As I stare up at a sea of Apple symbols staring down at me from the desks of Old Kirk 303, the largest lecture theatre at Te Herenga Waka, I imagine what is going on in the heads of my students.
Intro psych is a microcosm of the university – many students doing psychology majors but many doing it for interest or because they need it for something else. And they’ll have got here by different paths. Some will be straight-excellence students and some will have left school before completing NCEA and will have had to run the gauntlet of proving they’re ready.
But as they look at the sea of faces around them, I know many of them will be freaking out and thinking, “I don’t have what it takes to be here, and why am I the only one freaking out?” The irony.
Based on my many, many chats with these folk, I know that this impostor phenomenon is pretty common. In our nationwide survey last year, almost a third (33.1%) of respondents reported that they feel like an impostor most of the time.
There are three legs to the impostor phenomenon stool, based on analysis of Pauline Clance’s Impostor Phenomenon Scale: self-doubt over one’s abilities, a tendency to downplay achievements, and, when things do go well, putting it down to luck. Sheesh, that doesn’t sound like fun, but for many of us it’ll sound awfully familiar.
Impostor phenomena are separate from actual achievement, at least in our survey. It’s completely unrelated to education or income. But it is related to age; older people are less likely to feel like impostors. Why? Have a look at your younger family members’ social media and see how long you can cope with the never-ending run of carefully curated, artificial lives that they’re exposed to.
Are men or women more likely to feel like impostors? Yep, one in four men, but three in five women, feel like they’re on the verge of being found out. We live in a world that is more invalidating to women.
Women are also more likely to be problematically perfectionist compared with men and, remember, problematic perfectionism revolves around the desire to live up to what we think others expect of us. So it’ll also be no surprise that perfectionism and impostor beliefs go almost hand in hand. For the stats nerds out there, in US psychologist Jacob Cohen’s statistical language, they are “strongly” correlated.
Again, you can connect the dots. If you try to be “perfect”, you’re going to fail at least some of the time, and it makes sense that even when people say nice things about you, you’re going to think they’re just “being nice”. This is not a nice place to be – impostors feel notably more mental distress because, well, feeling like a sham and worrying you’ll be exposed any moment is stressful.
The American Psychological Association website hosts an article on overcoming impostor beliefs. It notes that 8 in 10 of us feel like this at least some of the time.
They also make several recommendations. First, test your assumptions, because often our internal dialogue (“I’m useless”, “everyone’s looking at me”, etc) is a script that’s developed over time, and without a solid basis. Whether you continue to “feel useless” or not, use people you trust as a sounding board and share your feelings. Odds are that they’ll feel the same way at least some of the time. They also recommend taking a moment to feel satisfaction in success and, perhaps paradoxically, share your failures as well. When other people share their failures it helps to put our own in context.
The association reckons that if you do these things, impostor beliefs will fade. But they also say, and easier said than done, to expect these feelings to ebb and flow, and we should practise accepting them when they do.
This is part of a series of columns that draw from a large nationwide survey I conducted in late 2023, and that more than 5000 took part in. I couldn’t do this without their time.
