Impostor Syndrome in High Achievers: Why Success Makes It Worse (Not Better)

You landed the promotion. The team respects you. The numbers say it is working. And there is still a quiet, persistent voice saying: they are going to find out you do not belong here.

An earlier version of this article answered that with a number, and the number turned out to have no study behind it. That is worth going through first, because the correction is more useful than the figure was.

The 70 Per Cent Figure Has No Study Behind It

An earlier version of this article said: “Research suggests that up to 70% of people experience impostor syndrome at some point in their career.” No study is cited there because none exists: the trail runs through Sakulku and Alexander in 2011 to a newspaper article by Gravois in 2007 to a survey that was never published.

An overview published by the American Psychological Association traces it precisely. The 70 per cent is “commonly referenced from an article published in the International Journal of Behavioral Science (Sakulku & Alexander, 2011). In this article, the 70% figure is attributed to an article written in the Chronicle of Higher Education, not an actual empirical study (Gravois, 2007). In the Gravois article, the 70% reference is attributed to an unpublished survey.”

A review article citing a newspaper article citing a survey nobody can read. The figure is gone from this article, along with the word “research” in front of it.

What the Actual Review Found

There is a real systematic review, and it is more informative than a single number could be. Bravata and colleagues published it in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in 2020, covering “62 studies of 14,161 participants”.

Their prevalence finding: “Prevalence rates of impostor syndrome varied widely from 9 to 82% largely depending on the screening tool and cutoff used to assess symptoms and were particularly high among ethnic minority groups.”

Nine to eighty-two. The range is not a weakness in the research; it is the finding. How many people “have” this depends almost entirely on which questionnaire you use and where you draw the line. Anyone quoting one figure has quietly chosen an instrument on your behalf.

On who it affects, which an earlier version of this article asserted without support: “Impostor syndrome was common among both men and women and across a range of age groups (adolescents to late-stage professionals).”

On what it travels with: it “is often comorbid with depression and anxiety and is associated with impaired job performance, job satisfaction, and burnout among various employee populations including clinicians”. That is reported here as the review states it. Nothing on this site diagnoses anything, and the association is not a mechanism.

The authors state their own limits in two words: “Studies were heterogeneous; publication bias may be present.”

The Sentence That Changes What This Article Can Offer

The same review contains one short sentence that removes a whole section of the earlier version of this article: “No published studies evaluated treatments for this condition.”

An earlier version said “the research on effective interventions points in a clear direction” and then named three. There is no evaluated intervention research. The review opens by noting that there was “no published review of the evidence to guide the diagnosis or treatment” before theirs, and what they found when they looked was that nobody had tested the treatments.

Which means every confident list of remedies on this subject, including the one this article used to carry, is advice rather than evidence. That can still be worth reading. It should not be dressed up as research.

Where the Term Came From

Clance and Imes introduced the term impostor phenomenon in 1978 after clinical work with 150 highly successful women who explained their achievements away while keeping criticism as evidence of deficiency.

Two things about that origin matter. They were describing a pattern they met in a consulting room, not measuring how common it is. And the word “syndrome”, which arrived later in popular usage, was not their framing: the original term was phenomenon.

Why Seniority Can Make It Louder

From here on this is a reading rather than a finding. No study cited here establishes that seniority intensifies it.

Early in a career, self-doubt has an easy explanation available: you are new. That explanation expires. When the room contains people who report to you and decisions that affect several hundred households, the doubt arrives without its excuse, and what is attached to being wrong has grown.

There is also simple exposure. More people are watching, so each uncertain moment has an audience. That does not make the doubt more accurate. It makes it more expensive.

Five Things People Describe

Descriptions, not criteria. Nothing here sorts anybody into a category.

• Discounting the achievement. Success gets attributed to timing, luck or other people, and rarely to ability.
• Failure as exposure. A mistake registers as confirmation rather than as information.
• Overwork as insurance. Effort is treated as the thing holding the position together, which makes reducing it feel dangerous.
• Praise is uncomfortable. Compliments get deflected, or the flaw in the praised thing gets located immediately.
• Comparing inside to outside. Your own doubts measured against other people’s composure, which is not a comparison of like with like.

What Might Be Underneath

An earlier version called this “a symptom of something deeper” and referred to “a wound that lives beneath the achievements”. That is clinical language, and this article is in no position to use it. What follows is a mechanism, offered as one.

Crocker and Wolfe described contingencies of self-worth in Psychological Review in 2001: the specific domains in which a sense of being worthwhile is staked on how things turn out. In those domains, they write, “people typically have the goal to prove themselves rather than the goal to learn, grow, or improve themselves”. They describe the arrangement as “a trade-off between increased motivation and increased emotional vulnerability”.

If worth is staked on performance, then a threat to the performance is not a threat to a project. And more achievement does not settle it, because each achievement is judged by the same arrangement that produced the doubt.

What Is Worth Trying, Labelled Honestly

None of this has been tested as an intervention, per the review above. It is offered as practice, not as treatment.

Name the pattern as a pattern. Calling the voice a recurring pattern rather than an assessment creates some distance from it. Whether that distance does anything lasting has not been measured.

Keep a written record. The recollection of a career tends to be selective in one direction. A list built from instances, with dates, is harder to argue with than an impression. This is bookkeeping, not affirmation.

Say it to one person. Not as a remedy, since nobody has tested it as one, but because a belief held silently never gets corrected by anything.

Look at where the worth is staked. This is the slower one and the only one with a mechanism behind it rather than a result.

An earlier version of this article recommended working with a therapist or coach and described it as potentially transformative. The recommendation is gone, because this publication does not point at other people’s offerings and has no basis for a claim about what they achieve. What remains is plainer: if the doubt has stopped looking like a question about work and is affecting how you sleep, eat or function, that belongs with a licensed professional. Nothing here substitutes for one, including the assessment below.

Where Your Worth Is Currently Staked

Crocker and Wolfe’s point is that the domains are specific, which means they can be named. The Executive Identity Profile is a confidential assessment of where your sense of worth currently rests across five dimensions, and which of them is carrying more than it should. It takes about ten minutes, and it opens a conversation rather than closing one. Begin your profile here.

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References

1. Bravata, D. M., Watts, S. A., Keefer, A. L., Madhusudhan, D. K., Taylor, K. T., Clark, D. M., Nelson, R. S., Cokley, K. O., & Hagg, H. K. (2020). Prevalence, predictors, and treatment of impostor syndrome: A systematic review. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 35, 1252–1275.
2. Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241–247.
3. Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108, 593–623.
4. On the origin of the 70 per cent figure: Sakulku, J., & Alexander, J. (2011), International Journal of Behavioral Science; Gravois, J. (2007), Chronicle of Higher Education; traced in the American Psychological Association overview of the impostor phenomenon.

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Further Reading

• The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women by Valerie Young. A widely read treatment of the subject, written for people who have the credentials and not the conviction.
• Mindset by Carol Dweck. The source of the fixed and growth mindset distinction. Worth reading alongside the two meta-analyses by Sisk and colleagues in 2018, which found the effects of mindset interventions on achievement weak.
• Daring Greatly by Brené Brown. On vulnerability and shame, and what projected invulnerability costs.

Related reading

• The Obsolescence Anxiety: What AI Is Really Threatening in High Achievers
• Quiet Cracking: The Burnout That Still Shows Up to Work
• Impostor Syndrome in Female Executives: Why Women Leaders Doubt Themselves More

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