#11: Why you have impostor syndrome, and what to do about it: remembering Katherine Hawley
Your desk is covered with self-affirmations on Post-It notes, you spend 5 minutes every morning visualising yourself as Queen of the Universe, and you try not to stick your fingers in your ears whenever people say nice things about you. So why is it that you still struggle to believe that you're good enough?
It's commonly thought that people with impostor syndrome ignore evidence of how great they are. But that's not always true. Katherine Hawley argued that people often have good reasons to believe that they're not good enough, even when they're wrong. Join the Academic Imperfectionist for a quick skate through Hawley's argument and round-up of how you can apply her insights to manage your own impostor syndrome.
Katherine Hawley, professor of philosophy at the University of St Andrews, passed away in April 2021. Her intellect, kindness, and all-round awesomeness are fondly remembered and much missed.
Read Katherine Hawley's 2019 article, 'What is impostor syndrome?' (Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93/1: 203–226), here.
And here's The Onion's alarmingly vivid portrayal of what impostor syndrome feels like.
Episode transcript:
Do you have imposter syndrome? Or are you actually an overhyped fraud? If, every day, you encounter evidence that you're not all that, then that's got to be right. Right? Well, wrong, actually.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Welcome, imperfectionists. I'm recording this at my desk under a roof light, and it's raining pretty heavily. I'm not sure whether you can hear that - you might get a bit of relaxing rain noise going with this episode.
The topic of imposter syndrome is a natural fit for this podcast, but this is a particularly special episode. At the end of April, the world of philosophy suffered a very great loss: that of Katherine Hawley, who was a professor at St Andrews University in Scotland. I first met Katherine when I arrived in Cambridge in the late 90s. She was only a few years older than me, and she had just finished her PhD, while I was just about to start mine. We had similar interests, and she looked after me a little bit. She was warm, generous, encouraging, and kind. She took the time to meet with me, to read my work (which was pretty half-baked at the time), and she gave me plenty of advice and support. When I met her for the first time, she also lent me what at the time was her only hard copy of her newly minted PhD thesis. It was a pretty hefty lump of pages, and she’d lugged it along to The Anchor pub in Cambridge, where we met for a chat. I wasn't in touch with Katherine very much after Cambridge. The last time I saw her was in 2017 in St Andrews, where I'd gone to give a talk on swearing. She came along to that, although she had to rush off afterwards, so I didn't get a chance to talk to her. But I was flattered that she'd made the time to come and listen to me.
Now, Katherine had a wide range of philosophical interests. That bulky PhD thesis that she lent me all those years ago was on the philosophy of time, and it later became her first book, How Things Persist. In more recent years, she was known and admired for her work on trust. She published two books on that topic. I'm not exaggerating when I say that she's published in pretty much every area of analytic philosophy in between. What I want to look at here today is her work on imposter syndrome. This is a topic that psychologists, coaches and self-help gurus have had a lot to say about over the years. But Katherine Hawley’s 2019 article, ‘What is imposter syndrome?’, was really the first philosophical treatment of it. For anyone suffering from imposter syndrome (that's all of us, right?) there are lots of helpful and important lessons from her treatment; lessons that go beyond the usual and well worn advice, which very often boils down to the comment that lots of successful people struggle with imposter syndrome, so don't worry about it. I want to summarise what she had to say about imposter syndrome here and to draw out some lessons that we can take from it.
Let's start with a definition. Hawley opens her article with the following: ‘People are described as suffering from imposter syndrome when they are successful by external measures such as exam results or professional accolades, but they feel that those external markers are unwarranted and that they therefore risk being revealed as an “imposter”.’ You're probably aware that imposter syndrome is thought to be especially widespread among disadvantaged social groups like women and people of colour. Hawley’s analysis draws out some aspects of imposter syndrome that tend not to be recognised. For example, she reflects that there is a moral aspect to imposter syndrome. The terms we use when we talk about imposter syndrome - terms like ‘fraud’, ‘found out’, ‘unmasked’, and of course ‘imposter’ itself - these are all morally loaded in the sense that they signal that not only do we think that we're not good enough, but we also behave as if we're intentionally deceiving people about our competence. So we're doing something morally wrong just by carrying on the way that we are. And that means that there's something humiliating about the prospect of being found out. We think of it as involving a dramatic and undignified unmasking, like when the disguise is pulled off the villain at the end of a Scooby Doo episode. There's an article in The Onion from 2014 that captures this fear pretty well. I'll put a link to that in the show notes if you're interested.
There's another aspect of Hawley's account of imposter syndrome that I want to focus on here. And that starts from her observation that for someone to count as having imposter syndrome, their belief that they're not good enough must be false. Because if it's true, then of course, you don't have imposter syndrome, although as Hawley points out, you have other problems. In some cases, although that belief is false, it might be justified. Now that might seem strange, especially if you're not a philosopher. But sometimes we are justified in believing things that are false. You might believe that your friend is going to be in your favourite cafe at 11 o'clock tomorrow morning. You've arranged to meet her there, and she's always reliable. But as things turn out, she calls to cancel at the last minute, which makes your earlier belief that she's going to be in your favourite cafe at 11 o'clock tomorrow morning false - but you were still justified in having it, in the sense that your belief was based on the right sort of evidence. Sometimes, something like this is also the case with the beliefs that we have about ourselves when we have imposter syndrome. Even so, this distinction between truth and justification is not recognised in discussions of imposter syndrome. As Hawley points out, it's simply assumed that because the sufferer’s belief about her competence are false, then they must also be unjustified. And that means that imposter syndrome tends to be viewed as a problem with the individual herself. To quote Hawley, ‘imposter syndrome is often characterised as an inability or unwillingness to “internalise” what seems to observers to be clear objective evidence of talent and success.’ The upshot of that is, basically, if you have imposter syndrome, you're irrational, you're too self-effacing, you're too unconfident, and perhaps too emotional.
However, Hawley describes several ways in which people can be justified in forming the false belief that they're not good enough. And these ways all relate to the individual’s social environment. So let's take a look at a couple of Hawley's examples of real and common situations which might lead people to be justified in believing that they're not good enough. First of all, she comments that what she calls formal markers of talent’ - those are things like prizes, publications, qualifications, and so on - those are a snapshot, and they can sometimes mislead. Sometimes it really does happen that people end up being promoted beyond their capabilities. Or they showed early promise by winning a prize, but then performed disappointingly after that. So even if we've got all the qualifications, and we've won all the prizes, we still need, as Hawley puts it, ‘ongoing and wider evidence’ in order to be justified in believing that what we seem to be from the outside is actually what we are on the inside. And there's a problem here. And the problem is that ‘women and minorities’, to quote Hawley, ‘face systematically less positive feedback on their performance explicitly and implicitly, even when they achieve well in terms of formal markers, such as grades.’ Now, there's a raft of empirical evidence to support this, and you've probably come across this from time to time. For example, student evaluations of online teachers are less positive when the student thinks that the teacher is female compared to when they think that they're male. Another study found that male students tend to rate other male students as more knowledgeable than the female ones, even when the female ones are doing better in assessments. So what does all this mean for imposter syndrome? Well, it means that if you're a woman, or if you're a member of a minority, your experience day to day is going to be: ‘Yeah, so I look great on paper. But what I'm seeing every day in terms of how people react to me tells a different story.’ Based on that, it's quite reasonable to conclude that the successes that you've had in the past must have been flukes. And that's not simple lack of confidence. It's a conclusion that, although it might be false, is formed on the basis of the evidence that you have available. So in cases like this, people can end up with the belief that their achievements misrepresent them as being more capable than they actually are, without being irrational, even though they're wrong.
Now, Hawley argues that sometimes efforts to deal with imposter syndrome can make the situation worse. Well-meaning institutions will try to deal with imposter syndrome in women and other underrepresented groups by creating training and policies to help people in those groups succeed. But these sorts of efforts have a sting in the tail. They encourage others to take the attitude that members of minority groups have succeeded only through tokenism, only because they're a member of a certain group, and not because they really have the ability needed to succeed. And for the individuals in those groups who succeed, these efforts risk undermining the evidence they have of their own success. So they might end up viewing their promotion at work not as evidence of their worthiness and ability, but simply as the outcome of their employers efforts to help people like them succeed. And that can just make imposter syndrome worse. It can lead people to think things like, ‘These efforts are to help able people, and here I am free-riding on those efforts and succeeding in spite of my shameful inadequacy.’
Okay, so next, Hawley points to the fact that sometimes people have trouble interpreting the informal feedback that they receive about their performance from others, from colleagues, managers, supervisors, and so on. And this problem is even more marked when there's a cultural difference between the person who's receiving the feedback and the person who's giving it. As an example here, there's a tendency among certain British people to say things like ‘This is not bad,’ and mean it as an enthusiastic compliment. And yet, somebody from outside that culture might reasonably interpret it to mean something much more negative, and to imply something along the lines of, ‘This is not good, in fact, it's a long way from being good. Or sometimes we don't get much feedback at all. Often, that's just how things are done in that institution, or in that department. And when we don't get much feedback, some people might interpret that as a good thing. They conclude that no news is good news, and that there's no feedback because there are no problems. But others might take it to mean something much more negative, that there's no feedback because there's nothing positive to say. And in cases like this, when individuals end up believing that they're not good enough, it's not that they're failing to take on board the evidence that's provided to them. It's that the evidence isn't very easy for them to interpret, or it's ambiguous, and they're kind of doing the best they can with it.
Now, this is another area that Hawley warns us can become worse when we start discussing imposter syndrome. For individuals who've shared with the people giving them feedback that they struggle with imposter syndrome, that sort of person might then reasonably suspect that any positive feedback she does receive is exaggerated by the person giving the feedback who, with the best of intentions, might be trying to compensate for her lack of belief in her competence. And so here's another situation in which what might look from the outside like evidence available to that individual for her own competence gets discounted, because what she takes from the evidence is not ‘Wow, I've done really well,’ but, ‘Well, this person knows that I struggle to believe that I'm good enough, and they're just trying to be nice to me.’
So why is any of this important? What can we take from it if we have imposter syndrome, and we'd like to get past it? Well, the fact that discussions of imposter syndrome tend to gloss over the distinction between the false beliefs that we have about ourselves and the extent to which we're justified in holding them creates problems with the advice that gets offered to sufferers of imposter syndrome. It's assumed that where people have false beliefs about themselves, their beliefs are unjustified, in other words, that that individual has evidence that she's doing well, but she's not reacting appropriately and rationally to that evidence. And that means that people who suffer from imposter syndrome are not being helped. Self-help advice often just involves drawing attention to the fact that imposter syndrome is a thing, and expecting that mere observation to be enough to enable an individual to unravel the unhelpful false beliefs that she had about herself, and cancel the anxiety and the underperformance that follow from them, which isn't helpful for an individual who's reacting appropriately to evidence. An individual like that, on receiving this sort of advice might well conclude, well, yes, there are people around who suffer from imposter syndrome, but I really am an imposter. I see the evidence of that every single day. At worst, that sort of advice is a form of gaslighting for sufferers of imposter syndrome, because it just denies the existence of the evidence they encounter every day. It insists that there's plenty of evidence available for their own skills and competence, it's just that they’re too unconfident and self-effacing to see it.
So what lessons can we draw from this? Well, one is that imposter syndrome isn't always something that its sufferers can sort out on their own. Some of the contexts that Hawley points to as likely to give rise to justified although false imposter beliefs arise from social inequality. So we need to carry on addressing that. As Hawley puts it, by doing this, we change and improve the evidence that's available to people about themselves rather than trying to change how they handle the evidence. But Hawley’s analysis is useful not only for people in general, it's also useful for the individuals themselves who suffer from imposter syndrome. It gives us some tools to overcome it, tools that go beyond the usual ‘Don't worry, lots of people experience it’ observation. So one thing we can do is challenge the moral aspect of imposter syndrome. And that's the thought that not only are other people mistaken about our abilities, but we're to blame for their mistake. The fact is, though, we're not responsible for the beliefs that other people form about us, at least in cases where we're not outright lying about ourselves. You're not behaving immorally or deceptively when you put your best foot forward on your CV and in job applications. Doing that's part of the game and everyone accepts and expects it. Your CV is to the real you as celebrities’ Instagram photos are to their day to day life: it is just one perspective, and it might be somewhat skewed, but it really is a perspective, not a lie. And if someone forms the belief that you're pretty amazing on the basis of reading your CV, then even if you think that their belief is exaggerated, you haven't done anything wrong. That's just what CVs are for: to highlight the good bits. Another thing that we can take from Hawley's account is to recognise that, when we notice that the version of ourselves represented by our best achievements really isn't reflected in our everyday lived experience, we're not imagining that. Noticing that doesn't make you irrational or lacking in confidence. But at the same time, there are reasons for that discrepancy. And those reasons include many things other than our inherent, secret, shameful incompetence. In a sense, it's the self confidence equivalent of an optical illusion: you might constantly get the message that you're not good enough, but not because you're really not good enough.
I think an important thing that emerges here is community. With so many opportunities for mixed messages and misunderstandings to feed into our beliefs about ourselves, it's helpful to have a core of supportive people whose opinion of you you trust, and who you trust to be honest. People who you'll believe when they say positive things about you, and who you know will balance out any negatives with a big dose of perspective. So, people who will remind you that, although that talk you just gave could have done with a bit more work, that doesn't entail that you're incapable of turning it into something knockout. And it especially doesn't entail that you're a fraud. Perhaps you're lucky enough already to have people like this in your life. And if you don't, perhaps you can find them among your existing network. Or perhaps, if you really want to level up, you can find that voice inside yourself. I've said before that you have an inner mentor, just as you have an inner critic. You don't always listen to her, but you can start. Next time you doubt yourself, ask her what she has to say on the matter. And let her remind you, whatever else she might have to say, that not only are you not alone, but you're also not an irrational or over-emotional, self-doubting mess. It's really not all in your head.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use, and please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful - you can take a screenshot on your phone and send it over to them. For more information and updates about me, the podcast, and my coaching, or just to get in touch and say hi, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com - or follow me on Twitter @AcademicImp or on Facebook @AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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