Pretending to know what I’m talking about: feeling like an imposter only to realize that everyone else probably feels the same way

A brief commentary on the psychological effects of creating a psychological test and attempting to understand why this occurs.

Entering into the realm of academia is sort of like deciding to stick to a budget. You plan it all out in your head and congratulate yourself for everything that you’re going to do to stick to it. Then you actually try and do it, and no matter how well you stick to it you decide that everyone else is better at handling money than you and that you’re really just pretending to keep up.

This scenario has appeared in my life in basically anything that I try to do. Approaching a recent psychological test construction project is just the most recent example. When I started, I was convinced that as a fourth year student in a psychology minor I was well equipped to create a meaningful test to measure a psychological construct. Why stop at simply focusing on reliability? What could hold me back from going above and beyond by adding items that could be used to assess the validity of the measure and compare it with existing ones? Then I actually started making the test, and the real question became how could I possibly have thought that I could create anything of significance? What made me think that I could somehow magically come up with items to improve the measure of a construct that has already been extensively studied by an entire field of people that are smarter and more qualified than me? I started to think that I would never measure up (no pun intended), not only to current measures of my construct, but to any of the tests that my classmates around me were breezily making and administering. I concluded that I’m a fraud, and that the only option left now is to frantically cover up my inadequacy and try to make it through this project without anyone finding me out.

So why am I openly admitting my status as a phony? Because I recently found out that I might not be. As improbable as it sounds, it seems as though I’m not the only one that feels this way. In fact, so many people experience this that there is actually a body of literature surrounded around measuring and defining it. It’s called perceived fraudulence or the “imposter phenomenon”, and is described as “the subjective experience of perceived intellectual phoniness that is held by certain high-achieving adults who, despite their objective successes, fail to internalize these successes.” Scales including the perceived fraudulence scale (PFS) have been created specifically to assess this phenomenon in young adults in the academic context. There is actually a psychological test that can measure my feelings of incompetence about creating a psychological test. While the irony of this statement is not lost on me, it does offer a glimmer of hope: maybe I’m not a fraud after all. Maybe there are others around me that feel the same way. And maybe, just maybe, the idea that I am an intelligent person is not simply something that I have tricked others into believing.

Reference:

Jr., J. K., & Sternberg, R. J. (1991). Perceived Fraudulence in Young Adults: Is There an ‘Imposter Syndrome’? Journal of Personality Assessment, 56(2), 308–326.