It's Not Just (Her) Personality: Structural and Cultural Foundations of Impostorism

The sense that one is an impostor—undeserving of one’s successes or accolades—is a pervasive problem among high-achieving individuals from traditionally lower-status groups (e.g., women, first-generation college students, and members of many historically disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups). Described as a feeling of “intellectual phoniness” (Clance and O’Toole 1988:51), individuals who suffer from impostorism—also called perceived fraudulence, or the impostor phenomenon—have difficulty attributing their successes to their own ability or hard work. Rather, such individuals are convinced that they have reached their position in life by luck or by unintentionally misleading people to regard them as more capable than they actually are. Despite continued successes, these “impostors” fear that their true incompetence will, at some point, be uncovered. Although this fear is almost always unfounded, it has tangible adverse effects including vulnerability to both psychological distress and job burnout and may lead to relatively limited academic or professional career aspirations, influencing occupational sex segregation.

There is relatively little agreement on the origin of impostorism or why it is more pervasive in particular social groups. Because, to date, impostorism has been studied almost exclusively in psychology, research tends to treat it as a person-level construct and focus almost exclusively on antecedents related to family background (e.g., family dynamics, childhood environment) and fixed personality characteristics (e.g., neuroticism, perfectionism). However, the fact that there are high rates of impostorism among high-achieving, lower-status individuals suggests structural factors may play a role. This paper draws on work on sociological social psychology (e.g., status characteristics, self-assessments, and double-standards) to posit a more sociological explanation to account for increased incidence among particular groups and to suggest a research program to test structural and culture accounts for impostorism.