Attributional and affective responses of impostors to academic success and failure outcomes

Individuals who suffer from impostor fears harbour secret intense feelings of fraudulence in the face of achievement tasks and situations. This study investigated affective and attributional reactions of impostors following success and failure feedback. N = 164 undergraduate students were presented with a vignette depicting either hypothetical success or failure outcomes in a 2 (feedback: success, fail) × 2 (impostor fears: high low) between-subjects factorial design. Participants then responded to post-vignette items which assessed their cognitive, attributional and affective reactions, and completed several personality measures including the Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale [Clance P. R. (1985). The impostor phenomenon: Overcoming the fear that haunts your success. Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers]. Elements of perfectionism were evident in a propensity on the part of students with high impostor scores to externalise success and hold high standards for self-evaluation, while being intolerant of their failure to meet these standards. Impostorsʹ greater reporting of negative emotions, together with their tendency to attribute failure internally and overgeneralise a single failure to their overall self-concepts underscore the veracity of clinical observations which suggest links between impostor fears, anxiety, and depression. These findings are important to an understanding of the dynamics and treatment of impostor fears.