The concept of Impostor Syndrome has become ubiquitous | Hacker News Reader

The concept of Impostor Syndrome has become ubiquitous

newyorker.com

51 pointscocacola152 comments

> her mother had taught her that naturally smart people don’t have to study.

Of all the parts of the article, that little bit stands out.

Because I see my older kid do that all the time, as if putting in effort to do something is somehow not the real thing. As if things learned from mistakes and practice is not progress - a substitute for talent.

It's related to pride, in my experience tutoring high school and college kids. That was my own experience while growing up as well, there's a sentiment that "natural" smartness and hard-working smartness are two seperate things.

I feel like kids have been moving away from this mindset, but maybe it's changed names. Growing up being a "nerd" was uncool, and studying was "nerdy". After college, I talked to some of the people who were the "naturally" smart kids and I found out they lied so much about how much time they spent not studying. Everyone lies. Part of it, I learned, was that my graduating class ended up with a lot of cut-throat people, they lied about how much work they put in to gatekeep. I don't speak to a single person from my graduating year now even though I am friends with some teachers as well as kids from other years. A similar concept but less isolated to academics has been kind of a popular "insult". I sometimes hear the concept of "sweaty" being uncool among the youngest ages I teach. Sweaty, as in working so hard towards something that you work up a sweat. It's doesn't have to be a physical activity, you can be called sweaty at video games, or sweaty at math.

Education is a weird place to use the word talent, looking back. You can't wake up knowing new information. Everyone has to learn, the people who look talented just learned it earlier than everyone else. I am not sure why hard working is seen as uncool at that age. I wonder if it's different in other parts of the world, I learned that I have a very typical north eastern USA experience.

    You can't wake up knowing new information. Everyone has to learn, the people who look talented just learned it earlier than everyone else.

Of course you are correct that the "naturally smart" people learned it faster. As in, new information was provided to them just once or twice and they instantly grasped it and were able to apply it.

As knowledge accumulates in people they may also actually "wake up with new information" nobody taught them. As in their brains may make associations and conclusions without someone teaching them. The proverbial "I had an idea while showering". There's your "talented" guy.

"there's a sentiment that "natural" smartness and hard-working smartness are two seperate things."

This is a huge problem in the dating market too. "Self improvement" implies that at one point one was a singificantly less high status individual... And that they are at risk of backsliding.

People who are naturally gifted or don't have to try have less risk of becoming unattractive later.

It's sexier, cooler, and more successful to be good at something without trying. I don't blame your kids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprezzatura

The most successful people I know are regular smart folks who have patience, and can get into deep focus mode / zone at-will.

The smartest people I know have 0 focus, but they can grasp insanely complex topics that are interesting to them super fast.

You're not strictly describing intelligence, you're also describing symptoms that relate to ADHD. I wonder if there's a bias to categorize someone as more intelligent based on the contrast between someone's ability to focus and their ability to grasp complex ideas quickly. I struggle severly with ADHD and notice it all of the time, in how people's perception of me changes when we end up on a topic I know well and enjoy talking about.

As someone who neither took notes nor studied for basically anything I disagree. I cannot study effectively. I would cram some facts in 30 minutes prior to a test and that’s it. I don’t think I was alone. It had nothing to do with looking uncool.

Most stuff is simply taught in class and if you pay attention and remember it you will be fine. Teachers tend not to test stuff they did not teach.

I always thought studying was for kids who either did not pay attention or wasted their time taking notes without actually learning. I’ve softened that opinion since but many people absolutely do not need to study much.

How much of it do you remember now? How much of it do you care to remember long term? I know you weren't alone, I was one of those kids too, at certain times and certain tests. For most people, it was about pride, being able to say you didn't study or social standing and "coolness". Later in life I learned I have ADHD and that went a long way to explain a lot of my bad habits. I think it depends on the level of curriculum too. 11th and 12th, the last two years of HS for me, six out of my eight classes were AP/college weighted, the only exceptions were english and physical education.

Teachers absolutely tested stuff they didn't teach and they barely assigned homework, there was a lot of self-learning. I think it's relatively uncommon for schools to do this, but in 12th I took AP Physics C, calculus based physics, and we did both semesters over the school year, both Mech and E&M. We matched college pacing, and on both AP test I got 5s. I am so grateful to that teacher for getting that experience before starting college, he had a PhD in theortical physics. My science education was filled with teachers with PhDs while I was in high school.

People absolutely have to study when they are being challenged at an appropriate level. If I was in a non-accelerated curriculum, I think I would have agreed with you, because it would have matched my experience. But I took my first AP class in 10th grade, the second year of high school. There's no way to be successful in a hard science AP class without studying in one way or another. I remember some of my friends used to do the homework from one class in another and then say they didn't study. I am not disagreeing with your experience, I am disagreeing with your generalization.

Imo I remember it very well. At least conceptually. History is the hardest.

I took 11 AP tests, 3 of them without taking the class over two years. My teachers were generally not PhDs but think these classes were better than my undergrad classes. I suspect you are right on the hard science assessment. Those do require simply memorizing many facts. I avoided those classes.

Wait so after a lecture on the principles of, say, kinematics you would then be able to nail an exam that required you to compute against those principles? I think that's unusual.

For me in class even if I could follow the teacher perfectly, only through applying concepts in study (read: solving many problems) could I gain the deeper level of insight and comfort with the material that it took to ace exams.

I mean yeah. I sat in the front. I listened and took no notes.

If you’re being tested on details from a book you need to read the book. Think English tests that really just want to Make sure you actually read.

If you’re being tested on the gist of what was taught then you can probably just pay attention in class. Think… biology or history.

If you’re being tested on your ability to apply things you just need to be confident in your understanding of the mechanics. If you understand a math formula, and it’s reasoning, there’s not often a need to practice it. Some exceptions apply where the math is just weird hacks and patterns like finding function roots or calculus patterns. Physics is pretty hard for people because it really asks you to be able to apply things to real world thinking. I recall a question that requires you to consider the distance to the moon to get an answer. This distance was not provided. If you understood the formula and the problem, it was apparent that the distance would be so large it would not affect the answer. Hard to study for.

> I mean yeah. I sat in the front. I listened and took no notes

The reason I commented is because I also did all of those things! But only through adding in study could I sit exams and make 0 mistakes.

I was a bio major -- the gist was not enough. For example I needed to memorize every reactant and product of the Krebs and Calvin cycles. And the exam would have so much more to both memorize and process then just that. I just couldn't have stuck that knowledge through one-shotting class, and never imagined anyone could.

You truly have a blessed mind.

As someone else who was the same: Yes. The teacher would be demonstrating sample problems to the class at a much slower rate than I could apply it, so I was checking that I understood the material in real time.

Homework was sometimes useful (the repetition ensuring it wouldn't fade like cramming before a test does), but I didn't need as much as was assigned and never studied beyond that.

>there's a sentiment that "natural" smartness and hard-working smartness are two seperate things.

Someone who recognizes this very wisely might be the one most likely to engage both as much as possible.

It’s a protection mechanism for ones ego. Because if you “don’t try” you always have an excuse for why you’re not doing as well as the “nerds” at school.

If you do “try” but you don’t get a top result, what would that say to a kids fragile ego ? They might think they’re not good at all.

By trying, you reveal your capabilities (as well as your limitations), and that can be terrifying for a kid with a fragile ego.

The correct mentality is to focus on the process, rather than the result.

The result doesn’t matter (especially for kids) as long as you focus on training and improving yourself.

A problem with this attitude is how schools and their grading systems are teaching children the exact opposite. What matters are your grades in the end.

I feel like judging myself by my results and not by the process im going through was so deeply ingrained in me that even after years of trying I cannot get rid of it.

SO is a high school teacher. This is her primary complaint about how we do things today. She talks a lot about the book Grading for Equity.

I'm of the opinion that traditional schooling is a bit of a zombie. There just isn't a way for an institution with that much inertia to keep up with a world that releases generalized search and chat-capable LLMs within 20 years of each other. Especially considering they're so underfunded that in places you don't even need to know a subject to get a job teaching it, because they don't have enough SMEs willing to work at the pay.

My kid is pretty smart, not genius smart, and he falls into this trap too. He loves succeeding at stuff, but hates putting effort into it. If he tries and fails once, he says "well I'm just not a ____ person" and digs his heels in. If we cajole him into trying, he'll intentionally flub it.

You can't divine the value of experience, except from experience.

Naturally smart kids really don’t have to study in high school because the material is so easy for them. Just staying awake in class and doing the reading once is sufficient if not moreso. Often times exam answers can be inferred from other exam questions with only partial knowledge of the material. There’s often a rude awakening in store for them though when they hit the second or third year of college and encounter challenging material for the first time while having no experience studying.

How are you dealing with this? I used to feel that way too but now that I actually want to put more effort, I cannot being myself to do that. I cannot focus and get easily distracted whenever I try.

The biggest issue with Imposter Syndrome is the name. It makes it sound like some kind of abnormal medical issue that some people "have". I think part of its popularity is because people make it part of their identity.

It's like people saying they are OCD when really they just like things to be neat.

It's should be called "lack of confidence", but they you probably couldn't write papers and books about it.

You could probably come up with more "syndromes" that are really common and normal human behaviours if you want to make a name for yourself! "morning syndrome" (difficult to get up in the morning), "hunger syndrome" (being hungry even when you've eaten a sensible amount of food), "stranger syndrome" (not being confident at talking to strangers), "Smalltalk syndrome" (being shit at Smalltalk), etc.

This seems to be talking almost exclusively about faking intellectualism, but I believe there's a bigger cultural issue going on. Nevermind that intellectualism requires humility and the ability to be wrong and in fact feel stupid from time to time. Something which is poorly taught. But I digress...

We all have just splintered into so many little groups, pods, and sadly solos, that to fit in anywhere requires a serious bit of "faking it". Unfortunately, this spills over into the workplace, even when much of the work is technical and answer oriented.

I'm not fresh enough to feel like I'm faking it (I never really did), but I haven't been around long enough to be used to the feeling of being left behind (I hope I never do).

I am resentful for how things have changed out from underneath me. And I'm regretful for the people I didn't foster better relationships with.

Everyone doesn't feel like an imposter.

But most of us feel we're surrounded by them.

I hear "fake it til you make it" coming from children's mouths these days, not just startup hustlers.

This is exactly right. Been seeing this a lot, especially in the last five years.

Most of my tech interview strategy has adapted to weed out candidates that are imposters.

This has always been a problem though, it's how simplistic programming tests like FizzBuzz got started: Non-imposters find it trivial, imposters can't figure it out on the fly. Then that one got too popular, solutions are all over the internet, the imposters started memorizing it, and now we've ended up with a crazy variety of programming tests that have drifted extremely far from the original intent.

We've found a cure to imposter syndrome, well, if we could only bottle George Santos.

hey, don't be knocking george santos! he was the first openly gay jewish monk to set himself on fire to protest the vietnam war! the man is an icon!

I had a job shovelling mulch once. No imposter syndrome.

edit: Not to trivialise the article, its a good one and worth reading and learning from.

If we are all imposters, then no one is.

I do not think I have ever felt imposter syndrome, in all honesty. Do most people honestly feel this?

There's another thread further down of us. Personally I think the author (or editor, whoever chose the title) feels it and is projecting onto everyone else.

To balance things out, the opposite is the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

"I'm bad at this. Oh, but maybe it's the Impostor Syndrome and that means I'm actually good? Oh but then maybe that's the Dunning-Kruger Effect and I'm actually bad."

Repeat until both cancel out and your mind settles on some middle point, not worrying about "maybe I'm bad and nobody else knows", and not being overconfident.

Dunning-Kruger's not real:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/2020...

This doesn't seem like it's debunking anything to me, instead debunking the author's own understanding. The alternate explanation they come to is how I've always understood it, which the footnote at the bottom kind-of acknowledges.

This article does not make any sense to me. It basically explains imposter syndrome as the consequence of having unrealistic external expectations of success and ability, requiring a fake persona, e.g. being the result of privilege and expectations that come with it, but then also dismisses mens experience of this phenomenon, and talks about how it’s basically the result of systematic injustice against women. How can it be both? And how can they justify hand waving away the fact that men also experience this?

Surmising from the article, it appears that Imposter Syndrome was originally conceptualized in the context of feminist thought and at some later point migrated into wider cultural discourse as a more gender neutral concept. But for people immersed in feminist literature and discourse it's probably still very much a feminist concept, especially as it relates to experiences.

Because of how women physically and emotionally mature and the social roles they grow into, I can easily imagine that there are dimensions to Imposter Syndrome as originally conceived which would be less familiar to or less intense for most men. For example, stressors regarding dress, tensions between sexuality and professionalism, dilemmas between following the rules vs breaking the rules, etc.

But I'm being charitable. The quick dismissal by the author is indeed disheartening.

I feel less charitable. In the last couple of decades, there has been meaningful change in people adhering to traditional gender roles. Especially in the last 10 years, I have seen a huge push to break the cultural acceptance of toxic masculinity. Pretending that men would be less familiar or feel it less intensely, in this day and age, is continuing the underlying themes of toxic masculinity. It's not just disheartening, it's disrespectful. I understand arguing that it affects women disproportionately, but I can't understand arguing that it won't affect men. Even if you are immersed in feminist literature, you have to be aware of the changing gender norms.

Indeed. I am no part of the LGBT+ community, but articles like this make me realize there are emotional elements of the female experience that resonate with me. Certainly imposter syndrome is something I have struggled with and continue to. I had an interaction just this week which brought it up.

All that said, if some feminist idea wasn't intended for me, I am not going to sweat it. Feminism at its core is the idea that people are people regardless of gender and should be treated accordingly.

I was reading the original paper where the idea was first presented and came across a footnote that demonstrated to just how far we've come in the last 40 years.

"The attribution research findings, summarized later, imply that the impostor phenomenon would be found less frequently in men than in women. We have noticed the phenomenon in men who appear to be more in touch with their “feminine” qualities. This clinical observation needs to be researched"

The whole point of feminism is equality, it doesn't make sense to then restrict experiences to a specific gender. I think the idea that "some feminist idea wasn't intended for" you is the wrong takeaway here. These ideas and frameworks are meaningful when they can be applied to improve your life, the intended audience isn't important. Otherwise it feels like it'll induce imposter syndrome for the concept of having imposter syndrome. If you feel that this struggle applies to you, then the idea was intended for you. One of the definitions of toxic femininity is shaming men for not being "manly" enough and more generally policing femininity in others.

That kind of othering is the reason why some people react so negatively to certain kinds of feminism, and it's why I don't call myself a feminist even if I work to promote feminist ideologies. Exclusionary feminism is not popular as a whole, but it is very vocal. I feel classifying resonating emotionally with the female experience as LGBT+ is continuing implicit toxic masculinity and femininity. Implicit bias surrounding these topics is completely dependent on the environment you were brought up in, and it's one of the hardest things to break when you are older. There absolutely is subjectivity in all of this, and there is value in classifying specific things as a feminine or masculine experience. But I dislike how strongly some people work to delineate the two. It feels wrong to intentionally create a minority out of people and behaviors that fit into both categories.

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...

>Although men do report feeling like impostors, the experience is primarily associated with women

No citation on that one...

Anecdotally, as a man in academia, all of the men I know closely also experience this. It’s pretty much universal for men and women. If it’s more associated with women, I think that is because it’s less socially acceptable for men to be vulnerable, or discuss their feelings.

It makes sense to me that it is in a sense a consequence of privilege, success, and opportunities. If nobody believes in you, or expects a lot from you, you won’t feel like an imposter.

> I think that is because it’s less socially acceptable for men to be vulnerable, or discuss their feelings.

This is also true in the broader sense of public discourse. I remember talk shows like Oprah Winfrey in the 1990s discussing women's sexual health and how women never get to discuss or explore women's sexual health issues.

Fast forward 30 years and I've come to realize that this narrative--1) women experience X, 2) women never get to openly discuss X--is a constant. Not just in the past 30 years, but going back for a least a century if you read popular women's magazines.

Heck, just last night on NPR (KQED) there was discussion about menopause and how women are ignorant about the physiology of menopause because it's never openly discussed. And I'm like, "are you kidding me! I don't have enough fingers to count how many times over the past 20+ years I've heard a program on KQED not only dedicated to menopause, but claim that nobody ever talks about menopause." As contrasted to men's health issues, where I definitely have enough fingers.

Which isn't to deny a deficit in open discourse regarding many women's issues, but certainly there's no deficit in the narrative that women's issues are never openly discussed; quite the opposite, they're constantly discussed--on the air, in print, etc, because apparently there's strong demand among women to discuss them.

I wouldn't consider the last century, 30 years, or even 5 years as providing a constant pattern for the level and access to discourse about issues impacting non white males. There is a world of difference between Oprah in the 80s and 90s making a space to address these things, and NPR today.

A classic "world to end tomorrow - women and minorities hardest hit" article

Because for centuries we only had a few professions which were passed down in each family and now we have so many specialist roles to work with material nature that no one really is an expert

I have never felt like I am faking it, is that really strange?

Yeah people in hard sciences can't really fake as a workhorse. However, I have worked at a job where almost everyone but me was an onshore offshore copy/paste StackOverflow "software engineer" and they were absolutely fakers but they truly didn't see themself as such. Their main defense was to make sure to only hire other "engineers" who were even worse than them. That type of hiring cascades to zero nicely.

For the latecomers - It was originally posted here with the title on the page, not the title in the URL: "Why Everyone Feels Like They’re Faking It".

I was also was gonna post something like "...uh, no I don't", but decided to hold off and see what others thought. Guess it was a good idea for a different reason, the title on here having changed.

Do you ever feel like the job comes easy to all your coworkers while you are struggling to stay with the pack?

Me either

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