A hush has fallen over the workplace. At tech startups and banks, in doctors’ offices and law firms, workers are increasingly being asked to keep secrets. These aren’t personal confidences but organizational secrets about clients, proprietary technologies, or business strategies. Sometimes employees are required to keep this information from the public. Other times, they’re asked to keep it from people within their organization and even members of their own team.

Nir Halevy, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, notes that while organizational secret-keeping has become more common, we know very little about how it affects the secret-keepers. In a new paper, he sets out to find an answer.

 …