By: Tess Chlebek, Sinead Howley, Kate Bohlman
In journalism, we decided to conduct a social experiment about anonymous people’s secrets. In this experiment, we got MIS students of various ages from as young as 9 to the oldest being 15 to submit their “darkest” or most bothersome secrets anonymously and voluntarily. We then selected a few for other people to read aloud and react to.
We prompted the readers by asking them various questions to get them thinking about the secret’s content and focus on how the secrets typically varied as the age increased. It was particularly interesting to see people’s reactions to the age of the student who wrote the secret. We initially kept that anonymous and got them to estimate how old they thought the person was based on their secret before comparing. In our video is that the ages were mostly correct or similar.
Another aspect we focused on was how they felt about the fact the person who wrote the secret felt the need to keep that information inside and not tell anyone else. The students and teachers on campus also gave advice to the kids that wrote the secrets after giving their overall view on them.
The purpose of this video is to remove the taboo aspect of secrecy in general, we are never taught about secrecy and how in some cases keeping an excessive number of secrets is linked to anxiety, sometimes depression and overall dissatisfaction in certain relationships. Keeping secrets can have a huge effect on a person’s mental health and even from a young age how to handle or deal with secrets is never really discussed or exposed to people. In a way this experiment was a way for some people to get one of their secrets off their chest and hopefully as you can see in the video, the way people positively reacted to the secrets that occur on campus. In hope to give people the confidence to talk to the people close to them about certain secrets they felt the need to hide in the first place.
It is important to remember and take away from the video that these secrets are all things that are related to someone in school and a sign that you may not always fully know what someone around you is going through and therefore how important it is to build relationships with healthy communication so that you have at least one person to seek advice and help from.