How Common Is Impostor Syndrome, Really?

In the early 1970s two psychologists in Atlanta, Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, kept hearing the same story from people who had no business telling it. A department chair who said her abilities had obviously been overestimated. A woman with a doctorate and a list of publications who felt unqualified to teach an introductory class. Students convinced the admissions committee had made a clerical error.

In 1978 they gave it a name: the impostor phenomenon, which they described as an internal experience of intellectual phoniness. Nearly fifty years later it is one of the most widely recognised ideas in popular psychology. That popularity has brought a question worth answering carefully: how common is it, and what exactly is it?

Where the idea came from

Clance and Imes did not run a survey. Their paper was a clinical report. Over five years they had worked, in therapy, in groups and in college classes, with more than 150 highly successful women: undergraduates and faculty at a Midwestern college, graduate students and faculty at a southern university, medical students, and professionals in law, nursing, teaching and other fields. Most were white, middle to upper class, and aged between 20 and 45. About a third were therapy clients.

What united them was a strange mismatch. Grades, degrees, praise and promotions did not register as evidence. Success was put down to luck, charm, hard work or somebody's mistake, and each new achievement raised the fear of eventually being found out.

Two details from that paper are often forgotten. First, the authors wrote that the women did not fall into any one diagnostic category. Second, they believed, from clinical impression, that the experience was much less frequent and less intense in men. That second claim is one the later research did not support.

What a systematic review found

In 2020 a team led by Dena Bravata published the first systematic review of the field in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. They searched the research published between 1966 and 2018 and found 62 studies with 14,161 participants in total, half of them published in the previous six years.

Their headline number is not really a number. Depending on the study, the share of people classified as having impostor feelings ranged from 9% to 82%. The authors explained why: studies used different questionnaires and, crucially, different cut-off scores. Where you draw the line between "some self-doubt" and "impostor syndrome" decides how many people end up on the wrong side of it.

Several findings were more consistent. Impostor feelings were common in both men and women, contradicting the original impression. They appeared from adolescence to late career. Rates were particularly high in some ethnic minority groups. And they often travelled with depression and anxiety, and were linked to burnout and lower job satisfaction.

The review also found something missing. At that point no published study had tested a treatment. Workshops, coaching and advice were everywhere; controlled evidence that any of them worked was not.

What this does and does not mean

It is worth being precise, because the popular version of this idea has drifted from the research.

• It is not a diagnosis. You will not find impostor syndrome in the psychiatric manuals. Researchers use the word "phenomenon" for a reason: it describes a pattern of thoughts and feelings, measured on a continuum, not a disorder you either have or do not.
• Prevalence claims depend on the ruler. When you see a single, confident statistic about how many people feel like impostors, ask which questionnaire and which cut-off produced it. The honest answer is a range, and a wide one.
• Common is not the same as harmless. The links with anxiety, depression and burnout are correlations, so they do not tell us which comes first. But they do suggest that for some people this is more than a passing wobble before a presentation.
• The samples have limits. Many studies used students, doctors and other professionals in English-speaking countries. We know much less about people outside those settings.

It is also worth noticing that the review was funded by a health company that employed most of its authors, which the paper openly declares. That does not make it wrong, but it is the kind of detail an honest reader should know.

What you can do with this

If you recognise yourself here, the research suggests a few grounded things to consider, none of which require a label.

First, notice how you explain your successes and failures. The core of the original description is an asymmetry: good outcomes are attributed to luck or effort, bad ones to a lack of ability. Simply writing down, after a success, what you actually did to produce it can make that asymmetry visible.

Second, separate the feeling from the evidence. Feeling unqualified and being unqualified are different things. Our impostor syndrome test measures the first, and our self-efficacy test looks at how confident you are that you can handle specific challenges, which is a related but distinct question.

Third, look at what the fear is protecting you from. Impostor feelings often sit close to a fear of failure: if you never fully own a success, you never have to defend it. The fear of failure test on this site can help you think about that link.

Finally, remember that the evidence on fixes is thin. If these feelings are persistent, affect your sleep or mood, or come with signs of anxiety or depression, it is worth talking to a qualified professional rather than relying on a quiz or an article, including this one.