We may cringe at influencers and friends who let it all hang out, but research shows that keeping quiet might be worse
D
o you recoil at oversharers on social media, or joke among your friends about “TMI”? I know I do. But while mocking public confession comes easy, it’s harder to appreciate the risks of normalising silence: withheld anxieties, unspoken family histories, and the little omissions that make workplaces and relationships brittle. The instinct to pour scorn on “attention seekers” may be masking a deeper public-health problem: chronic concealment.
For much of my career as an academic I made a living scolding people about privacy. I lectured on digital hygiene, warned audiences about the ways social media amplifies folly, and played the role of the wary scientist: don’t put your passwords in a document, don’t take quizzes that leak your intimate preferences, don’t broadcast things you can’t take back. I was a walking contradiction, though. Privately, I did online quizzes for fun. I kept a notepad of passwords on my desktop. I knew the rules and, like many of us, I broke them.
That cognitive dissonance eventually stopped being tolerable. When I stepped back to look at the broader patterns that have emerged from research – not just on privacy but on disclosure, trust and health – I saw something surprising. The consistent signal wasn’t that humans are inveterate oversharers; it was that we are underexposing the things that matter. We were treating silence as a default virtue. But that default has costs.
