"On average, every person has 13 secrets"

SZ-Magazin: Mr. Slepian, how do you research something that people prefer to keep to themselves? Michael Slepian: When they participate in the studies conducted by my team and me, people don't automatically have to share their secrets with us. For many experiments, for example, it's enough for them to think intensely about a secret that's important to them. To find out what kind of secrets people keep, we created a list of 38 categories of secrets. These range from theft and abortion to sexual infidelity within a relationship. Here, people can anonymously state which of these experiences they have had and whether they have told anyone else about them. In the course of my research, I interviewed more than 50,000 people. On average, each person has 13 secrets. Five of these we don't share with anyone. The other eight we reveal only to a few select individuals.