Why It Feels So Good to Confess

When you’ve committed a behavior you’re not very proud of, the chances are you’ll try to close your eyes and make it go away. It can be tough on your sense of yourself as an upright individual to confront the fact that you didn’t live up to your inner moral compass. Confessions clearly have a long history in the Catholic Church, but even in a nonreligious context, they seem to have a certain value. A fictional criminal may seem so tortured by their guilt that they put give up their freedom in order to achieve moral relief. You only have to conjure up an image of Lady Macbeth, who famously was plagued by her obsessive need to get out the “damned spot.”

Even noncriminal, but morally questionable, behavior can lead individuals to feel compelled to come forward. CNN’s Jeff Zucker’s announcement of a long-term undisclosed relationship with a coworker provides just one such example.

In your own life, what past dubious acts weighed on your mind until you revealed them to others? Despite facing whatever consequences these involved, was there a part of you that felt better to get the misdeed off your chest?

According to London Business School’s Beth Anne Helgason and Jonathan Lev Berman (2022), the desire to think of yourself as “good and moral” is an integral part of your identity. “Confessing to a past misdeed can threaten that reputation” (p. 1). The strong bias that leads people to see themselves in a favorable light can compete with the equally strong desire to relieve the guilt associated with a violation of that component of the self. Indeed, as the British authors maintain, your inner sense of morality is more than a small part of your identity. Because you see your identity as “particularly consistent,” “even wrongdoings from the distant past can leave a lasting stain on an individual’s reputation” (p. 2).

Identity and the Need to Confess

If that consistent sense of self becomes threatened by knowledge of your past transgressions, Helgason and Berman propose that one way to allow yourself to admit to them and move on would be to distance yourself psychologically from the “you” who committed the action to the “you” you are now. Thinking back on an act of which you’re not particularly proud, was it something you think you would do now? If you’ve gotten, as the expression goes, “older and wiser,” then putting that act in the long-ago past can serve to compartmentalize it while preserving your identity.

The second component of admitting to a past misdeed next comes into play when you come up with the reason for this action. Do you emit a litany of excuses and self-justifications, or do you allow the facts to speak for themselves? The British research team proposes that you’ll be less likely to enumerate all the reasons other than your own naughtiness if you see yourself as a different person than you were in the past. It’s not just the confession itself, as they say, but the cover-up that could matter even more.

Testing the Identity–Confession Connection

There is previous research supporting the idea that people who ultimately confess to bad behavior will go to great lengths to see themselves as different than they were then. Their memories of that behavior will, for example, shift it to further in the past. If they’re engaging in the behavior now, they will also create a “future self” whom they see as being ethically stronger.

If the shifting landscape between past, present, and future self reflects a desire to preserve a positive sense of identity, the British researchers wondered if they could intervene in this process and study what happens when they interrupted the flow of continuity across people's past and present self.

In the first of four studies, the authors used a simple manipulation in which they asked their online sample of adult participants to reflect on how they’ve changed or how they stayed the same since high school. After writing their responses in an open-ended text box, participants next indicated whether they’d like to confess to any past deeds. For the final part of the study, participants then rated themselves on a 1-to-7 scale to indicate how much they’ve changed.

This two-stage study allowed the research team to measure whether reflecting on identity change prompted a higher confession rate and then, secondly, whether the recall of the confession stimulated greater postconfession identity change. The findings bore out this part of the research team’s predictions.

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For the next experiment, the researchers began with the identity change manipulation but then, instead of asking for an open-ended confession, they gave participants a chance to confess to a set of six standard misdeeds reflecting high-school behaviors. For each of these, try on your own to think about whether you’d admit (on a 1-to-5 scale) to the following:

1. Copying someone else's homework
2. Gossiping about other students
3. Underage drinking
4. Making fun of other students
5. Lying to your parents
6. Disrespecting a teacher

How did you score? On average, participants in the identity-change condition indeed admitted to significantly more of these misdeeds than those in the identity-no change condition, though the absolute number of confessions was low (2.19 vs. 2.01). If you’re wondering which high school “sin” was most highly endorsed, it might not surprise you to learn that “lie to parents” received the strongest rating (close to 4 for the identity-change condition). As in the first study, participants in the identity-change condition who confessed also perceived themselves to have changed more since high school.

In the final study, participants who admitted to a misdeed (who were, again, more likely to be in the identity-change condition) rated what the research team called their “moral disengagement.” Think back on your own high-school misdeed, whatever that was, and rate yourself on these statements:

• I shouldn’t be blamed for what I did because many others do it, too.
• What I did is no big deal when you consider what others do in high school.
• It is OK to do what I did because other things people do are much worse.
• What I did was OK because I really didn’t do any harm.

The findings bore out the identity-change prediction as well, with a nearly two-point (out of six) differential in rates of moral disengagement.

How to Take Advantage of the Benefits of Confession

As you can see from the Helgason–Berman study, it’s easier to confess to even a relatively minor misdeed if you can put psychological distance between your past and current self. Although the high-school misdeeds were hardly equal to, for example, those in the popular show "Yellowjackets," they were enough to engage the machinery of identity self-preservation.

Returning to the initial question, the study’s findings suggest that the reason it feels so good to confess is that it allows you to reconnect to this fundamental aspect of your identity. You can finally feel that all-important sense of continuity in thinking of yourself across the years, if not decades. In the process, you learn to accept yourself, moral flaws and all, and to accept that life involves both challenge and change.

To sum up, this study’s authors, writing from the perspective of social psychology, tried to predict how perceived identity change would make a no-excuse confession more likely to occur. As you navigate your own reckoning with your past, this kind of confession can allow you to gain the kind of self-acceptance that ultimately can lead to a more fulfilling, and honest, identity.