Imposter Syndrome Is Common In Perfectionists – But Not If They're Also Narcissistic

Now, did that sound like nonsense? Or was it something you’ve been expecting to hear for years? If it’s the latter, you’re in good company: depending on where and how it’s measured, anywhere between nine and 82 percent of us experience this feeling at some point. It’s called the Imposter Phenomenon, or Imposter Syndrome – and now a new study has figured out the personality type most likely to get it.

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.

“The imposter phenomenon, often colloquially referred to as imposter syndrome, describes the feelings of inadequacy and intellectual phoniness,” Colin Xu, an assistant professor at the University of Idaho and lead author of a new study, told PsyPost this week. 

It’s “experienced by some high achieving individuals”, Xu said, and it “comprise[s] the sense of being a fraud, fear of being discovered, and difficulty internalizing success”.

You’re probably familiar with it at least a little – and if you’re not, then you likely know someone who is. “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 cofounder and codirector 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 last 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.”

The imposter personality type

Anybody can get imposter syndrome, but it definitely affects some people more than others: women seem to experience it more frequently and intensely than men, for example, and ethnic and racial minorities are similarly disproportionately hit. There are links to mental health, too: “Imposterism has previously been linked to neuroticism, depression, and anxiety,” pointed out Xu. 

But more subtle traits can also influence your likelihood of experiencing the phenomenon. It has been strongly linked to perfectionism – “a personality trait characterized by striving for flawlessness and setting excessively high standards for performance accompanied by overly critical evaluations of one’s behavior,” according to the researchers who first formally evaluated the personality type back in 2016. 

But as the new study points out, not all perfectionism is created equal – and it turns out some perfectionists aren’t that bothered by imposter syndrome after all.

“Past research on the multidimensional factors of perfectionism has found that perfectionism can be characterized by three global dimensions of perfectionism: rigid perfectionism, self-critical perfectionism, and narcissistic perfectionism,” the new study explains.

The first “describes a ‘rigid instance [sic] that one's own performance must be perfect’,” the authors write – it’s the personality type that drives a person to base their entire self-worth on their own personal perfect standard. Self-critical perfectionism, the second type, is fairly self-explanatory: it “captures the maladaptive facets of concern over making mistakes, doubts about the uncertainty of own's [sic] own performance, self-criticism when performance falls short of perfection, and the tendency to perceive others as demanding perfection,” the paper explains.

Both of these subtypes can be classed as “neurotic perfectionism” – but the final one, narcissistic perfectionism, cannot. This last type is more outwardly directed: it demands “unrealistic perfectionistic standards for others,” the paper says, while taking one’s own perfection or specialness as a given.

Evidently, one of these subtypes is not like the others – but whether or not that difference maps onto the experience of imposter syndrome has so far gone under-examined. Would the link hold up under closer interrogation?

The devil in the details

To figure out the nuances of perfectionism’s link to imposter syndrome, the team recruited close to 300 study participants and gave them two psychological assessments. The first, the Clance Imposter Phenomenon Scale, measures three specific factors: how much you feel like a fraud; how much you discount your own success; and how much you attribute your own success to luck. The second, the Big Three Perfectionism Scale, measures how much of a perfectionist you are and which subtype best describes you.

The results were clear: not only was narcissistic perfectionism not correlated to imposter syndrome at all, but in some respects, it was actually negatively correlated. Meanwhile, as expected, imposter syndrome went hand in hand with the two neurotic subtypes of perfectionism: “We found that imposterism was strongly positively correlated to the subtypes of rigid and self-critical perfectionism, but showed a null correlation with narcissistic perfectionism,” Xu told PsyPost. 

“Thus, it appears imposterism and perfectionism are closely related constructs,” he said, “but there are important distinctions between the subtypes of each.”

Now, admittedly there are some limitations to this study. The study participants were hardly representative, being entirely recruited from undergraduate programs at the University of Pennsylvania; plus, not to put too fine a point on it, some of them might have genuinely been imposters. 

“We did not measure between-subjects variation in objective achievement,” the authors admit. “That is, while participants self-reported their feelings of imposterism, we do not know whether the effects would be magnified or reduced for an individual who is objectively higher or lower achieving among their peers.”

And as strong as the correlation may be, the researchers stress that causation can’t be inferred from this study alone. “We do not know the directionality” of the effect, they write: “whether imposterism is leading rigid and self-critical perfectionism, or if perfectionism leads to imposter phenomenon, or if there is a bi-directional relationship.”

Still, those are questions for future research. Until then, this study is an important puzzle piece for understanding the link between imposter syndrome and perfectionism – or perhaps, we should say, some kinds of perfectionism. Narcissism, it seems, is a genuine imposter.

The study is published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.