Impostor syndrome is the often irrational belief that one does not deserve one’s results: successes are attributed to luck or errors in judgment, minimizing one’s abilities. Those who suffer from it live with the constant fear of being “discovered”, as if they were the creator of a scam. At the basis of this syndrome there is a mix between perfectionism and fear of failure, which make the contrast between what one is and what one should be unacceptable.
Impostor syndrome: making it without really believing it
Impostor syndrome is not a real psychopathological disorder, but a distortion of thinking: despite obtaining brilliant and evident results, one has the belief that one is “cheating”, as if one’s success were an error of judgment. Those who suffer from it tend to attribute their merits to luck, timing and the support of others, rather than to their own abilities. The consequence is to live in constant fear that sooner or later you will be “exposed”, fueling anxiety, chronic doubt and feelings of guilt for enjoying merits that you are not up to.
It is common to detect this distortion among people who occupy important social and work positions, who have already demonstrated ability and talent. Yet “the impostor”, despite the concrete evidence of his value, continues to question himself as if the results obtained were never truly deserved. He does not experience the successes achieved with serenity and satisfaction because:
- he is convinced that he is an impostor and that he is deceiving others regarding his talent;
- he continually fears being exposed in his “scam”;
- if he achieves a goal, he believes he is not truly up to it and belittles himself by attributing the causes of success to external and fortuitous variables;
- feels that he or she does not deserve promotions or career advancement and feels guilty about his or her awards;
- if he receives compliments, he belittles them by making fun of himself;
- obvious work or training successes are not internalized and therefore are not enough to positively reevaluate one’s talent;
- he is very focused and inflexible on his own presumed shortcomings and intransigent towards possible errors;
- he continually compares himself with others, who are perceived as increasingly better and better prepared.
To give some concrete examples, you could think of a student who always gets top marks, but who says in his head: “it only happens because this faculty is really easy”. Or a professional who is hired for an important role might think: “I got the job because there was no other candidate, it was just luck.”
Even Albert Einstein confessed to feeling like a “willful fraud”: he said that people overestimated him and that sooner or later, they would discover the “truth”.
The origins of impostor syndrome
The term “imposter syndrome” was born in 1978, when psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described the phenomenon for the first time, studying some successful women: they were managers, scientists and academics who, despite having a solid career behind them, struggled to perceive themselves as deserving of their goals. The two scholars noticed that these women found countless ways to deny any external evidence that contradicted their belief that they were, in reality, not very competent. Furthermore, many of them feared that sooner or later some people might discover that they were “intellectual impostors”. The most frequently reported clinical symptoms were generalized anxiety, lack of self-confidence, depression and frustration.
In this study, Clance and Imes focused on an important social aspect: in the Seventies, society still struggled to accept the image of women as endowed with competence and ambition, the dominant female ideal was still the one limited to the domestic and subordinate sphere, where it was easy to internalize the message of “not being able to belong” to certain successful environments. The psychologists wanted to demonstrate that impostor syndrome also arose from a culture that delegitimized female achievement, transforming doubt into guilt and competence into suspicion.
In fact, the observations revealed that women tended to attribute their successes to temporary variables, such as luck or commitment, unlike men who were much more inclined to attribute it to their own abilities. Furthermore, the female share tended to explain failure by lack of ability, while the male share more often by luck or the difficulty of the task. They therefore concluded that because women’s success did not fit with social expectations and internalized self-evaluations, women needed to find an explanation for their successes other than their own intelligence (e.g. by deceiving others or by an error in judgment). Even their repeated successes weren’t enough to break the cycle.
Impostor syndrome today: beyond the cultural question
Although impostor syndrome still affects, or at least is verbalized, more by women than by men, numerous more recent studies show us how this cognitive distortion can also affect men. Indeed, the male gender was found to have worse psychological reactions than the female gender. In particular, what has been observed is:
- following a feedback negative, men experienced higher levels of stress and anxiety than the female study group; furthermore, it was observed that women put in more effort and achieved marginally better performance when they received a critical comment;
- the male gender also reduced their commitment and obtained worse results than the female gender in highly responsible tasks.
What the scholars wanted to highlight (and they succeeded!) is the fact that we can go beyond the cultural and social model of impostor syndrome, highlighting how men can also be affected by it, regardless of the ways in which it manifests itself. In fact, recent research has found it in 62% of the mixed population sampled, therefore including the male gender. The symptoms most associated with impostor syndrome are: anxiety, depression, stress and burnout.
Causes of impostor syndrome
In the original study, Clance and Imes attempted to explain the origin of impostor syndrome. First they investigated the family history of the sampled women and essentially divided them into two groups: in the first there are women who have a brother, sister or close relative designated as an “intelligent” member of the family, in the second they themselves were considered highly competent and brilliant in every respect.
- In the first case it was observed that already since school, despite numerous educational successes, the family did not seem impressed and continued to attribute greater competence to the “brilliant” sister/brother, whose academic performance was often lower than the comparison. On the one hand, women continued to look for ways to gain confirmation of their intellectual competence, on the other, they thought their family might be right, secretly doubted their own intelligence, and began to wonder whether they had gotten their high grades due to teachers’ sensitivity or expectations, social skills, or feminine charm. Thus the phenomenon of the impostor emerged.
- In the second, women were given the idea that there was nothing they couldn’t do if they wanted to, and they could do it with ease. They were told numerous examples of how they had demonstrated their precociousness as newborns and children. In the eyes of their family members they were perfect. The girls, however, began to have experiences where they couldn’t do everything they wanted to do and where they had difficulty achieving certain goals. Yet they felt compelled to meet their family’s expectations, even though they knew they couldn’t continue like this forever. Because they were praised indiscriminately for everything, they began to distrust what their parents thought of them. Furthermore, they also started to doubt themselves. Consequently, during their school days, doubts about their abilities intensified: although they did exceptional work, they still had to study to achieve good results; However, having internalized her parents’ definition of brilliance as “perfection with ease” and realizing that they could not live up to this standard, they came to the conclusion that they were “stupid.” They were not geniuses, therefore, they must have been intellectual impostors.
The sense of falsity for both groups was further reinforced by the difference between high achievement and low social expectations. The image of women as intellectually false was in line with the social view that, at the time, they were not considered competent. If a woman achieved great results, it could not be thanks to her own abilities, but it had to be by a stroke of luck. If she had recognized her own competence, she would have had to go against the views perpetuated by an entire society – far too ambitious an undertaking!
To date, among the most recognized causes of impostor syndrome, net of the social influences of the times, the same early family dynamics observed by Clance and Imes remain mostly:
- On the one hand there are hyper-demanding parents, who burden their children with high expectations and condition their personal value on the achievement of impeccable results. In these contexts, the child learns early that to be loved or approved he must “perform,” not simply “be.” Over time, this translates into rigid perfectionism, a constant fear of making mistakes and a need for control that make it impossible to truly feel good enough. Every success, rather than strengthening self-esteem, becomes a temporary test to be defended.
- At the other extreme, we find devaluing or comparative parents, who tend to minimize their child’s achievements or compare them with brothers and sisters considered more “brilliant”. In these cases the implicit message is that you are never enough. The child grows up with a distorted perception of his own value, developing low self-esteem and a fragile sense of self-efficacy, that is, the belief that he is not really capable even in the face of evidence.
Both dynamics, although opposite to each other, lead to the same result: an adult who struggles to internalize his successes, tends to doubt his own skills and experiences every recognition as something undeserved. In short, the fertile ground for impostor syndrome.
