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Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved December 7, 2015 (received for review August 24, 2015)
Significance
Disclosure is a critical element of social life, especially given Internet media that afford many opportunities (and demands from friends, partners, and even employers) to share personal information—making withholding anomalous, conspicuous, and therefore suspect. Seven experiments explore people’s decisions to withhold or disclose personal information—and the wisdom of such decisions. Declining a request to disclose often makes a worse impression even than divulging unsavory personal information. Moreover, those who withhold fail to intuit this negative consequence: people withhold even when they would make a better impression by “coming clean.” In short, people should be aware not just of the risk of revealing, but the risk of hiding.
Abstract
Seven experiments explore people’s decisions to share or withhold personal information, and the wisdom of such decisions. When people choose not to reveal information—to be “hiders”—they are judged negatively by others (experiment 1). These negative judgments emerge when hiding is volitional (experiments 2A and 2B) and are driven by decreases in trustworthiness engendered by decisions to hide (experiments 3A and 3B). Moreover, hiders do not intuit these negative consequences: given the choice to withhold or reveal unsavory information, people often choose to withhold, but observers rate those who reveal even questionable behavior more positively (experiments 4A and 4B). The negative impact of hiding holds whether opting not to disclose unflattering (drug use, poor grades, and sexually transmitted diseases) or flattering (blood donations) information, and across decisions ranging from whom to date to whom to hire. When faced with decisions about disclosure, decision-makers should be aware not just of the risk of revealing, but of what hiding reveals.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: ljohn{at}hbs.edu.
Author contributions: L.K.J. generated the idea; L.K.J., K.B., and M.I.N. designed research; L.K.J. and K.B. performed research; L.K.J. and K.B. analyzed data; and L.K.J., K.B., and M.I.N. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1516868113/-/DCSupplemental.
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