How much should you reveal to your co-workers

0:00Today on Nudge, I'm interviewing a Harvard professor with a guilty pleasure. One of my guilty pleasures is that I like watching beauty contests, like there's so much psychology in it and who doesn't love looking at beautiful women in beautiful gowns? That's Leslie John, author of the brilliant book, Revealing. I'm Leslie John, I'm a behavioural scientist and a professor at the Harvard Business School. In her book, Leslie mentions the 1997 Miss Universe final. Ladies, this is your last round of competition. 1997 competition. It comes down to the final question at the end, and it's super high stress.

0:40It's a one shot. There's three candidates at the end, and there's one question. They each ask the same question in front of a live audience. I will ask each of you the same question, and you'll have 20 seconds to respond. And then they're whisked away into the soundproof booth, so they can't hear the other's answers. So that Miss USA and Miss Trinidad will not hear this. Can I ask both of you to wait in our soundproof booth? Thank you very much. So first of all, to set it up, it comes down to Miss Venezuela, Miss Trinidad and Tobago and Miss USA. And the question is, Here's the final question.

1:16If there were no rules in your life for one day and you could be outrageous, what would you do? Of course, said in this like cheesy announcer voice. And people's answers to me revealed what I call the Goldilocks principle, which is finding that sweet spot between TMI, too much information, and TLI, or what I call too little information. It can often be kind of really gossamer thin. And their answers revealed really much mastering this space or not mastering it as the case may be. So Miss Venezuela said...

1:57Miss Venezuela answers in Spanish before her translator announces her answer to the American audience. I think I would simply take a trip. I would travel around the world. I would go to Israel. And since it would be in one day, I would just magically travel from place to place to place. And that was kind of, that was TLI, too little information. That was womp womp, like, okay, whatever, like not very interesting, not reveal-y at all. Miss Trinidad and Tobago said, I won't wear clothes. I mean, clothes, I mean, it's necessary because we know that we have to be private and all that. But if we had no rules, I would want to be free.

2:43And I'm sure everybody else would. Thank you, Miss Trinidad and Tobago. That didn't go well over well for the conservative beauty queen crowd, right? And so there was kind of like the absence of excitement over that response and then she noticed it and she's like oh but you know it's important to wear clothes and everything like she tries to backpedal and save it but too late tmi and then out comes miss usa in this spunky i mean i just love the gowns this spunky faux midriff bearing royal blue and what she says is she says it looks super unfiltered and she said, I would eat everything in the world.

3:25You do not understand.

3:28Leslie John: I would eat everything twice. Thank you, Miss USA. It just was so perfect, right? Because it is reveal-y. It is edgy. Like for a beauty queen to admit, yeah, it's hard. I want to eat. I deprive myself. And so that was just the perfect sweet spot for that crowd. And who won? Miss USA.

3:58And then I ran a little study myself, which is so fun. I love my job where I showed participants clips of the three candidates. And I asked them, you know, how trustworthy are they? How much do like them. And of course, people liked Miss USA the best. There's a subtle art to knowing how much or how little to share. Leslie John has spent her career asking people the most taboo, off-putting questions, and she's run studies that reveal how much and how little you should reveal at work. All of that is coming up in today's episode of Nudge.

4:39most businesses have an overwhelming amount of data it's typically scattered across the business in different tools with different teams but because it's scattered no one can use it that is where hubspot come in hubspot connects it all every interaction every support ticket every conversation and they connect it into one platform that every team can work from because when you know more, you grow more. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Hello, you're listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew, and Harvard professor, Leslie John. In her book, Revealing the Surprising Power of Oversharing, Leslie first explains how if you share something revealing with a colleague, a friend, or even a stranger, it can make you more likable.

5:31So when you reveal something sensitive, something a little edgy, you are basically modeling that you trust the person you're revealing it to.

5:43Leslie John: Why? Because saying something a little sensitive requires social risk. When you're on the receiving end of that, we like that. We like it when people trust us and then it causes us to trust them back. So it makes this reciprocal trust. trust. And Leslie has run some rather incredible studies that prove this. As a decision scientist, what I do is I often give people really difficult choices, choices that they probably don't even want to make, and force them to make a choice. And if I've designed the study well, their choice reveals something about human nature. What we did in this study, we were interested in seeing like, Like, how strong is this preference for revealers?

6:26Leslie John: How strong is this tendency to like people who open up? What if they say like kind of bad things? Would we still like them? So we're kind of pushing the boundaries to see how strong the effect is. And so if you were a participant in this study, we would ask you, we'd say, we're going to ask you which of two people you'd rather date. And suppose you would talk to each person privately. And at one point you had asked each, tell me about any STDs you've ever had. I know it's a bit of a weird, like you're not going to start with that, but let's just boil it down because you're busy people. So the first person you say, they say, I have had so many STDs.

7:04Leslie John: Like I have lost track. I have discovered new STDs. I have had all the STDs. So basically like it can't get worse than that answer. The other person, they say, I'm not answering that question. They just simply opt out of answering in a very conspicuous way. And so the question is, would you rather date the revealer in this case or the hider? Do you care to say who you would rather date, Phil? Well, I'll be honest. I said I'd rather date a person riddled with STDs. I can't trust a person who refuses to answer honestly. So, you know, I'd go with the person who I can trust, even though in reality that answer is, Well, it's totally irrational.

7:48Leslie John: Not everyone, but most people again and again, they tend to prefer the revealer. And we thought, wow, what is going on? And that's when we really realized that this mechanism of trust is really foundational. Because when you think about it, we are herd animals. We need connections with others. We need friendships. We need intimate relationships. And the question was why? And what we found was that the central mechanism here is trust. when someone refrains from doing this essential activity trust building activity revealing as in they abstain they hide we view them with contempt so much so that we'd rather date someone we'd rather hire someone we'd rather sit next to the tube besides someone who admits to the thing relative to someone who saliently says they're not doing it leslie found the same bias for revealers in multiple different studies.

8:4589 % of participants preferred to hire someone who admitted to failing an exam over someone who withheld their grades, kept their grades secret. And 85 % of people in a different study were more interested in a colleague who kept a painfully transparent calendar, one that included calendar entries for therapy and colonoscopies, than one that kept their calendar private. And you can see like in the animal kingdom, there's lots of analogues of

9:14Leslie John: animals building trust by taking social risk, by making themselves vulnerable. What's an animal equipment? Well, like puppies, you know, when they arch their back and they expose their bellies, that's a very vulnerable part. They're taking risk. And in so doing, they endear themselves to others. Revealing increases your likability. Leslie teaches this to her students at Harvard every year. But intellectual Harvard undergrads, they aren't always the easiest to persuade. Those with the grades to get into the business school are usually the hardest people to persuade that revealing really works. So to persuade them, Leslie starts each semester with a game.

9:51Leslie John: So I divide the room in two and everybody's going to get a question that they have to talk about with the person beside them, who they typically don't know, which makes it even better. They only know what question their half got. To be clear, Leslie splits the group in half. She tells one half to cover their eyes and then writes on the whiteboard a question for the first group with their eyes open to answer. So half of the room, I assign them secretly to answer the question, what do you like about your job? Womp womp. The other half of the people, I say, you're going to answer this question. You're going to talk about this question.

10:27Leslie John: When is the last time you cried. That also gets a womp womp response, but for different reasons. Like that one is like active eye rolling. People are like looking at me, what are you crazy? And nobody wants to talk about it, but I forced them to do it. And when they do it, then I walk around the room and it's the criers, the people that are talking about crying that are actually laughing and they're having a good time and they're bonding. And the people who got the dud question, why is it a dud question what you like about your job because it doesn't prompt revelation. It doesn't prompt sensitive sharing.

11:00Leslie John: Then I asked them at the end, like, how fun was this? How thought-provoking? How inspiring? And it's the criers that are the ones that are raising their hands. The people forced to talk about the last time they cried are considerably more likely to want to repeat the exercise than those told to talk about their job, which is surprising because evidence suggests that people never want to talk about the last time they cried. This is research by my bestie, Alison Brooks. She gets people to, she studies conversation and she'll get people to rank order how much they want to talk about or little they want to talk about different topics.

11:33Leslie John: Talking about the last time you cried consistently ranks dead lasts. We do not want to talk about this. And yet when we do it, it's pretty amazing. We don't want to reveal much about our deepest thoughts, but when we do, we appreciate it. So we should encourage our friends and colleagues to share a little more. However, there is an important caveat, something counterintuitive that you should know before you ask someone to open up. This was back when I was a doctoral student with my advisor, George Loewenstein and Alessandro Aquisti. What we did was we wandered around campus asking people a series of sensitive questions.

12:10Leslie John: Have you ever plagiarized? Very sensitive academic questions. and what I did was I just varied whether I gave them an assurance upfront. So a third of people got this very strong assurance saying like, we'll treat your answers confidentially. You can trust us. Don't worry. Blah, blah, blah. Very long winded. The next group got like a weak assurance, something more easy breezy. And the third group got no assurance at all. I just went right into it. And what we found is that people revealed the least when they got the strongest assurance, which is very counterintuitive, right? And they revealed the most when they got no assurance at all.

12:52Leslie John: Thinking about it, we realized that, well, this idea of trusting someone, trust must be earned, it must be shown. Strong assurances made people the least comfortable at revealing sensitive information. Instead, people were more willing to reveal when they were given no privacy guarantees at all. To round up, we hate the idea of revealing something to colleagues, but we enjoy it when we do it. We're more likely to reveal if we're told our secrets will not be kept private. We're more likely to date someone who's honest, even about objectively bad things, and miss USA, one miss universe by revealing just the right amount.

13:32But Leslie wasn't done. After the break, she shared how to overcome a fear of spiders and how to increase your happiness. All of that coming up. The Ross Simmons Show is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. I've been following Ross for a while. His podcast is great. And an episode I'd highly recommend is called Mastering Time, Prioritization Over Productivity. He gives some really well thought out tips on how to prioritise your time, including something I care a lot about, which is how a small percentage of your efforts can drive the majority of your results.

14:10So go and listen to The Ross Simmons Show wherever you get your podcasts. Small businesses make up a huge part of the UK economy, but it doesn't always feel like we have a voice. The Federation of Small Businesses exists to change that, and it's one of the reasons I joined. FSB started out more than 50 years ago as a group of self-employed people coming together to campaign against a big tax hike on them. Today, it is a powerful champion of its members' interests, with decision makers right across the country, from the UK government to devolved administrations to elected mayors and local authorities standing up for small businesses and the self-employed on a whole range of issues.

14:47As a member, you can also take part in surveys that directly shape policy decisions, which I love because it really feels like my voice is being heard. Visit get.fsb.org.uk forward slash nudge or click the link in the show notes and use the code nudge to get 10 % off your membership. Hello, welcome back. You're listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. To start the second half of today's show, Leslie shared something which I found rather surprising.

15:14Leslie John: James Pennebaker, a legend in the field, a social psychologist. And what he showed is that when you write down in a diary, for example, just privately things that are bothering you, it enhances your well-being. In this 1986 study, Penny Baker asked people to spend just a few minutes writing honestly about something. And just doing that made people happier. But that was not all. And so one of the classic studies he ran, for example, was he randomized HIV patients to keep a diary, you know, write in it every three days or so for a few weeks, whatever it was. And half of the patients, he said, you know, just write kind of about your day or whatever, didn't give them much instruction.

16:02Leslie John: The other half, he said, try to put words into what is anything that's bothering you. Write about things that trouble you. And that was kind of it. He didn't say like, try to make yourself feel better or try to process it. He just said, write about it. And what he found is that the people that wrote about the things that troubled them, they had better psychological health, but even more strikingly, physiologically, they were healthier. So he took blood samples afterwards and patients who had randomized, right? Randomized to write about what troubled them. They had higher, I think it was T cell counts or white blood cell counts, something like an indicator of better health, better immunity.

16:43Leslie John: And so this suggests like a direct causal link between getting it out, the stuff that bugs you, to our health, our mental and physical health. And that's been replicated many times. It's a small effect and it requires you to comply and all these things, but it's really, really a foundational set of studies. Those HIV patients showed better T cell counts after expressive writing tasks than those who were given a placebo. Penny Baker went on to find that university students who wrote about traumatic events made fewer trips to the health centre. And one 1994 study found that recently unemployed adults found jobs faster after doing some expressive writing tasks.

17:25but you don't even have to write. Just taking the time to put your thoughts and your fears into words can help. Psychologists call this affect labelling.

17:35Leslie John: Affect labelling is a really powerful psychological tool and one that I think is really underappreciated. What it is, is it's just the act of taking those thoughts and feelings and naming them. And Leslie shared a fairly compelling 2012 study from Matthew Lieberman that really showcased the power of affect labeling. Lieberman showed this more directly in the masochistic tradition of social psychology. He brought people into the lab and brought a huge tarantula in. Yes, I said a tarantula, like big, hairy, creepy tarantula. And for some people, he basically just said, here it is like try to make yourself less stressed out like do whatever you can to cope the key group he said the affect labeling he he said to them whatever you're feeling put words on it label label those feelings and then a few days later he brought them back and he brought back the tarantula and he measured how stressed they were how anxious and sure enough it was the group that had labelled their feelings earlier that were less stressed.

18:44A week after the initial tarantula experience, the researchers exposed participants to another tarantula. Then they measured participants' anxiety levels by actually measuring their sweaty palms. And only the effect labelling group showed reduced anxiety. In other words, it was only those who had practised putting their fears into words who ended up coping better.

19:08Leslie John: One of the things I love about this is you don't need to try to sense make. You don't need to try to process your feelings. What the heck does that mean? I don't even know how I would go about doing that. All you have to do is take the things and put words on it. And then Lieberman and others have shown if you are in the presence of someone else that is a confidant, a friend, a loved one, if you say it to them, the effects are even stronger of the benefit of opening up in this way, the therapeutic benefit. Disclosing our feelings to ourselves by writing them down really helps. Disclosing them to others is even better.

19:42It can really help us overcome our fears. But can it make us happier?

19:47Leslie John: What we did in this study with Ximena García-Rada, Christina Brandt, and Mario Small, first we measured how often people avoid difficult topics. And it's really common to avoid talking about hard things. I get it. And so what we did is we forced people to do it. We assigned them. Half of people we assigned, go talk about this, whatever issue you brought up to us, go talk about it with a loved one, see us again in 24 hours. And the other half of people, we did not make that assignment. They came back 24 hours or so later and we measured how they felt about the issue. We measured their general wellbeing, their general happiness, and all of those measures improved by having talked about it.

20:29Leslie John: And yet people think and prospect that it's not going to be good. And I'm not saying it's easy to talk about these things. In fact, sometimes even in the moment, it feels difficult. But the long game suggests that it actually really does help you be happier once you do it. Again, with the caveats up with the right person, the right time and all these things. All right. Lots of compelling evidence here that disclosure can improve your life. But I wanted to end today's episode with a fairly ridiculous study. Yeah, this is one of my favorite studies ever. One of the first studies I ran actually as a doctoral student, it's called How Bad Are You?

21:08Leslie John: And so what we did was this was this like online survey where we asked people a bunch of sensitive questions. You know, have you ever cheated on a partner? Have you ever filed a false insurance claim, like some illegal stuff too. And all we varied was the look and feel of the survey. So some people had like a pretty bare-boned looking survey. Other people had a survey that looked completely ridiculous. It had this banner called How Bad Are You? And it looked super amateur hour, like terrible, like comic sans, weird font, inconsistent sizes. There was like a bitmap graphic of a devil. Like it was just like, it was like if an amateur, like if I designed a website.

21:48Leslie John: and we designed it to be representative of the kinds of websites that do not protect your information. So there's a whole body of research in human computer interaction, which looks at like, how is the look and feel of websites related to their actual security or lack thereof? And so things like weird colors, weird fonts, low quality graphics are highly indicative of a website that doesn't protect your data. So we're like, objectively, you should not share on this site. And yet, we found that people were twice as likely to admit these sensitive things on the crazy how bad are you site relative to one that was more buttoned up.

22:25Leslie writes that the site felt like a joke, which made confessions feel oddly fun, even though many of the questions asked about behavior that was clearly wrong and even illegal. But the humor made people open up. It's a reminder that playfulness can lower inhibitions for better and for worse. Today we've covered that revealing personal info makes you more likeable, privacy promises backfire, and writing or naming your fears boosts your health and your mood. But the thing I'll remember is that Miss University competition, and how too little disclosure makes you appear guarded, but too much disclosure can make you seem reckless.

23:03The winner, Miss USA, struck that perfect balance, open enough to seem warm and genuine, but measured enough to stay classy. That's the real lesson from Leslie's work. Disclosure isn't about sharing everything or nothing, it's about revealing just the right amount.

23:24Massive, massive thank you to Leslie for coming on today's show. I really, really highly recommend checking out her book Revealing. It's a great read, not only because Leslie, well she packs it with these great studies, but also because she reveals a lot about her own life and her work in the book, which just makes it far more readable. It's a really good book. And there is a link to pick up Leslie's book in the show notes. Now, on today's show, we have covered a number of insights about human psychology. But of course, there are many, many more insights that you can use when you're thinking about human psychology to improve your business or to improve your marketing as well.

23:58I've spent the past eight years reading studies, books, peer reviewed papers to find all of these insights and I've documented them all in my brand new product. It is called the Nudge Vaults. The Nudge Vaults contains over 600 insights into the science behind great business and great marketing. If you'd like to access the Nudge Vaults or just learn a bit more, then go to nudgepodcast.com forward slash vaults. That is nudgepodcast.com forward slash vaults, or you can just click the link in the show notes of today's episode. If you do that, you can preview your first 50 insights for free. You can check it out.

24:34You can see if it's for you. And there's no catch, really. If you like it, you can subscribe. If not, well, you can ignore it. That is all from me today. Thanks again to Leslie for joining me on today's episode of Nudge. I'll be back next Monday for another episode. Cheers.