In and out of the workplace, people often keep adverse information about themselves secret because they worry that others will judge them harshly. But those fears are overblown, according to new research from the McCombs School of Business.
In and out of the workplace, people often keep adverse information about themselves secret because they worry that others will judge them harshly. But those fears are overblown, according to new research from the McCombs School of Business.
The work is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
In fact, when study participants pushed through fear to reveal a secret, those in whom they confided were significantly more charitable than they expected.
« When we’re thinking about conveying negative information about ourselves, we’re focused on the content of the message, » said study co-author Amit Kumar, assistant professor of marketing at Texas McCombs. « But the recipients are thinking about the positive traits required to reveal this secret, such as trust, honesty, and vulnerability. »
Kumar cites several key takeaways from the 12 experiments in his paper, co-authored with Michael Kardas of Oklahoma State University and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago.
Researchers asked several groups to imagine revealing a negative secret and to predict how another person would judge them.
