Impostor fears and perfectionistic concern over mistakes

Abstract

Impostors are outwardly successful individuals who experience secret intense feelings of fraudulence in achievement situations. Elements of perfectionism are evident in a tendency on the part of impostors to maintain high standards for personal evaluation while being critical of their inability to realise these standards. This study utilised a 2 (impostor status: high, low)×2 (task type: high vs. low frequency of mistakes) between-subjects factorial design to investigate the connection between impostor fears and perfectionistic concern over mistakes. Sixty undergraduate students completed either a high or low frequency of mistake Stroop Colour-Word task, following which they completed items assessing perceptions of their performance, concern over mistakes, perceptions of control and anxiety, the Positive and Negative Affect Scale and the Russell Causal Dimension Scale. Links with perfectionistic concern over mistakes and anxiety were strongly supported, with impostors reporting less control, greater anxiety, more negative affect and greater concern over mistakes than non-impostors irrespective of experimental condition. The roles of anxiety and perfectionist cognitions in the maintenance of impostor fears are discussed.

Introduction

The impostor phenomenon refers to an intense feeling of intellectual phoniness experienced by many high-achieving individuals (Clance, 1985). Despite the accumulation of consistent, objective evidence to the contrary, people experiencing impostor fears harbour resilient doubts of their own abilities, which they believe to be over-estimated by others. As a consequence, they suffer from perpetual fears that they will be found out: that others will discover that they are not truly intelligent, but are in fact, ‘impostors’.

Reporting clinical anecdotes, Clance (1985) indicates that after an achievement-related task is assigned, these individuals are plagued by bad dreams, worry, self-doubts and anxiety, experiences which result in procrastination and immobility in the face of possible failure (e.g. Chrisman et al., 1995, Clance and Imes, 1978).

Impostors react to this anxiety in one of two ways, either by extreme over-preparation, or by initial procrastination followed by frenzied preparation. Following success, there is elation and relief. However, the relief is short-lived. As new achievement situations are encountered, anxieties and self-doubts return and the cycle begins anew. Impostors' extreme over-preparation results in their attribution of success to effort (if they over prepared), or to luck (if they procrastinated). The apparent inability of impostors to harness their anxiety as motivation means that impostors are unlikely to derive any satisfaction from challenge, seeing it as threat. Their overstriving, like their immobility and procrastination, is a consequence of extreme anxiety.

A further tendency on the part of impostors is to overgeneralise the negative implications of failure to the whole of their self-concepts (Thompson, Davis & Davidson, 1998). This tendency is all the more pronounced in the case of individuals with low self-esteem and is likely to lead to depression (e.g. Carver and Ganellen, 1983, Kernis et al., 1989, Kernis et al., 1991). For example, Carver and Ganellen (1983) found overgeneralisation to be a powerful predictor of depression in both male and female college students. These consequences are endorsed in the case of impostors, with links between impostor fears and low self-esteem noted. Cozzarelli and Major (1990) found impostor scores and trait self-esteem significantly correlated at r(106)=− 0.51, p<0.001 and Thompson et al. (1998) found impostors report lower academic self-esteem and lower global self-esteem than non-impostors.

Chrisman et al. (1995), exploring the relationship between depression and impostor fears, found a high correlation (r=0.62) between the Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale (CIPS: Clance, 1985) and the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire (DEQ: Blatt, 1976; cited in Chrisman et al., 1995). Of the subscales comprising the DEQ — dependency, efficacy and self-criticism — it is noteworthy that the self-criticism subscale attained the highest correlation (r=0.71), signifying the pivotal role of self-criticism within impostor beliefs.

The tendency on the part of impostors to report negative emotions (anxiety, dissatisfaction, guilt, humiliation), together with their tendency to attribute failure internally to a greater extent than non-impostors (e.g. Thompson et al., 1998) underscores the veracity of clinical observations (e.g. Langford, 1990, Langford and Clance, 1993) and empirical findings (e.g. Frost et al., 1990, Kolligian and Sternberg, 1991) suggesting links between impostor fears, anxiety and depression. Taken together, this evidence of over-inclusive, internal attributions following failure points convincingly to a greater susceptibility to depression among impostors (Rizley, 1978). Collectively, these findings have implications in terms of an understanding of the dynamics and treatment of impostor fears.

Within the clinical literature, perfectionism is a dominant theme, with impostors setting extremely high, often unrealistic standards for self-evaluation (Imes & Clance, 1984). Thompson et al. (1998) found elements of perfectionism evident in the differences between impostors and non-impostors in a tendency to discount positive feedback and maintain high standards for personal evaluation while being critical of their inability to realise these standards. These elements are central to the identification of perfectionism and emphasised in much of the literature on this topic (e.g. Burns, 1980, Ferguson and Rodway, 1994, Frost et al., 1990, Hamachek, 1978, Pacht, 1984).

As noted above, impostors are likewise differentiated from non-impostors in terms of a tendency to overgeneralise the negative effects of failure, a further cognitive distortion associated with perfectionism (Barrow and Moore, 1983, Hamachek, 1978, Pacht, 1984). Likewise, Imes and Clance (1984) note a tendency among impostors to overgeneralise any mistake as implying incompetence and Cromwell, Brown, Sanchez-Huceles and Adair (1990) found that impostors were significantly more likely than non-impostors to set unreasonably high expectations and were high in their need for other peoples' approval.

In a similar vein, it has been suggested that an overly critical evaluation of one's performance is at the crux of psychopathology associated with perfectionism (Frost et al., 1990). Whereas high achieving behaviour alone is not unhealthy, allowing oneself little latitude for mistakes may well be (Frost et al., 1990). It has also been proposed that the tendency to be overly preoccupied with making mistakes suggests that the motivation driving perfectionists is fear of failure rather than a need for achievement (Hamachek, 1978). On these bases, it seemed to be warranted to explore links between impostor fears and perfectionistic concern over mistakes.

In a situation designed to generate a high frequency of mistakes, it was expected that impostors would demonstrate impaired performance relative to non-impostors. On the other hand, in a situation designed to generate a low frequency of mistakes, no performance differences were expected. Differences were also expected in terms of perceptions of performance in a number of ways, with (for example) impostors estimating having made a greater number of mistakes, reporting a greater concern over mistakes and stating a higher criterion for what would represent ‘a very good performance’ than non-impostors.

Our predictions were based on several considerations. One was a greater tendency on the part of impostors to experience greater anxiety during a time-limited performance situation which evokes evaluative threat relative to non-impostors. This anxiety was expected to impair performance in a situation designed to give rise to a high frequency of mistakes. A second consideration was that perfectionistic concern over mistakes associated with impostor fears was expected to add to an already high level of anxiety in situations which presage a high likelihood of mistakes.

The Stroop Colour-Word Test (Stroop, 1938) was chosen in order to create a situation characterised by either a high or low frequency of mistakes. Choice of the Stroop task was predicated on the fact that anxiety is known to be a factor affecting reaction time for this task (e.g. Jorgenson, 1977, Pallak et al., 1975).

Findings from a study by Frost et al. (1995) gave us further reason to consider the Stroop task to be particularly well suited to our purposes. These researchers investigated affective and cognitive reactions to making mistakes for participants high and low in perfectionist concern over mistakes. They found that following a task characterised by a high frequency of mistakes, individuals high in perfectionistic concern over mistakes reacted more negatively than individuals low in perfectionistic concern over mistakes. On this basis, we included a measure of concern over mistakes in order to determine the relative status of impostor scores on key dependent measures while controlling for concern over mistakes.

Differences between impostors and non-impostors were also expected in terms of anxiety and perceptions of control, with impostors likely to experience greater anxiety in both high and low frequency of mistakes conditions and report less control. As these differences were expected to be particularly apparent in the high frequency of mistakes condition, we expected significant interactions involving impostor status and frequency of mistakes. On the same basis, impostors were expected to report greater negative affect in the high frequency of mistakes condition relative to non-impostors. Finally, on the assumption that performance differences would be evident between non-impostors and impostors in the high frequency of mistakes condition, we expected impostors to attribute their performance more to internal, stable and uncontrollable factors than non-impostors.