Lower-Class Background Contributes to Imposter Syndrome in Academia: New Study

March 12, 2024

WASHINGTON, DC—”Imposter syndrome”—that is, the persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s own efforts or skills—has been characterized and studied as a private trouble, originating from the individual. But how does one’s understanding of imposter syndrome change when it is considered a public issue rather than a private one—that the problem lies not in the person experiencing imposter syndrome, but in the system in which one operates?

In the article “Impostorization in Academia, Psychological Distress, and Class Reproduction” in the March 2024 issue of Society and Mental Health, published by the American Sociological Association, author Jo Phelan, Professor Emerita of Sociomedical Sciences and Special Lecturer in Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, explores this question. Using her own personal experience of impostor syndrome as a first-generation college student in concert with her training as a mental health sociologist, Phelan examined imposter syndrome as something borne of sociological processes as opposed to the result of individual shortcomings.

Phelan grounded her examination in aspects of established sociological research that consider that “much that distresses us in our personal lives originates in social structures.” Further, she found that the idea of impostorization slots very well into established sociological theories about the reproduction of class structure, specifically the theory that, “although higher education is generally viewed as a major conduit for upward social mobility…the university system, with its ability to give or deny access to power and privilege, is actually the key social arena in which inequality is reproduced.”

Phelan then tested this conceptualization using data from an online survey conducted via Qualtrics Panels, a nonprobability panel whose participants are recruited from a variety of sources with varying sociodemographic compositions. The survey consisted of 2,034 participants, restricted to English speakers between the ages of 18 and 26 who were currently or had previously been enrolled in a four-year undergraduate program at an in-person (not exclusively online) college or university. The survey also employed quotas for Whites with no parent who had attended college, and Blacks, Latinxs, and Asians to achieve at least 200 participants (10 percent of the overall sample) from each of these groups.

Phelan’s results showed that “concerns about being an impostor on campus are significantly heightened by coming from lower-social-class backgrounds.” Phelan also shows how “the associations of lower-class background with reported experiences of devaluation and exclusion in college, impostor concerns, depression/anxiety, and low college persistence are consistent with the idea that impostor concerns play a role in the reproduction of social inequality in higher education.” Furthermore, the results showed that cultural aspects of impostorization “played a larger role than the intellectual aspects emphasized in the traditional conceptualization of impostor syndrome.”

Phelan hopes that “impostorized academics who have succeeded in our fields come out of our closets and share our back-stories to help young impostorized colleagues feel more at home.” In order to change this structure in which many students and academic feel like imposters, Phelan suggests populating “the upper echelons of our fields with a diverse set of people and either broaden what counts as cultural capital or make cultural capital irrelevant altogether.” In addition, she questions if there are “ways we—at the level of academic departments, schools, or even colleges and universities—can choose to rob cultural capital of its power?”

Ultimately, Phelan advocates for the replacement of the within-the-person term “impostor syndrome” with “impostorization,” a term first used by Angelica Gutierrez to locate the sources of impostor feelings in policies, practices, and seemingly innocuous interactions that make some people feel as though they don’t belong. Like the term “minoritization,” “impostorization” frames the problem as something that is done to an individual rather than as a characteristic of the individual. It points our attention to systems of stratification rather than to the individual in looking not only for the causes of this problem but for the solutions as well.  

For more information and for a copy of the study, contact [email protected].

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About the American Sociological Association and Society and Mental Health

The American Sociological Association, founded in 1905, is a nonprofit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society. Society and Mental Health is a journal of the ASA Section on Sociology of Mental Health. It publishes original articles that apply sociological concepts and methods to the understanding of the social origins of mental health and illness, the social consequences for persons with mental illness, and the organization and financing of mental health services and care.