Impostor phenomenon through the lens of behavioral science

Have you ever experienced any of these thoughts?

“Little do they know, I actually feel clueless..”

“I just don’t think I’m good enough.”

“It was total luck that I succeeded.”

“If I ask a question, they will think I am stupid.”

You are not alone. Many have been there. Employees in competitive environments experience these thoughts induced by something called the “Impostor Syndrome.” Studies show that 70% of successful people have reported experiencing imposter syndrome (or imposter phenomenon, as it is not a clinical diagnosis) thoughts at some point in their work-life. 

What is it, and why should companies care?

In essence, the imposter phenomenon is an internal experience of intellectual phoniness in individuals who are accomplished but unable to internalize their success. As a result, they believe their success is not earned, and they will soon be “found out” as incompetent fraud. Even though early research stated that the impostor phenomenon is primarily observed in women, newer studies have concluded that it is common among both genders.

According to its founders, the phenomenon is not a disease someone is inherently born with. Instead, clinical psychologist Dr. Andrea Salazar-Nuñez suggested that “the problem isn’t necessarily the person; it can also be the setting or culture.” This is why, as described in this HBR article, it is important to address this issue in the workplace to avoid the risk of losing key talent. With this in mind, it should be in the interest of companies to understand impostor phenomenon and mend any workplace issues that provoke the phenomenon in their employees. And then possibly mitigate it systematically to make a real impact. 

At Impactually, we are always interested in using behavioral science to solve societal and organizational problems. This was a particularly interesting topic for us to look into and a topic on which the behavioral science literature is lacking. Continue reading to learn how we used literature, qualitative interviews and our BOOST model approach to design some promising interventions. 

Six characteristics that identify the phenomenon

First, we need to define the problem. So how do you know if you or one of your employees suffers from it? In 1985, Dr. Clance suggested six potential characteristics that identify the impostor phenomenon: 1. the Impostor Cycle; 2. the need to be special; 3. the need to be the superhero at everything; 4. fear of failure; 5. denial of competence, and discounting praise; 6. feeling fear and guilt about success. Not everyone who experiences the phenomenon has all six characteristics; however, a minimum of two characteristics should be identified to qualify. 

“The Impostor Cycle” is initiated by getting an achievement-related assignment that triggers anxiety and self-doubt-related symptoms. It makes the “impostor” either extremely over-prepare or start with procrastination due to stress, followed by frantic preparation. After the task is completed, the person feels a sense of relief for a short moment. Once colleagues offer positive feedback about their completed work, the impostor attributes success to either their efforts (if they over-prepared) or luck (if they initially procrastinated), just not their ability, and the cycle starts again. 

The need to be special. Impostors have often been at the top of their class throughout their school years. However, in a larger setting, such as higher education institutions, impostors realize there are many excellent people, and their own skills are not atypical. Unfortunately, this causes the impostors to dismiss their skills and conclude they are unintelligent when they are not the best. 

The superhero characteristic is the need to be the best at anything an impostor does. This tendency is interrelated with the need to be special and an additional aspect of perfectionism. A Perfectionist is a person who sets impossibly high standards as goals and as self-evaluation criteria. With such high standards, impostors often feel overwhelmed, disappointed, and generalize themselves as failures when unable to attain the goals set by their perfectionist nature.

According to Dr. Clance, fear of failure is characteristic number four, which is an underlying motive for most impostors. Producing mistakes and not performing at the very highest standard causes them to experience feelings of shame and humiliation. Consequently, to avoid failure, impostors tend to overwork themselves.

Denial of competence and discounting praise. That manifests itself in attributing success to external factors to a greater degree than most people. Impostors focus on evidence and develop arguments to prove that they do not deserve praise or credit for particular achievements.

Fear and guilt about success. This fear stems from worry about being rejected by others for being different. When impostors’ successes are unusual in their family or peers, they might feel less connected and more distant from them and hone overwhelming guilt about being different. Furthermore, impostors feel uncertain about their ability to maintain performance. Therefore, they are reluctant to accept additional responsibility out of worry that higher demands or expectations may finally reveal their intellectual phoniness. 

How we identified workplace issues 

After a thorough literature review, we conducted qualitative interviews with employees who have experienced the phenomenon in their current or past workplaces. The interviews revealed an additional culture issue to those well-known in the literature. Several employees listed a lack of appreciation for their work as a workplace issue. One employee stated, “People are always very quick to criticize when something is negative, but people aren’t good at praising you, or saying we have done a good job. I, myself, have felt unappreciated as well.” The majority mentioned the need to receive positive reinforcement in the form of appreciation, praise, and acknowledgment to feel good at work. No matter how we feel about ourselves, it doesn’t hurt to receive some good feedback once in a while.

Using the BOOST model to develop effective solutions

Receiving positive feedback is not something that employees themselves can directly impact, especially not if they have feelings of impostorism, So applying positive company-level behavior change techniques can be a solution to break the cycle and help impostorism employees on a systematic level. Using targeted nudges both for leaders and employees more attention could be put into reinforcing positive behavior and avoiding negative, triggering behavior.

So, to help mitigate impostorism amongst employees, we had a workshop on designing a digital, company-level behaviour change intervention by following the BOOST model. First, we determined in which situations feelings of impostorism might be particularly strong and which behaviors we wanted to facilitate or avoid. We had a long list of behaviors such as “ask for feedback”, “schedule a meeting for feedback”, “don’t overprepare”, “take the spotlight”, “speak up in meetings”, and several others (B = behavior from the BOOST model). We decided to go with the following behavior: “We want employees to speak up in meetings and take the initiative when they are competent to do the task.” To understand why they might not be doing this behavior, we deep-dived into the different obstacles (O = obstacle from the BOOST model). We identified three cognitive biases: underconfidence (low esteem about one’s own abilities despite successes), social norms (conforming to the environment to please others) and loss aversion (afraid to fail in front of others, who are successful). To come up with interventions, we used the model’s REFINE Matrix to identify suitable interventions (O = Outline from the BOOST model). The most suitable categories are: to either Reframe information in a different way, Encourage by making the behavior in question more desirable and appealing, or Incentivise in a behaviourally informed way.

Curious how you can use the BOOST model to solve your challenges? Check out our self-paced online course “Designing Nudges“! 

Having identified from which category it would be most effective to design nudges, we then used a word-association task to brainstorm possible interventions. During the brainstorm session, we came up with a total of 17 possible digital nudge ideas. Many ideas are inspired by successful interventions used to affect health or savings behavior.

• A dedicated platform for only positive feedback feed from peers for each other’s work 
• An automated initiative pre-commitment system “say-yes-later” for encouraging risk-taking
• A badge reward system for exposure activity for boosting confidence
• A confidence-building chatbot offering daily praise

All these ideas could work towards mitigating the identified obstacle of self-doubt and fear of failure that impostor phenomenon induces in employees who are ambitious and getting them to step up when they have the right skills.  

While each of the ideas mentioned would capitalize on at least one of the strategies to help impostors in some way, the idea of a platform for only positive feedback from peers also addressed an identified workplace issue. Therefore, this idea was taken forward to create a digital proof of concept because it tackled the lack of work acknowledgement culture identified during the seven interviews. 

The idea, in essence, was that after a finalized project or challenge would be presented publicly, the presenter would receive a “Twitter”-like feed of only positive feedback from peers who attended the presentation, which would ultimately generate social proof and validation of competence. The systematic-level hypothesis behind the idea was that if regularly offering and receiving appreciation for work between peers becomes the social norm within an organisation, then gradually, employees who experience the phenomenon will feel safe to actively take more risks by making themselves seen and, therefore, advance in their careers faster. As a result, the desired systematic outcome of the nudge concept was to establish and normalize an acknowledgment culture within organizations. As a next step, we would want to test the nudge in an organization to measure its effect on our target behavior. Does frequent positive feedback from peers increase the probability that people will speak up and volunteer for tasks that they are qualified for?

The takeaway from this project is that the impostor phenomenon is a systematic problem in companies. Using the BOOST model we were able to strategically think about how imposterism could impact behavior in the workplace and thus hinder company productivity. The step-by-step process, focussing on behavior and unpacking the impostor syndrome into several biases, allows designing targeted nudges and interventions to change behavior and potentially alleviate impostorism in the long run. At the end of the day, it is in everyone’s interest to reach their fullest potential at work while preserving wholesome emotional health.

— This text was co-written by Ieva Silina, who wrote her Master thesis in collaboration with Impactually 

Christina Gravert

Christina.gravert@impactually.se

+ 45 50 17 43 32

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