This story appeared in the Fall 2019 Letters & Science magazine.
You’re giving a presentation. All eyes are on you as you begin sharing knowledge about a topic you’ve spent years building expertise on, but your brain is sending a troubling message: Why would anyone listen to you? Everyone can see you’re not qualified.
Impostor syndrome — the phenomenon of feeling like a fraud and that your accomplishments aren’t your own — affects even the most successful people. Athletes, musicians, CEOs and other high achievers can fall victim to it, doubting that they have played a starring role in their own accomplishments or deserve to be in a place of achievement, even as wins and accolades accumulate.
The common advice to combat impostor syndrome is to dismiss the doubts as irrational, believe in yourself and forge ahead. But Shanna Slank, a philosophy graduate student who earned her PhD this summer, suggests the “impostors” might actually be rational for feeling the way they do.
“If you’re thinking about all of the causes of your success, you can rationally decrease your confidence in thinking you are the reason for it,” she says.
After all, a whole smattering of criteria can lead to success, from parents who could afford to pay for your test prep or allow you to take an unpaid internship to advance your career path, to a stroke of good luck such as being in the office on a day when your boss was ready to hand out a great opportunity.
People who consider those factors end up with a more realistic and reasonable assessment of how they’ve gotten to where they are — their talent was part, but not all, of it.
“I do think they can be attributing things correctly and giving themselves the right credit,” Slank says. “The people who are not so confident are the ones being more rational.”
Slank, a moral philosopher interested in topics such as the nature of right and wrong, says her interest in impostor syndrome started out “a bit autobiographical.” Even she identified with the phenomenon.
But Slank hopes her work pulls back the curtain to show that everyone has a mix of reasons that lead to achievements and that acknowledging them doesn’t make you any less worthy of your success.
“If you can think of attending to all of your causes for success as rational, you might not feel as bad,” she says.