I do. Often. Perhaps it has to do with increasing levels of responsibility, and my corresponding attempts to reduce the expectations that others have of me. I almost always feel that others are smarter or more capable than I am, and I often attribute my success to luck, rather than to skill.
Alas, I’ve been found out: I am a phony phony. According to a 2000 Wake Forest University psychology study, “many self-styled impostors are phony phonies: they adopt self-deprecation as a social strategy, consciously or not, and are secretly more confident than they let on.”
Even though my phoniness may be phony, I still feel like a phony most of the time.
Are there any other phonies (real or phony) out there in the world of science?
I think we all feel like that from time to time. I wonder if part of the cause is the wider range of roles people seem to play these days. We’re all having to learn to be jacks of all trades as the world gets more integrated and interdisciplinary.
A term I’ve heard used among young scientists (grad students) is the ‘imposter syndrome’: feeling like you got to the school/lab that you are in, doing the work that you’re doing, more out of luck, rather than based on skill or merit or talent. I’ve heard people talk about where it comes from (no good answers yet) and that it may be more common among women in science than men. Pete, have you heard of this?
I agree with Matt too. We’re always learning new skills and taking on new roles and so it takes time to become comfortable with changing roles.
I agree with Matt too.
The enormous amount of incoming information is just too great to keep to one single topic or role.
I’ve always had trouble with the fact that I’m fairly decent in a variety of areas but not good at any specific subject.
So, I agree that sometimes I’m a phoney. Except when I’m sleeping or eating… I’m quite the real mccoy at those two tasks! :)
It’s so nice to have this issue discussed in the open! I am three months away from defending my thesis, yet am still convinced that I got into grad school thanks to an administrative error. I don’t know if the impostor syndrome is more common in women or they are simply more ready to admit a potential weakness than men are. In either case, high pressure environments such as grad school or stressful jobs seem to breed this affliction, real or phony.
Like Anna, I am pleased that this subject has been prised from beneath its rock. Like Matt says, it could be because we’re always having to rush to keep up with the next thing, mastering it – if that is the word – only inexpertly, before we move on to the next thing. It might also be a natural product of the scientific mind, which tells us that there is always more to discover, and that the more we learn, the less we seem to knoww. I’ve been a Nature editor for 20 years and still feel that I’m learning on the job.
Thank you all for your comments.
As I reflect further on this issue, a sentence from the Times article that I linked to in the original post jumps out at me: “impostorism looked a lot more like a self-presentation strategy than a personality trait”.
In light of this comment, I think one could make a useful distinction made between two types of people: (1) those who possess genuine humility, humility that stems from an acknowledgment of how little they know, and of how much there is to know; and (2) those who exhibit a false humility – characteristic of a “self-styled imposter” – in which “self-deprecation [is used] as a social strategy”.
The difference, it seems, between these two groups of people is that those in group (1) would still probably believe that, given sufficient time and effort, they could understand most – if not all – of what there is to know; whereas those in group (2) would tell themselves (and others) that there is simply no way that they could ever understand any of the vast amount of stuff that they don’t presently know and understand, and that they made it to where they are today by luck, not skill.
The odd thing about the latter position is that the evidence – past achievements, evidence of ability to understand etc – often points in precisely the opposite direction (meaning that, with time and effort, they – as much as anyone in group (1) – could probably understand practically anything that was put in front of them.)
The following quote from the Times article reveals how people who I would classify as part of group (2) responded in a research study:
“In a 2000 study at Wake Forest University, psychologists had people who scored highly on an impostor scale predict how they would do on a coming test of intellectual and social skills. An experimenter, they were told, would discuss their answers with them later.
Sure enough, the self-styled impostors predicted that they would do poorly. But when making the same predictions in private — anonymously, they were told — the same people rated their chances on the test as highly as people who scored low on the impostor scale.
In short, the researchers concluded, many self-styled impostors are phony phonies: they adopt self-deprecation as a social strategy, consciously or not, and are secretly more confident than they let on."
With this distinction in mind, any scientist who has ever stood in awe of how little they know would qualify as having felt like a legitimate phony. However, those of us – and this includes me! – who wonder whether administrative errors (Anna) might have been responsible for getting us where we are today, but who, if pressed, would grudgingly admit that we are probably just as capable as the next person (just as the Wake Forest University study reveals), are really illegitimate phonies, or, as the Times calls them, phony phonies.
(Corie, the people whom you are talking about – those who believe that they get where they are based on luck rather than skill/talent/merit – would indeed qualify as phony phonies. The researchers quoted in the Times article are probably a good place to start looking if you want to learn more about this phenomenon.)