A few years ago on this show, we spoke to a psychologist whose research focused on secrets.

Michael Slepian and his colleagues at Columbia University had discovered that at any given moment,

the average adult is keeping

13 secrets. Our culture frowns on oversharing, and we tend to worry that blurting out highly

personal or embarrassing details about our lives will hurt our reputations. But could there also be a

cost to undersharing? From KERA in Dallas, this is think.

I'm Chris Boyd.

It turns out there can be real social benefits to disclosing things about who we really are

and what we truly think.

Although it's counterintuitive, my guest's research has found that choosing to make

ourselves a little vulnerable by opening up

can actually make us seem more appealing, even more trustworthy to people around us. Leslie John is

James E. Burke, Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and author of the

book Revealing the Underrated Power of Oversharing. Leslie, welcome to think. Thanks so much for having me.

So oversharing is underrated. I had typically thought of oversharing as the kind of cringe-worthy,

unsolicited release of highly personal information that nobody wants to hear. Your definition is

a little more expansive.

Yes, it sure is. I mean, oversharing is alive and well in the form of what you just alluded to,

saying things that offend people or saying cringy things that you have no place in saying.

But I think even those things that

are overshares technically, what I've discovered is that there's often even redemption

in some of these outrageous blurts or social faux pas that we sometimes make. What makes sometimes more disclosure than we're immediately comfortable with such a powerful

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