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Most people advance through their careers with legitimate training, and yet many professionals may still feel about as ill-qualified for their jobs as Demara was for his various "vocations."
Indeed, psychological scientists have explored the "impostor phenomenon," a term first coined in the 1970s to describe the intellectual and professional fraud that many high-achievers feel they're committing. Despite academic and career success, these individuals believe that others overestimate their abilities and will eventually discover their incompetence.
A team of Belgian psychological scientists recently set out to explore the impostor phenomenon (IP) more closely, and found that it correlated with specific personality, emotional, and behavioral traits. Professionals grappling with IP manifest high levels of maladaptive perfectionism and neuroticism, the researchers found. And those individuals tend to be relatively unhappy with their jobs.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Thursday November 05 2015, @02:52PM
Impostor syndrome is nothing like the Peter principle. Impostor syndrome is one of the two sides of the Dunning-Kruger effect, namely that the most capable people doubt themselves because they are aware of what they don't know. The flip side—that incapable people overestimate themselves because they haven't begun to explore the vastness of their ignorance—enjoys more internet fame.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @04:35PM
It's popular, and it's also fallaciously used in many instances where anyone has any degree of confidence in their skills. The Dunning-Kruger effect was never meant to apply to 100% of the population, so it is foolish to act like you know it applies to the individual person you're speaking to because you probably don't actually know much about them (i.e. that they are actually incompetent).
(Score: 2) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Thursday November 05 2015, @04:46PM
Good point. I'm sure we've all seen many people who ridicule others' "incompetence" as examples of the effect and thus display it rather ironically. Perhaps we were even the fools doing so.