Why You Reveal More Than You Know You Should

It was late last night. You’d had a rough day at work, and you’d come home exhausted, both physically and mentally. You were still upset about that incident in the office, so you had a couple of drinks and went onto social media to unwind. While you were there, you let your friends know just what you think about your boss and coworkers.

It felt so good at the time to let out all that pent-up frustration. But now, in the cold light of morning, you’ve got that sinking feeling of regret. You know you revealed more than you should have, and now you’re afraid it’s going to come around to bite you.

We think we prize our privacy—and yet people frequently disclose personal information that may not be in their best interest. This is a fact of human behavior that psychologists have struggled to explain.

The Costs and Benefits of Revealing Private Information

According to traditional views on privacy-related behaviors, people should carefully consider each piece of personal information, only revealing it if the benefit of doing so outweighs the cost. Since people often disregard costs and benefits when revealing personal information, there’s obviously a problem with the traditional explanation. Perhaps, Carnegie Mellon University psychologists Erin Carbone and George Loewenstein suggest, people do in fact weigh the costs and benefits, but not in the way psychologists have assumed.

In an article they recently published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, Carbone and Loewenstein argue that we all have a drive to disclose that works just like other drives, such as those for hunger, thirst, and sex. In other words, we have a fundamental need to reveal information about ourselves to others. That means that when people decide to disclose something private on a given occasion, the costs and benefits center on satisfying that drive in the moment rather than long-term consequences.

The Carrot and the Stick of Drives

According to Carbone and Loewenstein, drives work by the stick-and-carrot approach. The stick is the unpleasant feeling that we experience when a drive is not met. When we’re hungry, thirsty, or horny, we feel uncomfortable, and we can think only of satisfying that need.

The carrot, then, is the pleasure we experience when we do satisfy a drive. Orgasm may be the greatest pleasure we humans can experience, but the satisfaction of a good meal is a close second. Of course, drives care only about the here and now and not the future, and we may soon regret that particular sexual encounter or the kind of food we ate.

Disclosing personal information works the same way, Carbone and Loewenstein argue. Holding back secrets can be troubling, and, in fact, doing so can lead to long-term physical and psychological health problems. There is also the pleasurable sense of relief we feel when we can finally get something off our chest.

When we open up to a trusted friend or counselor, we can gain the benefits of disclosure while incurring no social costs. But when we reveal private information to strangers on the internet, we may feel relief in the moment, but the long-term social costs are quite likely going to outweigh that momentary pleasure. In this way, disclosing too much on social media is a lot like ill-advised drunken sex or gorging on junk food—such acts may satisfy a drive, but not in a healthy way.

The Drive to Disclose in Our Evolutionary Past, And Now

The evolutionary rationale behind most drives is obvious. We need to eat and drink to survive, and we need to have sex to get our genes into the next generation. But why would we have evolved a drive to disclose?

For most of human existence, our ancestors lived in small groups of 100-150, in which everyone knew everyone and many people were related to each other. When individual survival depends on coordinating group activities, candor is essential. Besides, when you spend your whole life in the same small group, there really are no secrets anyway, so it’s best to be open.

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But nowadays we live in a world of strangers, and we never know for sure who we can trust and who wants to take advantage of us. In other words, privacy is a need that arises from our modern, anonymous lifestyle, and as such, evolutionary psychology suggests that we have no innate cognitive mechanisms for dealing with it. Instead, we have to exercise willpower to keep from making personal disclosures that would have been appropriate in the days of our hunter-gatherer ancestors but are totally inappropriate in modern society.

Even though our drives are often a mismatch for our lifestyle today, there’s no way we can curb them entirely. If we want to live a healthy life, we need to choose nutritious foods to satisfy our hunger drive, and we have to find dependable mates to meet our sexual needs. Likewise, we have to acknowledge our drive to disclose, but we should also find safe channels for meeting that need to reveal ourselves to others.