Impostor Syndrome Explained: Why So Many Capable People Feel Like Frauds

Success does not cure impostor syndrome, and that is what makes it so stubborn. Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first described it in 1978 as an inner sense of intellectual phoniness in high-achieving women who believed they had fooled everyone who thought them bright, and in their clinical work repeated successes alone were not enough to end it.¹

Impostor syndrome is persistent doubt that you earned your success. It is a pattern of thinking, not a recognized psychiatric diagnosis, though it often travels with conditions that are. The first systematic reviewsystematic review: A review that fixes its question and its rules for including studies in advance, then searches out every study that fits and weighs them together. Some systematic reviews pool the results into a meta-analysis; others describe what the studies found without combining the numbers.Full entry in the glossary of the research, published in 2020, found impostor feelings in men and women from adolescence to late career, often alongside symptoms of depression and anxiety, but found no study that had tested a treatment.²

Impostor syndrome is an experience, not a diagnosis

Impostor syndrome describes capable people who cannot take in their own success: they credit it to luck or help from others, treat setbacks as proof they are not good enough, and fear being found out. A 2020 systematic review in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, led by Dena Bravata of Stanford University, uses that definition.²

The same review points out that it is not a recognized psychiatric disorder: it does not appear in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual (the DSM) or in the World Health Organization’s ICD-10, the edition current at the time.² A 2019 review of the questionnaires used to measure it, by Karina Mak and colleagues at the University of Sydney, puts it the same way: a pervasive experience, seen in clinical and non-clinical groups, that cannot be diagnosed.³ Nor is it the same thing as a fixed or growth mindset, which psychologists define as a belief about whether qualities such as ability can change.

The distinction matters because a diagnosis names a condition a clinician can assess, while impostor syndrome names a way of reading your own results. Take an illustrative case. A newly promoted analyst leads a project that lands well. Her manager praises the result; she privately decides the deadline was generous and the team carried her, and she starts dreading the next project, when everyone will see.

Seeing yourself in her does not mean you have a disorder, and the feeling does not need a label to be worth taking seriously. The label matters in one practical way. Because impostor feelings often come with anxiety and depression, which are diagnosable and treatable, it is worth asking whether you are dealing with one of those as well (the last section sets out where to go).

Clance and Imes drew the idea from therapy rooms, not a survey

Clance and Imes built the idea from what they saw in therapy rooms, groups and college classes, not from a measured study. Over five years they worked with more than 150 highly successful women, including PhD holders, respected professionals and top students, who did not feel successful inside; the women were mostly white, middle to upper class and aged 20 to 45.¹

The women in their account explained away every achievement. Students thought an admissions committee had made a mistake; a department chair said her abilities had been overestimated. The authors proposed two family patterns as roots, a sibling labelled the bright one or parents who praised the child as effortlessly perfect, and they argued that stereotypes about women’s ability made the doubts worse. They also wrote, in a footnote, that in their clinical experience the phenomenon was rarer and milder in men, and that this needed research.¹

1. 1978Clance and Imes describe the impostor phenomenon
2. 1985Clance's book spreads the idea; her 20-item scale becomes the most used measure
3. 2020First systematic review of the research
4. 2025Umbrella review finds no gold-standard measure

The idea reached a wide audience after Clance’s 1985 book, and later research found impostor feelings in men and women, across many professions and in several ethnic and racial groups.² The origin story matters because clinical impressions and tested findings deserve different weight. The family theories came from a selected group of women, many of them in therapy or growth groups; the remark about men was a clinical impression; and that paper tested neither. So when a popular article says your doubts come from being cast as the clever sibling, read it as a 1978 hunch rather than a result.

Why success does not settle the doubt

Success fails to reassure people with impostor feelings because they credit it to things that do not count as ability, such as luck or sheer effort. Clance and Imes described a self-sealing cycle: worry about being found out, very hard work, a good result, brief relief, then the same worry before the next test.¹

1. Worry: fear that this time you will be found out
2. Hard work and cover-up: studying or working very hard so the feared gap is never seen
3. A good result: good grades or performance, and approval
4. Brief relief: short-lived, because the sense of being a phony is untouched and the result is credited to luck or effort, not ability

The logic is simple from the inside: if you believe you only succeeded because you worked twice as hard, every success teaches you to keep working twice as hard, and never teaches you that you are capable. The authors also described quieter habits that keep the feeling alive: holding back your real opinions and telling people what they want to hear, then wondering whether your own views would have passed.¹

Later research fits the idea that the problem lies in how results are read, not in the results. In one 1990 study of college students, summarized in the 2020 review, those high in impostor feelings expected to do worse on a midterm exam and were more anxious about it, yet their grades showed no clear difference from other students’.²

The lesson runs against instinct: the fix the feeling seems to demand, one more success, is the one thing that does not work on its own. A more useful first move is to notice where you send the credit, and the question below is a quick way to do it.

What seems to help, and how thin the evidence is

There is no proven treatment for impostor feelings. When Bravata’s team searched the research up to 2018, they found no study that had evaluated one; they advised clinicians to screen people with impostor feelings for depression and anxiety and treat those with established therapies.²

Three simple ideas come from the original clinical work and the 2020 review, though none has been tested on its own:

1. Talking to peers. Clance and Imes saw women relieved to learn they were not alone once one of them spoke openly in a group.¹ Bravata’s team suggested groups designed to make impostor feelings normal to talk about.²
2. Keeping a record of praise. Clance and Imes asked clients to record positive feedback and to notice how they brushed it aside.¹
3. Changing what a team celebrates. Bravata’s team suggested workplaces that celebrate accomplishments and do not treat mistakes as failures.²

The first two aim at the cycle above: a group can ease the belief that you are the only one, and a written record makes the habit of discounting visible. For the analyst in the earlier example, that could mean a short note of what her manager actually praised, reread before the next project starts.

Formal programs have been studied, but not well. A 2025 umbrella review in Medical Education, which appraised 16 earlier reviews, found about 30 studies of some kind of intervention, only a handful of them randomized trials. It judged coaching, online self-study modules and mindfulness-based programs promising, but warned that many used poorly validated scales and few were of high quality.⁴

The clearest trial so far was small. In a 2021 pilot at the University of Colorado, about 100 female resident physicians were randomly assigned to a six-month online group-coaching program or to training as usual. The program reduced impostor scores, a secondary outcome measured with a brief questionnaire, as well as emotional exhaustion. It ran at one institution, fewer people in the coaching group answered the final survey, and five authors had ties to the program, two of them as its co-founders, according to a June 2022 correction.⁵ Read it as a promising early result in one group of young doctors, not as proof that coaching works for everyone.

How common is impostor syndrome? It depends on the ruler

Nobody can say how common impostor syndrome is, because the answer depends on which questionnaire researchers use and where they draw the line. The 2020 review by Bravata and colleagues, the first to gather the evidence systematically, shows why any single prevalenceprevalence: The share of a population who have a given condition at a point in time or across a set period. Every prevalence figure depends on the case definition behind it: loosen or tighten the criteria for counting as a case and the figure moves with them.Full entry in the glossary figure misleads.

The study

Limited evidence

Same feeling, different rulers: the first systematic review, 2020

Reported rates ranged from 9 to 82 percent, largely depending on the screening tool and cutoff used. Impostor feelings turned up in men and women and from teenagers to late-career professionals, often alongside symptoms of depression and anxiety, and were linked with burnout and lower job satisfaction in employees. No included study had tested a treatment.²

A range that wide is not a statistic you can use. Most studies used Clance’s 20-item questionnaire, but researchers drew the line for “impostor” at different scores, or simply split their sample at the middle. A survey that splits an office at the middle score will label about half the staff impostors whatever they feel; a high cutoff might label a handful. Nearly every study was a one-off survey, often of students, which can reveal links but not causes. The review was funded by Crossover Health, a provider of employer-sponsored clinics, and all authors but one were its employees or consultants.²

The 2025 umbrella review found the picture had not sharpened: there is still no gold-standard measure, the concept is defined in different ways, and the systematic reviews it appraised were rated low or critically low in quality. Gender shows how slippery the numbers are: a 2024 meta-analysis described in the umbrella review found women score slightly higher on average, but the gap is small and larger with some questionnaires than others.⁴

What this means for you: be wary of any confident headline figure for “how many people” have impostor syndrome. What the research does support is that the experience is common enough, in enough kinds of people, that feeling it does not make you unusual.

What impostor feelings are linked to, and why context counts

Impostor feelings are repeatedly linked to anxiety, depression, low self-esteem and burnout, and among employees to lower job satisfaction and less career planning. The reviews reporting these links rest on surveys taken at a single moment, which cannot show whether the feelings come before the anxiety or after it.² The 2025 umbrella review lists perfectionism, belonging to a marginalized group and hierarchical workplace cultures among the recurring risk factors.⁴

That last point has led some researchers to look beyond the individual. In a 2020 perspective piece, Sanne Feenstra of the University of Groningen and colleagues argued that impostor feelings are not only a trait inside the person but can be produced by the setting: stereotypes about who belongs, being under-represented in a role, and everyday treatment that signals your ideas count for less.⁶ This is an argument built from wider research, not a new study, and whether impostor syndrome is the right concept at all has its own debate.

As an illustration, the same engineer may feel like a fraud in a team where her suggestions are routinely talked over, and not in one where they are taken up. For managers, the practical question is what the team’s habits signal about who belongs, not only how to coach individuals toward confidence. The same point connects impostor feelings with how burnout develops, since both are tied to the conditions of the work as well as to the person doing it.

When self-doubt needs more than reassurance

Impostor feelings are not a diagnosis, but they often come with depression and anxiety, which can be diagnosed and treated.

Myth

Impostor syndrome is a mental health condition a doctor can diagnose.

Fact

It is not in the DSM or the ICD-10. It is a pattern of self-doubt, though it often shows up alongside anxiety or depression, which can be diagnosed.

The routes below run from most to least urgent.

• Right now: anyone in the US with thoughts of suicide or in emotional distress can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, and in a life-threatening situation should call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room, according to NIMH, the US National Institute of Mental Health.⁷ NHS advice for the UK is 999 or A&E if someone’s life is at risk or you feel you cannot keep yourself or another person safe.⁸ Outside the US and UK, use your local emergency number.
• Soon, for urgent help short of an emergency: in England, the NHS points to 111 (select the mental health option) or an urgent GP appointment, and to Samaritans on 116 123, a free and confidential listening line.⁸
• At a routine appointment: the NHS urges anyone who thinks they may be depressed to see a GP without delay.⁹ Its 2024 page on generalised anxiety disorder likewise advises a GP visit if you think you might have it, and adults in England can refer themselves to NHS talking therapies with no GP involved.¹⁰ For US readers, NIMH says a primary care provider can carry out a first mental health screening and pass you to a specialist.⁷

The bottom line

The trap in impostor syndrome is that success does not end it, because each success gets filed under luck or effort. It is a common pattern of self-doubt, not a diagnosis; research finds it in many kinds of people but cannot say how many, and no treatment is proven yet. Noticing where you send the credit and talking with peers are sensible first steps, and low mood or anxiety that comes with it is worth a doctor’s time.