrets, somewhere in the world there will probably be a politician with far worse.

The characters on TV sitcom Friends drew laughs through their secrets and self-deception.Credit: Getty Images

“WHAT? WHAT SECRETS? YOU KNOW SECRETS? WHAT ARE THEY?”

Friends, SERIES 5, EPISODE 11

Michael Slepian is a psychologist and associate professor at Columbia Business School who has specialised in the study of secrets for the past 10 years. He stumbled into this area as a researcher in his early 20s, struck by a metaphor people used when they referred to their secrets as a “burden”.

“Why do people speak this way?” he wondered. He and colleagues put together tests exploring people’s motivation to engage in physical activity. Astonishingly, those who were preoccupied with an important secret did estimate a hill was steeper or a target further away. Their secrets did make them feel weighed down. Slepian knew he wanted to go further.

“A secret is basically something you don’t want to admit to other people, and sometimes not to yourself.”

The field is new and huge, but studies conducted so far by Slepian and his colleagues around the world indicate what we must instinctively suspect: secrets can hurt our health, relationships and sense of wellbeing and produce depression and anxiety.

But however much most of us don’t like having them, secrets seem as natural a part of the human condition as breathing. Ninety-seven per cent of us will have at least one big secret at any given time, Slepian discovered, and the average person has 13 secrets. Five will have never been divulged to anyone. “Women confide their secrets more than men,” Slepian says, “and I think what that reflects is essentially just men’s discomfort with opening up ... It’s not considered masculine.”

Secrets are often self-protective. We’ve done something that doesn’t match our standards for ourselves and/or those set by our society or community. We keep it secret so we don’t lose the regard of others. One interviewee confesses to Slepian, “A secret is basically something you don’t want to admit to other people, and sometimes not to yourself.” As for what we keep secret, it’s the entire range of human behaviour. Use your imagination.

The most often shared secret is that we’ve told a lie; the least shared is that we’ve had thoughts about having a relationship with someone other than our partner. Slepian has built a website (keepingsecrets.org) where people can take a test on their own secrets and see how they compare with others. The results will help Slepian’s own research into secrecy.

Sometimes we cop someone else’s secret. Julia Robson, a Melbourne private investigator, will present a dossier to a partner, husband or wife that reveals yes, their other half has, in spite of all denials, been secretly cheating. It can lead to separation or confrontation but, says Robson, “more often than you’d think, they decide to do nothing. It’s enough for them just to no longer feel crazy. They can trust themselves again.”

Surprisingly, it’s not the hiding of our secrets that takes the toll on us. Slepian says, “People often don’t ask [us], so it’s not the rare moment we have to hide a secret that matters, but the many moments it comes to our own mind … There’s no end to how much you might have to think about it if you’re not getting help with it.”

Nor is the heaviness of a secret determined by its size; it’s how often our mind wanders to it, and whether it makes us feel guilty or ashamed. “These two emotions seem like synonyms,” Slepian says, “but guilt is, ‘I did something wrong.’ Shame is, ‘I’m a bad person.’ That’s very different and really hard.

“Guilt is the right emotion. We can make amends. Shame makes us feel helpless and powerless and is very much related to how often you think of your secrets.”

Katie Greenaway, a senior lecturer in social psychology at the University of Melbourne who collaborates with Slepian, suggests when a secret causes guilt, “you can apologise or come clean”. For secrets where things can’t be changed, “Other strategies might be needed, like acceptance or reappraising the situation.”

Some secrets hardly matter except to their keeper. Some grow with time. When my attractive mother met my equally attractive father, she was more than 2500 kilometres from home, and thus from anyone who knew the basic details of her life. She was free to concoct a little. Guilelessly, flirtatiously, she nevertheless chose to change the one thing that would ride on her back all her life, her age. Instead of being a few years older than my father, she became one year younger.

Her sisters, safely away in another city, still had to be roped into the deception. Did she ever imagine when she first falsely stated her age what that secret would cost her and those around her? I can’t say because I didn’t find out until after she died. By then, even as I agonised for my mother for those years of pretence, I knew what it had done to our own occasionally fraught relationship.

In my late 20s, for instance, my then husband and I moved to London, where we worked for seven years. Every time we travelled, whether it was to Amsterdam, Rome or the French coast, I’d find views, hotels or places I knew my parents, especially my mother, would love. I’d ask them to visit but they never did. It seemed incomprehensible, given they had the money and the time. Even now I can remember the hurt line that ran straight to my heart.

“Power and secrecy are highly interrelated but, in the end, the secrets control you.”

After my mother’s death, I found out why. It was to do with the date on her birth certificate and the complications of applying for a passport. She had instructed my sister to tell me only after she had gone.

A caution: don’t keep secrets until the end. It leaves behind too many what-ifs. The husband of a good friend kept his lung cancer a secret until three weeks before he died. A doctor, he had decided to protect her and enjoy their time together. But she didn’t get a say. Slepian says, “Romantic partners expect to have access to that knowledge.” When someone decides to hide something that affects people close to them, what they’re also saying – however understandable their reasons – is that preserving the secret is somehow more important than the person in front of them.

One reformed secret-keeper tells me, “Power and secrecy are highly interrelated but, in the end, the secrets control you. They’re like pearls, they just layer and layer.”

The website postsecret.com asks people to submit secrets on a postcard which it then posts. All humanity’s aches are there. One confides: “My dad was in prison for six years and I never sent him a letter. He sent me 214.” Another: “One of the only times I’ve ever seen my dad cry was when I caught him cheating on my mom.”

But some people seem to thrive on keeping others in the dark. American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh had three families apart from his legal one and seven secret children, all in Europe. Revered New Yorker editor William Shawn not only had a long-time hidden partner, the writer Lillian Ross, Ross had an adopted son. The trio would eat dinner together; then Shawn would go home to his wife. American architect Louis Kahn, creator of some of the most beautiful buildings ever imagined, had children with his wife and two different lovers.

In an unsettling 2013 research paper, The Cheater’s High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behaviour, psychologists identify a sub-group who get off on deceiving people or doing things that are normally prohibited, especially when they tell themselves there are no real victims. Apart from any tangible gains, cheating makes them feel good, in control. Confidence trickster Frank Abagnale, on whose life the 2002 Leonardo DiCaprio film Catch Me If You Can is based, described it as being “heady with happiness”.

Winston Churchill suspected his son’s wife was having an affair but didn’t warn him. President Trump is the “self-deceiver-in-chief”, according to British psychologist Celia Moore. New York socialite Ann Woodward took her own life when her secret was about to be exposed.Credit: Getty Images

“SO WHY ARE YOU IN HERE TRYING TO THROW IT ALL AWAY OVER THIS BULLSHIT?”

The Assistant, RELEASED 2019

In October, 1975, wealthy New York socialite Ann Woodward took her own life days before a piece of roman-à-clef fiction by Truman Capote appeared in Esquire magazine. It was thought she had seen an advance copy. La Côte Basque, 1965, an excerpt from the novel Capote was writing, picked through the true life secrets of Manhattan’s social princesses which he had absorbed over gossipy lunches with them.

Woodward is thinly disguised as Ann Hopkins, a social-climbing, unfaithful ex-showgirl who’d entrapped the son of an old-money, blue-blood family. She had then shot him at their Long Island estate because he wanted to end their marriage. She had got away, Capote wrote, with pretending she’d thought he was a prowler because his parents preferred that to scandal.

Capote’s story also revealed that the elegant socialite Slim Keith had been discarded by her British baron husband, and exposed a humiliating fling between CBS head Bill Paley, the husband of Capote’s beautiful friend, Babe Paley, and the New York governor’s porcine wife who looked as if she wore tweed brassieres.

As soon as it was published, Capote’s princesses exiled him. Capote protested: “What did they expect? I’m a writer!” But he went downhill fast, into a mire of drink and drugs. He wouldn’t be the first person to expose the secrets of the powerful and pay. Perhaps what Capote found so confounding was that everyone he knew also knew these stories and now he’d put them in his work in progress. So what?

It was a fatal misreading. Films, television dramas and novels thrive on the hero or heroine who tackles a flawed or corrupt person, organisation or government and, like Liam Neeson in Taken or Jamie Foxx in Django Unchained, kicks ass relentlessly and wins. In reality, messing with the secrets of the rich and influential is terrifying.

The more powerful the person or institution, the more dangerous it is, the more enablers there are. It’s what allows a Harvey Weinstein or a sex offender like Jeffrey Epstein to thrive, and for institutional sex abuse and corporate misdoing to be shamefully widespread. In sickening cases, we still look away. We enable, even collaborate. We pretend we don’t know what’s going on while victims have shocking secrets forced upon them and are disbelieved, rubbished and/or punished.

The Assistant, written and directed by Australian Kitty Green, is an unnerving, day-in-the-life movie about a Harvey Weinstein-style office. Its star Julia Garner, who plays Jane, the assistant, described its dynamics, telling British online newspaper The Independent, “This girl is fairly new in the business. She probably just got out of school and she’s struggling with what’s right and what’s wrong, but she still wants to keep her job. For people who maybe have worked in an abusive environment and they are like, ‘I said something!’ I’m like, ‘No, you didn’t. You wanted to keep your job.’ It’s about that. It’s not about Weinstein.”

Director Green didn’t focus on what happened inside the powerful man’s office once the pretty actor was taken there. It was about, she told interviewers, “What do people know who are leading women into that room? … So it’s more about the machinery or system surrounding that predator.”

Wharton Business School professor Maurice E. Schweitzer, an author on the “Cheater’s high” paper, tells me that secrets inside offices or cliques also create power groups. “People like being in an exclusive group. Secrets separate people into groups. Not everybody can join in. Such secrets can also reflect acceptable norms.” Or what’s acceptable to that group.

Randolph Churchill arrived back in London on leave in 1942 and quickly discovered his wife’s affair with Harriman. He was convinced his parents had known and, as Lynne Olson records in Citizens of London, about Americans in wartime Britain, Pamela believed so, too. “It created a rift that never healed,” said one family friend. Some think the PM, who loved his son dearly, knew and didn’t know; that in his aristocratic circles no one asked what happened in private.

It turns out our brains can be smart indeed at letting us do what we want.

“WELL, IT WAS A FALSE REPORT … I WAS THERE FOR A TINY, LITTLE SHORT PERIOD OF TIME. AND IT WAS MUCH MORE FOR AN INSPECTION …”

US President Donald Trump explains away his rush to the White House bunker during the George Floyd protests.

Celia Moore was sitting in a London bus a few years ago when she started mulling over paying her nanny tax. It’s a sizeable whack, so many Britons rort the system. Moore, a professor of organisational behaviour at London’s Imperial College Business School, was fascinated to observe her cognitive processes as they invented ways she could morally justify not paying the tax in full. If she fudged on hours, she could give more money to the nanny; her nanny was Brazilian so would be back home before she could benefit from taxes paid by her employer …

Moore, a lively, dark-haired woman who has been teaching MBA students about ethics, leadership and moral agency for 15 years, was riveted by her mental gymnastics. “There are certain human motivations that seem quite universal and one of them is for self-enhancement,” she says. “We want everyone to believe we are fantastic.” That applies especially to ourselves. “We want other people to think that, but we really do need to believe it ourselves.”

She did, of course, keep paying the tax, but it’s an area that fascinates her: our in-built capacity for self-deception. The secrets we hold tightest are the ones we keep from ourselves. We will fight as fiercely as a Clint Eastwood vigilante to keep that knowledge hidden so far away from us that the only people who can see it are … well, almost everybody around us.

As CNN’s Chris Cillizza commented on Trump’s reframing of events in the Floyd protests, “This is a man who has been telling himself a story of his life – one in which he is always the toughest, the smartest and the winner-est – for well, his entire adult life.” Moore says, “Trump is the self-deceiver-in-chief right now, and doing it in front of the globe.”

Cognitive psychologists have pondered the question of how people can not know something when, simultaneously, they do: Moore terms it “motivated forgetting … That we just conveniently don’t think about the ways in which our actions don’t fit with the version of ourselves that we like to have in our heads.”

You can see how fear plays into the need to lie, the need to keep secrets, the need to self-deceive.

Moore knows someone who tried online dating for the first time and met her husband. Now that woman tells everyone, including guests at the wedding, that they met randomly in the Starbucks queue, even though neither of them drink coffee – and wasn’t that serendipitous!

“But,” says a mystified Moore, “I saw her on the morning of her date and she told me where she was going.”

Moore’s somewhat depressing research reveals three ways we self-deceive. The first she calls “motivated attention”: we direct our attention towards evidence that justifies our choices and ignores the rest. We will concentrate on the one thing that tells us, health-wise, love-wise, morality-wise, what we want to hear.

A second, “motivated construal”, lets us view actions through a different framework. We know what we’ve done or are doing in secret is wrong but we minimise our responsibility and exploit any ambiguities that will let us off the hook.

The third trick is “motivated recall”, which allows us to rewrite history in our heads altogether, like the Starbucks romantic. (I asked Moore what the groom did during her wedding speech; he stayed quiet.)

Moore says a lot of her work focuses on “moral disengagement”: how people make their actions acceptable. People will use words as a smokescreen. US president Bill Clinton told the news cameras in January 1998: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Moore says, “He very specifically chose words that could be consistent with the truth but that presented a version of himself publicly – and to himself – that could be more easily integrated into his self-conception.” Profumo did the same thing.

“Fear,” says Moore, “is the most dysfunctional motivator of our behaviour. You can see how fear plays into the need to lie, the need to keep secrets, the need to self-deceive. We’re afraid of what’s going to happen if they get revealed – either to others or to ourselves. We fear the reduction of positive regard.

“It takes a lot of maturity to be able to acknowledge our imperfections and our true weaknesses or areas that we should focus on for growth, and to live in a way that does not require self-deception. The people most susceptible [to self-deception] are those with fragile self-esteem.”

What we keep secret changes. Over dinner, a friend, some years older than me, told me something that had once haunted her. The next day, she had to tell me again. I realised why I had forgotten; her secret was now so unexceptional.

She had become pregnant when abortions were illegal in New Zealand, but had procured a termination. Weeks later, she was sitting in court as a reporter, and the female doctor who had treated her appeared in the dock.

There are pluses for confiding in at least one other person. It can give us perspective, let us feel supported.

“I can still remember her, swathed in blue cashmere. I quickly left in case she recognised me.” It was only at a lunch with friends, 10 years afterwards, that the heaviness lifted. Every woman at the table had been through a similar experience.

There are pluses for confiding in at least one other person. It can give us perspective, let us feel supported and less alone to ruminate. One man who kept two huge secrets for years – his alcoholism; an affair – tells me: “It’s really hard work, a huge drain on your energy and emotion. Your secrets become the centre of your life.”

In one paper, Slepian and co-author Brock Bastian argue that when we keep misdeeds secret, we can retreat to self-punishment to appease our own sense of justice. It might involve denying ourselves pleasure or seeking out painful experiences.

“Confessing a secret misdeed,” they write, “… may … bring an end to the feeling one still deserves punishment.” Slepian also warns that there’s a distinction between secrecy and being secretive: “If your solution to problems is to just keep secrets, we know that is a very maladaptive coping strategy.”

Confiding, Slepian says, can improve our wellbeing, though he and Greenaway stress people can have good reasons for keeping a secret, and many are benign. Greenaway says, “It’s more if you were to reveal your secrets, what would be the best conditions.”

Our confidants are usually family or close friends but we have an endearing tendency to share secrets with strangers. We may seek out therapists and doctors but we also talk to people on planes, in waiting rooms. In her new book, Friendship: The Evolution, Biology and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond, Lydia Denworth quotes Harvard University sociologist Mario Luis Small, who says simply, “People’s true pool of confidants is everyone they run into.”

When Small analysed a survey of 2000 adults, he found more than half the time, people “often confided even deeply personal things to people they weren’t that close to”. The randomness doesn’t bother him: “The people who are really in trouble are … the people who are literally not running into anybody on a regular basis.”

But we must choose carefully. However corrosive secret-keeping can be, it is far worse, Slepian warns, to confide in the wrong person.

Secrets can be a huge drain on your energy. They can become the centre of your life.Credit: Getty Images

“THE PEOPLE THAT HAVE MADE ME FEEL THE WORST WERE ALWAYS MY BEST FRIENDS."

Law & Order: SVU, SERIES 5, EPISODE 17

In 2009, Michael Cox, then British boss of UK Wines of Chile, took it into his head to commission a survey of how long women can keep a secret. To female outrage, the study of 3000 women purported to show it was for less than two days: 47 hours and 15 minutes.

Forty per cent of the women aged between 18 and 65 confessed they couldn’t keep any secret to themselves, no matter how personal or confidential. (The slender link with Chilean wines was that women were reportedly more loose-lipped after drinking.)

It was hardly a solid study but there have been other similar, commercially funded surveys capitalising on the image of women as unreliable gossips. Greenaway speculates it’s more about “base-rate”: women share more, hence may have more opportunities for lapses. Nevertheless, the stakes are high. Slepian and colleagues write: “Confiding is not only a type of disclosure. It is also a request for help and confidentiality.”

Do men make safer confidants? Slepian doesn’t know; the research hasn’t been done, although he’s keen to explore. Meanwhile, I have to observe that while every woman I know has benefited hugely from sharing secrets with a close female friend, each also knows the brutalising shock of betrayal or having their secrets used for another woman’s advantage. Few men will say the same of their sex. Base-rate or not, something needs scrutiny.

Men, often maligned for their perceived emotional limitations, can make excellent listeners, I’ve found. It goes in; it stays there. They can also see things in a way we women, so close to the emotional action, often don’t or can’t. When I finally told a man, a close confidant for decades, about a shatteringly tasteless phone call I’d received from a woman I’d trusted as an intimate, I was instantly cheered to hear his cut-through assessment of what she’d done and why. But he added bemusedly, “I don’t know why women say these things to each other.”

Well, I don’t know why, either, but author Deborah Tannen can provide clues. Tannen, a linguistics professor at Washington’s Georgetown University, has written several bestselling books about men and women, beginning with You Just Don’t Understand in 1990. Her 2017 book, You’re The Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships, is acute on the subject of secrets.

For it, Tannen interviewed 80 women from different world cultures. She says, “For many women and girls, talk is the glue that holds a relationship together. For boys and men, your best friend is the one you do everything with; for girls and women, your best friend is the one you tell everything to…”

One interviewee told Tannen, “When I tell a friend something personal, it’s like saying, ‘Here’s a little piece of me. This means I like you.’ ” Tannen comments, “But what will she do with that piece of you? The wonderful thing is a feeling that you’re not alone in the world …. but that does give them some power over you.”

Over the phone, Tannen tells me she hadn’t wanted that book’s title. “It idealises women’s friendship,” she says. “I wanted to call it Why Didn’t You Tell Me? But I think the publishers wanted to appeal to women buying a gift for friends.”

In it, Tannen notes: “Several women said they prefer men as friends because guys won’t repeat their secrets. I don’t think this is because men are inherently more trustworthy, but because secrets don’t have the currency in boys’ and men’s friendships that they have in girls’ and women’s: men have nothing to gain by repeating secrets.”

She says, “For girls, and later women, being close to a popular girl or a mutual friend confers status. And closeness can be demonstrated to others by showing you know someone’s secrets.”

There are intriguing studies in this trip-wire territory. In 2011, Canadian psychology professor Tracy Vaillancourt published a paper that received international coverage. She and a colleague had conducted tests that revealed, they determined, that women had an innate instinct to behave with hostility towards women they regarded as sexier than themselves. “It resonated with women everywhere,” she tells me from the University of Ottawa, where she is the Canada Research Chair in School-Based Mental Health and Violence Prevention.

The study had recorded women in a laboratory reacting to the same young woman dressed in two different outfits. When she entered in mousy clothing, the women didn’t notice her, but when she wore more revealing clothes, with her long hair loose, they became “mean girls”, rolling their eyes and mocking her afterwards.

Vaillancourt published a 2013 analysis that argued women use this “indirect aggression” as a highly effective tactic in what she calls intrasexual competition strategy: “… the aggressor can also make it appear as if there was ‘no intention to hurt at all’.” Vaillancourt, whose research is ongoing, says now, “The competitiveness is pervasive. Women across the world speak about this.”

This is where confidences suffer. “The trading of secrets and betrayal of confidants are core examples of indirect aggression,” Vaillancourt says. Her study attracted criticism. One Forbes writer was indignant: “I know that women are often competitive, rude and aggressive to other women,” wrote Meghan Casserly, “but to me, adding credibility to these stereotypes … gives artillery to our detractors …”

The feminist website Jezebel cited experts questioning the findings. Vaillancourt was amused: “How do we change something if we won’t acknowledge it? … When they attack me, they tend to use the same indirect aggression I’m writing about. You can attack the science but you don’t have to be mean about it.”

What I’m left wondering is: how do we choose a good confidant? Schweitzer says his research with colleagues produced a simple equation: certain people are more prone to feeling guilt. “And these people will be more trustworthy,” Schweitzer tells me. “They worry about letting people down, so they work harder to avoid anything that will make them feel guilty.” They don’t like missing deadlines, making mistakes, spilling red wine on the host’s white carpet. They go out of their way to avoid being put in those situations. “They will choose white wine,” he says with a laugh.

In one Wharton podcast, Schweitzer explains that while trustworthiness is hard to judge – we’re taken in by a baby face or charisma – it’s far easier to assess if someone is guilt-prone. And those people “tend to be really conscientious in ways that then fulfil people’s trust”.

Something odd happened as I wrote this story: I became addicted to Friends. I’d hardly watched it but now my subconscious pushed me towards Monica, Chandler, Joey, Phoebe, Ross and Rachel. Friends deals with almost all the situations addressed above, but with humour.

The characters’ secrets and self-deceptions are outed. Transgressors – they all transgress – are shamed. Fragility, fickleness and folly are mined for laughs. Then the characters try to do better. For me, wading in the murk of human secrecy, it was light relief.

But maybe the very existence of secrets proves that most of us, like the characters in Friends, do know we should and can behave better. Celia Moore quotes American social psychologist Anthony Greenwald, that “humans have a deep-seated need to see themselves in a positive light”, to be the hero of our own narratives when we have been anything but.

She says as a psychologist (rather than as an anthropologist), she doesn’t know why, except it is so and we agree it’s a very good thing. “Society benefits when people are moral,” she says. But she adds the kicker, “Individuals benefit when they aren’t.”

Which, unfortunately, is the fastest way to understand why humans invented secrecy in the first place.

Lifeline: 13 11 14

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