The interpersonal costs of revealing others' secrets

People often keep relevant information secret from others. For example, an employee might keep a coworker's plan to quit without giving notice secret from their manager, or someone might keep a friend's affair secret from their friend's spouse. In this article, we identify a critical but overlooked factor that determines whether an actor will disclose secret information they know about another person: Impression management concerns about how other people will judge their decision to disclose or keep the secret. We conceptualize secret-keeping as social decisions that involve the focal actor (who could keep or disclose a secret), the partner (the focus of the secret), the audience (interested in learning the secret information), and external observers (who may observe if the focal actor disclosed the secret). Across four pre-registered studies, including real-world judgments of secret-keeping dilemmas (field data from a Reddit community; N = 332), a recall study (N = 200), and controlled experiments (N = 624), we describe how impression management concerns influence secret-keeping decisions. We find that focal actors are often judged harshly for disclosing others' secrets, even when the audience could derive substantial benefits from learning the information and even when observers judge disclosure to be more moral than keeping a secret. Focal actors are heavily influenced by impression management concerns and routinely keep partners' secrets from an audience who could benefit from the information. Taken together, impression management concerns act as significant impediments to the flow of information, advancing our understanding of both information flows within groups and secret-keeping dilemmas.