SoylentNews

Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

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,” [psychologicalscience.org] 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.

Original Submission