Impostor syndrome: what it is and where doubt comes from

Laura got the promotion on a Friday. On Monday she sat through her first meeting in the new role, listened to the congratulations, and had one thought running underneath all of it: when will they find out. When will somebody at that table work out that the chair went to a person who is mainly good at looking the part.

This was not modesty and it was not nerves. Laura had four years of results behind her that she could have pulled out of her inbox in two minutes. Even so, at that moment she would have sworn the hiring panel had mixed up two folders.

The gap between what a person has demonstrably done and what they privately believe about themselves has a name in psychology and a reasonably precise description. Several different things just tend to get folded into it.

Impostor syndrome: what it actually is

The concept was described by the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978. They studied a group of women who had degrees, awards and careers, and who were nonetheless convinced they had reached their position through some administrative accident. Everything since has shown that the pattern has no gender and no field. You will meet it in surgeons as readily as in software developers, teachers or people running their own company.

The label is unfortunate, because the word syndrome invites you to read the whole thing as a diagnosis. It is not one. It does not appear in the classifications of mental disorders, you cannot have it or not have it the way you have flu, and nobody treats it. What it is is a pattern of thinking that can be described, measured as a degree and, with some patience, unlearned.

One thing separates it from ordinary uncertainty, and that one thing matters. Stage fright before a first presentation, or the unease of a first week in a new job, dissolves the moment things go well. Here nothing dissolves. On its way into memory a good result gets rewritten into good preparation, a generous audience or favourable timing, so the evidence about your abilities has nowhere to be filed.

In practice it goes round and round, and Clance had already described that circle in the eighties. A task arrives, tension comes with it, and the tension quietens down only through preparation far beyond what the job needs, or else through putting the whole thing off until the last possible night. The thing ends up going well, a short relief arrives, except the credit is booked to the grinding or to a run of luck. Two days later the relief is gone and the bar sits a notch higher.

That is where the strangest part of it comes from. Success does not shrink the doubt, it tends to feed it: every promotion raises what is expected, so the room available for a future unmasking grows as well. Laura did not feel worse in spite of the promotion. She felt worse because of it.

The three sources the doubt comes from

"I do not belong here" sounds like a single thought. Ask people what exactly they mean by it and it falls apart into three fairly different stories. One is about the fear of being found out, the second about achievements that keep disappearing, the third about luck that will eventually run out.

The first source is easiest to see in a meeting. Somebody at the table knows the answer, holds it in their head the whole time and does not say it, because they are not quite certain yet. Three minutes later somebody else says the same thing out loud, collects a round of agreeing nods, and the discussion moves on. For the person who stayed quiet this is not evidence that they should have spoken. It is evidence that the other one was sure, and that they are therefore not at that level. One missed second, and another brick goes into the wall.

The three sources are not three disorders, nor three boxes a person fits into whole. They are sides of one pattern and they hang together: score high on one and the rest tends to be raised too. The useful question is which of them speaks loudest.

That dominant source is what decides what will help. Laura never questioned her results, she just dissolved every one of them into the team, so nothing ever accumulated; what to do so that a compliment lasts longer than five seconds is covered in the piece on how to accept a compliment. Her colleague Ben had an equally high total score and a completely different head: he explained every good outcome by timing and sent it away again. He is better served by the question of whether the last result came down to success or luck.

The balance between the sources is not a life sentence either. Situation moves it: after ten years in the same field the loudest voice is usually the discounting one, because everything looks like ordinary work. Move into unfamiliar surroundings and within a month the fraud feeling comes forward. A result is therefore a photograph of a current setting, not a description of character.

Which is why "value what you have achieved" makes sense to one of them and bounces straight off the other. That is the whole practical point of telling the sources apart: general encouragement works badly, because it does not aim at the sentence the person actually has in their head.

How many people this concerns

The number circulating online is 70 %. It comes from a paper in which Sakulku and Alexander summarised the existing literature in 2011, and it is only fair to say what that number is: an estimate by the authors, not a measurement on a representative sample. Repetition eventually turned it into a fact it never was.

A soberer picture comes from the systematic review that Bravata and her colleagues assembled in 2020 from 62 studies. The prevalence found in them ranges from 9 to 82 % depending on who was asked and which instrument did the measuring. A range that wide is not a flaw in the research, it follows from the fact that no sharp line between having it and not having it exists. It is a degree, and everybody sits somewhere on that scale.

Across studies, though, the places where the doubt collects repeat fairly reliably:

• people newly in a role, after a promotion or a change of field, wherever the old yardstick stopped applying and the new one has not formed yet
• university students whose parents did not study; Cokley and his team described a stronger sense of not belonging at university among them in 2013
• fields where a mistake is expensive and certainty is expected of you: medicine, law, research, aviation
• anybody who is the only one of their kind in the room, whether because of gender, age or the route that got them there

The true spread is hard to measure for one simple reason: hardly anyone talks about it. Doubt about your own competence belongs among the things people hide from colleagues more carefully than their salary, so everyone in the room sees only the finished, unruffled performances of the others and adds their own internal mess to the picture. In groups where somebody finally says it out loud, the biggest surprise is usually the number of hands that go up.

What is interesting is who you will not find on that list. People who genuinely know very little. That is why impostor syndrome is sometimes described as the other side of the coin from the Dunning-Kruger effect, even though the pair is more complicated than the way it usually gets written about.

Who is more prone to it

Bernard, Dollinger and Ramaniah looked in 2002 at how the tendency towards these doubts relates to the five-factor model of personality, that is to Big Five. The strongest link came out with neuroticism, the disposition to experience negative emotion more intensely and for longer. Whoever scores high there replays one critical remark for a week while twenty appreciative ones pass unnoticed.

The second trait is more interesting, because it cuts both ways. Conscientiousness protects a person by getting them well prepared and producing work that can be relied on. At the same time it sets the bar so high that almost every real result lands underneath it, and from there it takes very little for ordinary imperfection to become evidence of personal inadequacy.

Whether a person talks about the doubt matters as well. Say it out loud and a correction usually arrives from outside within two seconds: "I know that one, I had exactly the same." Keep it in and the correction never comes, you answer yourself, and the doubt confirms itself. Ben is precisely that case, an outwardly calm man carrying two uninterrupted seasons of inner monologue.

Personality traits are not fate, though, and they explain nowhere near everything. A great deal is done by the surroundings: how much feedback is given in them, whether uncertainty can be said out loud, and whether there is anybody in the room who looks like you. Where exactly the doubt gets triggered hardest is taken apart in the separate text on impostor syndrome at work.

What impostor syndrome is not

It is not modesty. A modest person does not deny the fact, they just do not broadcast it; the sentence "it worked out and the whole team was on it" is true and takes nothing away from you. Discounting does something else, it erases the fact, so afterwards nothing is left of it for you either. The test is simple and takes a second. Do you believe what you have just said?

It also gets mixed up with generally low self-esteem, although the two are different things. Somebody with the impostor pattern can be perfectly confident in a pile of other areas and fall apart only where they are being judged and where expertise is at stake. Self-esteem is a broad thing and is built differently, which is what the text on how to build self-esteem is about.

Nor is it the literal opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect, however neat that symmetry would sound. The original 1999 study measured something other than the self-confidence of experts, and part of its conclusions is still being explained by statistical artefacts. What survives from it is mainly one thing: the more a person knows about a field, the better they see everything in it they cannot do yet. Seen from the inside, that view gets confused with incompetence.

The last difference is the sharpest. A genuine fraud is not afraid of being found out, because he knows what he is doing and has factored it in. The fear of exposure belongs instead to the person who does the work honestly and simply does not trust it; why that fear cannot be argued away with evidence is taken apart in the text on where the fear of being found out comes from.

What can be done about it

Another success will not solve it, we know that much already. Three fairly boring things get further, and all three can be started this week.

The first is to name the source. As long as a person carries a vague "I am not good enough", there is nothing to work with, because that is a statement about worth. The sentence "I have a habit of explaining my results by circumstances" is about a habit, and habits have solutions.

The second is to collect evidence before you need it. Start one folder, an email folder will do, and put responses, numbers and finished things into it. Memory under pressure reliably produces only the mistakes, whereas a folder holds facts. There is one rule: adding is allowed, deleting is not.

The third is to say it out loud, and this part tends to be the most effective of the lot. Clance and Imes worked with their clients in groups and found that a large share of the relief arrives the moment somebody hears the same thing from a person they had considered thoroughly self-assured. Unspoken doubt grows, spoken doubt shrinks. Specific approaches for each source, including a ceiling on preparation and the folder of evidence, are covered in the text on how to overcome impostor syndrome.

What does not work, even though almost everybody has tried it, is reassurance from outside. The sentence "but you are brilliant" gets translated inside the recipient's head within a second as politeness, or as proof that they have managed to fool even the person praising them. What is usable is concrete feedback: not that you are good, but what exactly you did on that project and what would have turned out differently without it.

One note on the side, an honest one. If doubts about yourself go on for months, take your sleep or keep you away from things you would otherwise want, that is not a failure of self-knowledge and there is no point trying to fix it with another article. A load like that is worth carrying with a professional beside you.

How to find out where your doubt comes from

Self-observation has one flaw on this topic: the doubt speaks louder than anything else, so asking yourself on a miserable day gets you a different answer than asking on a Tuesday after a good meeting. It helps to watch specific sentences instead of an overall impression. When did you last say one bare sentence about something that went well, with no defensive qualifier attached to it?

The second aid is simpler still. After your next good result, notice where your head reaches first for an explanation. One person lands on the preparation, another on the team, a third on the timing and a fourth on it not having been difficult. That first explanation is a decent indicator of which source speaks loudest in you.

If you want the picture faster and in a more organised form, go through the short impostor syndrome test. It gives you an overall score in one of four bands, from minimal to strong self-doubt, and with it the split between the three sources. Treat it as an approximate comparison and a starting point for your own observation, not as a diagnosis.

Three months after the promotion Laura opened the folder mentioned above and found eleven things in it she had carried through in that time. The feeling of not belonging did not vanish, it just stopped being the only available reading. Something else worked for Ben: before defending a project he wrote down a prediction of how it would go, and read it back afterwards. It had gone better than what was on the paper, and that was there in black and white.