I’ve attended and helped organize sessions that discuss the theory of impostor syndrome (or the impostor phenomenon). Here are brief notes adapted from one such session that we ran at Canada/USA Mathcamp (this is mostly not my original work!).
The theory
The impostor phenomenon is heavily tied to the process of “discounting,” which is the process by which validation from an outside source is disregarded as inauthentic.
Examples:
My supervisor praises me. I tell myself she’s just being nice.
I get a good grade. I tell myself I got lucky, or maybe the test graded on a huge curve.
I get hired. I tell myself that it’s because I look better on paper than I do in real life.
My friends think I’m great at math. I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything, because they don’t know much about math or what it means to be good at it.
One way to counter the discounting is to acquire sources that you trust as authentic.
This can take time. For example, if I were to tell you right now that you belong in your job or program, my word wouldn’t mean a lot.
Your teachers, advisors, and peers will spend a lot of time with you. They are also likely knowledgeable about your field, and you can ask them for help.
People who discount in this way never receive internal validation that they are qualified, and feel like they must “fake it.”
This creates a constant fear of being exposed as unqualified.
When one feels like they are fraudulently qualified, future authentic stimuli will be discarded because of the mindset of impostorism.
A couple of notes:
Impostorism can manifest as self-deprecation.
Impostorism harms learning by inhibiting risk-taking.
Perceptions of community knowledge are hard to assess.
This is all worse when people think that ability — or usefulness — is something fundamental and unchangeable. This is called a “brilliance belief.”
What should happen:
What happens in practice, especially given a brilliance belief:
This is also exacerbated when we compare ourselves to others. Another relevant (and classic) diagram:
I’ve seen many variations of this diagram. I don’t know where this one is from, originally. I’ve been told that the circles should look more like blobs—people’s knowledge comes in different shapes. I agree, but don’t want to bother changing it.
Appendix to the post
I’ve attended and helped organize sessions that discuss the theory of impostor syndrome (or the impostor phenomenon). Here are brief notes adapted from one such session that we ran at Canada/USA Mathcamp (this is mostly not my original work!).
The theory
The impostor phenomenon is heavily tied to the process of “discounting,” which is the process by which validation from an outside source is disregarded as inauthentic.
Examples:
My supervisor praises me. I tell myself she’s just being nice.
I get a good grade. I tell myself I got lucky, or maybe the test graded on a huge curve.
I get hired. I tell myself that it’s because I look better on paper than I do in real life.
My friends think I’m great at math. I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything, because they don’t know much about math or what it means to be good at it.
One way to counter the discounting is to acquire sources that you trust as authentic.
This can take time. For example, if I were to tell you right now that you belong in your job or program, my word wouldn’t mean a lot.
Your teachers, advisors, and peers will spend a lot of time with you. They are also likely knowledgeable about your field, and you can ask them for help.
People who discount in this way never receive internal validation that they are qualified, and feel like they must “fake it.”
This creates a constant fear of being exposed as unqualified.
When one feels like they are fraudulently qualified, future authentic stimuli will be discarded because of the mindset of impostorism.
A couple of notes:
Impostorism can manifest as self-deprecation.
Impostorism harms learning by inhibiting risk-taking.
Perceptions of community knowledge are hard to assess.
This is all worse when people think that ability — or usefulness — is something fundamental and unchangeable. This is called a “brilliance belief.”
What should happen:
What happens in practice, especially given a brilliance belief:
This is also exacerbated when we compare ourselves to others. Another relevant (and classic) diagram: