What People Get Wrong About Imposter Syndrome

Do you ever:

• Feel like a phony?
• Dread other people evaluating you?
• Fear that people will discover that you’re not as competent as they think you are?
• Attribute your successes to luck and your failures to incompetence?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, then you might be experiencing imposter syndrome.

There is no single, universally used definition of imposter syndrome, but here's something that is generally agreed upon:

Someone experiences imposter syndrome when they doubt their abilities and feel like a fraud, despite having the relevant abilities.

Other aspects of imposter syndrome (such as attributing success to luck and failure to incompetence or fearing that people will discover that you are a fraud) are more debated but often appear in definitions of the concept.

Imposter syndrome has been getting a lot of attention lately. Unfortunately, lots of misconceptions and confusion about it exist. We at Clearer Thinking are in the middle of a big project aimed at understanding and helping people overcome imposter syndrome, so we wanted to share with you some insights that we’ve learned as we’ve been conducting studies and literature reviews on the topic.

Here are five things people often get wrong about imposter syndrome:

1. It’s not (technically) a syndrome.

It’s called imposter syndrome, but it’s not technically recognized as a syndrome at all! The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses (DSM) used by healthcare professionals to diagnose psychological syndromes and disorders does not list it; it's not officially recognized as a clinical syndrome. For this reason, academics and researchers refer instead to imposter phenomenon or simply imposter feelings.

Of course, the fact that imposter phenomenon isn’t technically recognized as a syndrome right now doesn’t mean it’s not real. There is plenty of evidence that it is a genuine feeling (or set of feelings) experienced by many individuals. Some early papers questioned whether imposter feelings could be explained by things other than a distinct phenomenon (e.g., by low self-esteem), but subsequent work has validated the phenomenon, providing evidence that it is a real, distinct experience even if it’s not currently recognized as a syndrome.

Although imposter syndrome isn’t officially recognised as a syndrome in the DSM, it does seem to fit some definitions of the word. For instance, Calvo at al conceptualize a syndrome as a “recognizable complex of symptoms and physical findings which indicate a specific condition for which a direct cause is not necessarily understood.” They argue that “once medical science identifies a causative agent or process with a fairly high degree of certainty, physicians may then refer to the process as a disease [or disorder] not a syndrome.” Imposter syndrome appears to fit such criteria; it is a recognizable complex of symptoms (feelings of fraudulence, fear of evaluation, fear of being discovered to be less competent than people perceive one to be, and so on) for which no straightforward, direct cause is yet known.

So, it’s not quite as simple as saying that it is or is not a syndrome simpliciter. It is technically not (yet?) considered a syndrome by clinical professionals, but that could change in the future, particularly since it fits some definitions of the word. You might therefore want to be careful and deliberate in your use of the word syndrome when referring to imposter feelings. (For the rest of this article we’ll follow the academic usage and use the term imposter phenomenon.

2. It can be justified (while also being false!).

Imagine that a friend you trust tells you that they are pregnant. You have no reason to think your friend is lying to you and they have generally been reliable about this sort of thing (e.g., their own health) in the past. You would probably believe them, and you would be justified in doing so.

Now imagine that your friend turned out to be wrong about being pregnant. They weren’t trying to deceive you, but they were basing their belief on an at-home pregnancy test that has a non-negligible error rate. That means your belief was justified and false. It is possible for us to have many justified yet false beliefs!

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People often assume that if imposter feelings are false, they must be unjustified. This leads people to treat imposter phenomenon as a problem within the individual experiencing it: if only that person could think better about their successes and failures! If only they learned to internalize their successes! But that assumption is sometimes a mistake.

The philosopher Katherine Hawley has pointed out that it is possible for people to experience justified imposter phenomenon. For example, consider an employee whose manager gives them neither praise nor criticism. How should the employee interpret this? Maybe the manager thinks absence of criticism shows that they believe the employee is doing well (“If you were doing something wrong, I’d tell you!”). Or maybe the manager's silence is a sign that they have nothing good to say about the employee’s work. In such a context, the employee may have reason to think they are being criticized when they are actually being praised. Such a situation may provide justification for the imposter feelings, even when the imposter feelings are false!

In fact, there are lots of situations wherein you might experience obstacles to knowing truly how skilled you are.

The lesson to learn from this is that imposter phenomenon isn’t just something to think about as happening purely within an individual. If you have it, it’s not necessarily originating from you. It’s worth thinking about where those beliefs come from. If things about your relationships or workplace are contributing to those beliefs, it may be worth asking whether there are changes in the environment that may help.

This point generalizes to many situations: Whenever you’re thinking about problems, it may be worth zooming out and considering how they are caused by not only your individual actions but also by features of your relationships, the institutions you are part of, the environment you are in, and even the structure of society!

3. It's a state, not just a trait.

Traits are the usual ways you think, feel, and act that stay mostly the same over time and in different situations. States, on the other hand, are how you think, feel, and act at specific moments and in particular situations. States can change frequently depending on what's happening around you.

Until 2010, all attempts to measure imposter phenomenon understood it as a trait, independent of situations. But there is some argument and evidence that people experience it a lot more in certain situations than others. This debate is still ongoing, but the answer affects how we think about how to address and manage imposter feelings.

When imposteor phenomenon occurs primarily as a trait, interventions might focus on changing long-term patterns of thinking and behavior (targeting the individual). However, when it is more state-dependent, strategies could be tailored to specific contexts and situations in which the feelings are likely to arise, providing more targeted and potentially effective support (targeting the institutions, relationships, and environments that the individual is in).

In reality, imposter phenomenon has both trait and state elements: Some people tend to experience it more than others regardless of what environment they are in, but any given person's imposter feelings will fluctuate, and these fluctuations are influenced by their environment.

Understanding to what extent imposter phenomenon is a trait and/or a state for you can significantly influence the best approach to alleviating it, shaping both therapeutic techniques and workplace policies.

4. It affects all demographics.

The first investigations into imposter phenomenon hypothesized that it probably affected women and minority groups most of all. Initially, that’s where research was pointed. But a slew of more recent research has indicated that it might affect men and women to roughly the same degree. If there is a difference in the extent to which different demographics are affected by imposter phenomenon, it’s likely to be a small average difference, rather than a straightforward case of “these people experience it and those people don’t.”

One demographic you might expect to be less affected by imposter feelings is extremely successful people. But that is not the case. Even the most most accomplished people are not immune! Anecdotally, it appears that some people find it comforting to know that even extremely successful people experience imposter phenomenon. So, it might help you to know that people as famous and successful as Taylor Swift, Michelle Obama, and Tom Hanks have all talked about experiencing it. Tom Hanks said of his experience with it:

“No matter what we've done, there comes a point where you think, 'How did I get here? When are they going to discover that I am, in fact, a fraud and take everything away from me?'”

5. We don’t know how to cure it (but we probably can!).

The internet is replete with articles telling you how to fix your imposter phenomenon, but the truth is: It's not generally known how to improve it. If you look for references in articles like those, you’ll quickly spot that they don’t point to rigorous research—they are primarily just guess work.

That’s because, although imposter phenomenon has been known about since the 70s, the first studies designed to test whether specific interventions worked to reduce imposter feelings were not carried out until 2019! There have been a lot more published since then, but they are mostly small studies with significant limitations. As more and more get published, the evidence base is growing, but it’s still too small to make definitive claims.

However, the fact that we’re still learning doesn’t mean we have no clues about how to help it. The strongest evidence available is for the following interventions:

• Interactive workshops
• Coaching
• Self-compassion exercises

The evidence for these approaches looks promising, but we can’t yet have a great deal of confidence in their effectiveness.

We also have theoretical reasons to think that the following interventions might also work:

• Institutional interventions such as the most effective forms of diversity and inclusion initiatives, education of supervisors, support networks, access to therapy, and resilience training.
• Treatments (such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)) for comorbidities such as anxiety, depression, perfectionism, and procrastination.

But current studies either do not test these theories or test the theories but not robustly enough to consider the evidence strong or even moderate.