There’s a famous story, told by a once widely lauded author, about finding himself at a party where he felt hugely out of his depth. Amongst the “great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things,” he said, “I felt that at any moment they would realize that I didn’t qualify to be there.”
That was, until he started talking to another invitee – a “nice, polite, elderly gentleman,” he recalled, who “pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, ‘I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.’”
The author’s response? “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.”
To some of us, that probably sounds ridiculous – how could Neil Armstrong, of all people on Earth, believe he had no serious claim to fame? But for many others, it’s a completely relatable feeling: that despite all evidence to the contrary, you really don’t deserve any success you’ve achieved – and that eventually, everyone will realize just how much you’ve fooled them.
But here’s the question: why?
What is imposter syndrome?
Imposter syndrome is, in a way, the inverse of the Dunning-Kruger effect. While the latter refers to the phenomenon of being so bad at a task that you can’t see your shortcomings, the former is when you’re really, genuinely good at something – you may even have praise, awards, accolades and so on to prove it – and yet, for some reason, you simply cannot accept your abilities as legitimate.
“I know people who have a particular level of expertise or who have done a lot of research about a topic, but they hold back in meetings and do not contribute,” said Susan David, a psychologist and co-founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching.
“During these meetings, they are thinking to themselves, ‘How did I get into this room with people who are clearly smarter than me?’” she told McLean Hospital earlier this year. “‘They’re going to find out I’m a fake.’”
It can be a vicious cycle. Burdened by the belief that you don’t belong where you’ve ended up, you overwork yourself, aiming for ever-higher standards. Unsurprisingly (at least, to outsiders) that earns you praise and plaudits – which only makes you feel like more of a fraud.
“When we hear anything that’s positive, we want to dismiss it, show others our mistake, and that we didn’t do well,” Lisa Orbé-Austin, a licensed psychologist, executive coach, and author, told McLean Hospital. “Such thinking gets us caught in the impostor syndrome cycle.”
Who gets imposter syndrome?
When the term was first coined back in 1978, imposter syndrome had an obvious victim choice: women.
“In the past five years we have worked in individual psychotherapy, theme-centered interactional groups, and college classes with over 150 highly successful women – women who have earned PhDs in various specialties, who are respected professionals in their fields, or who are students recognized for their academic excellence,” wrote Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Ament Imes at the time.
“However, despite their earned degrees, scholastic honors, high achievement on standardized tests, praise and professional recognition from colleagues and respected authorities, these women do not experience an internal sense of success. They consider themselves to be ‘impostors’.”
“Women who experience the impostor phenomenon maintain a strong belief that they are not intelligent; in fact, they are convinced that they have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise,” they reported. “For example, students often fantasize that they were mistakenly admitted to graduate school because of an error by the admissions committee. Numerous women graduate students state that their high examination scores are due to luck, to misgrading, or to the faulty judgment of professors […] In other words, these women find innumerable means of negating any external evidence that contradicts their belief that they are, in reality, unintelligent.”
In the decades since, though, it’s become clear that imposter syndrome isn’t unique to any particular demographic – even if it may be more common in some than others. Women seem to experience it more frequently and intensely than men; ethnic and racial minorities are similarly disproportionately hit. But a new study out of Denmark has found one common denominator that can affect anybody at all: your mental health.
“People with anxiety and depression tend to exhibit persistent underconfidence, as we call it,” explained Sucharit Katyal, a postdoc at the Department of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen, in a statement this month. “Their skewed judgement of their own abilities can lead them to avoid new tasks, even when they can do them.”
The conclusion comes as a result of something you’re probably very familiar with – or at least, your aunt who won’t stop sending you those annoying invitations over Facebook is. “We […] asked participants to complete a computer game where they had to help the residents of ‘Fruitville’ in harvesting fruit,” Katyal said.
And what they found was pretty interesting. It wasn’t just that those participants with anxiety or depression were undervaluing their performance – it was more like they couldn’t even see it at all. “We discovered that participants with symptoms of anxiety and depression often ignored the times when they felt a high sense of confidence in their answers,” explained Katyal.
“Instead, they focused on situations where their answers were accompanied by low confidence when judging their overall performance.”
What to do about imposter syndrome
The upside of all this? There’s a pretty obvious way to help out your local imposter syndrome sufferer: positive feedback.
“[Our study] points to the need for interventions that specifically address metacognitive distortions in people with anxiety and depression,” Katyal said. “It is actually effective to have these persistently insecure people focus more on their successes and less on their internal insecurities.”
“Some people need help to take their own judgements with a grain of salt – otherwise they will just maintain a distorted, negative view of their own capabilities,” he added.
Of course, they won’t like it – that’s part of the whole imposter syndrome gig. But if you find yourself instinctively repudiating praise, maybe take a beat and rethink it: “A compliment is relational,” Orbé-Austin told McLean Hospital. “We’re losing that relational moment when someone tells us we did a good job [and we don’t accept it].”
“Instead of saying, ‘No, [my performance] was so-so,’” Orbé-Austin advised, “make eye contact and say, ‘Thank you so much. I really appreciate that – I’m really honored that you would take the time to say something to me.’”
Remember, you’re far from the only person to ever feel this way – and you’re highly unlikely to have ended up where you are through luck or unintentional fraud alone.
And if all else fails, just think back to that party, attended by an author and an underconfident astronaut.
“I felt a bit better,” the author recalled. “Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.”
The new study by Katyal et al is published in the journal Nature Communications.
Source Link: Imposter Syndrome: What Is It, Who Gets It, And What Can We Do About It?
