Katharine (Katie) Greenaway is a Senior Lecturer in social psychology at the University of Melbourne (katharinegreenaway.com). Katie completed her PhD at the University of Queensland before being awarded a fellowship with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and later an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award. Katie is currently funded by an ARC Future Fellowship. Katie’s research aims to understand how people form social connections, and what benefits these connections have for people’s well-being and social lives. For this work, Katie has received multiple awards for early career research excellence and has attracted $1.8 million in grant funding.

Why do we keep secrets? To whom do we tell our secrets? What happens when we reveal a secret? These are only some of the questions that psychologists have begun to investigate on the topic of secrecy. The current state of the science suggests that secrecy has a negative psychological impact – but can nevertheless be positive; that confiding secrets hurts other people – but can also help them; and that revealing a secret can have bad outcomes – but also good ones. In this talk, I’ll explore these apparent contradictions and broadly discuss thepsychology of secrecy.