So, You’re A Success Or Just Faking It?

Feeling fake? You’re not alone. Millions of successful people believe their accomplishments are undeserved, the result of dumb luck or extraordinary circumstances and not their own talents or abilities.

It’s called the Impostor Phenomenon, says psychologist Pauline Clance of Georgia State University, who has written extensively about it since the 1970s, most recently in the current issue of Women & Therapy.

Clance estimates that about 70 percent of all collegeeducated people experience the phenomenon sometime in their lives, often when they get a promotion or start a new job. But she also said about “40 percent of us aren’t able to lose that sense that ‘Somehow I don’t belong - the next time I will blow it.”’

New research by others suggests how feeling fake shapes the everyday lives of otherwise successful people. These studies suggest that in school, Impostors are less likely to apply for honors courses though they have the grades and test scores to qualify. They feel distressed and threatened at work in spite of their accomplishments. And they’re less happy in their personal relationships, bedeviled by feelings of unprovoked jealousy and doubt.

In fact, Clance said, the inability to enjoy success is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Impostor Phenomenon. Julie Narom, assistant professor of psychology at Wellesley College, is following the progress of 90 Wellesley students, 40 of whom Narom classified as classic Impostors: fearful when they entered college that they didn’t belong academically and also fearful that they’d fail socially.

These students, she found, were half-right. These Impostors did well in Wellesley’s challenging academic environment; if anything, their grades were somewhat better than nonimpostors. But they fell far short of meeting their social goals. “It may be that the social consequences may be greater than the academic consequences” of the Impostor Phenomenon, she said.

While most of the major studies of the Impostor Effect have focused on women, men also can feel faux.

Clance recalled how a male Harvard professor described sharing his fear with close colleagues that he was “the one person” at Harvard who didn’t belong. Well, 75 percent of them also thought they were Harvard’s only mistake.

The psychology of big salaries

Other than you and I, who in the world is worth those multimillion dollar salaries that big and not-so-big companies pay their chief executives? Nobody, says Stanford University economist Edward Lazear - but that’s not the point. Those big salaries aren’t rewards for current performance, he says. Nor are they meant to motivate chief executive officers.

Instead, those ultra-big bucks are the payoff for the brutishly long hours the Big Boss spent on his or her way to the top - and motivation for lower-rung managers to keep their noses to the grindstone in hopes that someday they, too, will be obscenely overpaid.

Scholarship with a smile

It’s awards time! Yes, time to pass out the Wizzies, awarded each year (starting this year) by yours truly, the Unconventional Wiz, to the authors of the best-titled research papers presented at the recent annual meetings of the American Psychological Association, American Political Science Association or the American Sociological Association. The winners, please:

Research Paper Most Likely to Be Made Into A Movie Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger: “War, Rape, Pillage, Groupies, and Politics: The Evolution of Male Coalition-Forming Behavior,” by Michael Commons, Harvard Medical School

Paper That Was First a Top 40 Hit by T. Jefferson and the Boyz: “It’s My Constitution and I’ll Cry If I Want To: Constitutional Dialogue, Interpretation, and Whim in the Inherent Item Veto Dispute,” by Robert Spitzer, State University of New York, Cortland

Newest Mental Illness: “The Centerfold Syndrome: Unrecognized Development of Men’s Sexuality,” by Gary Brooks, O.E. Teague Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center, Temple, Texas

Bedtime Story for Young Riot Girlz: “A Feminist Psychoanalytic Exegesis of The Cat in The Hat,” by Naomi Goldenberg, University of Ottawa.