Feeling like a fraud despite the record of your competence has a research history that began as a story about individuals and has recently become a story about workplaces. The question underneath: when the feeling arrives, is it something you brought into the building, or something the building does to you?
Clance and Imes coined the impostor phenomenon from clinical work with high-achieving women who privately attributed their success to luck and charm and expected exposure. For four decades the research tradition that followed treated impostorism as a relatively stable individual pattern, linked to perfectionism and personality, something a person carries from role to role.
Clance & Imes (1978), Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241-247
Feenstra and colleagues argued the field had neglected context, then tested it: across six studies with 1,288 participants, using experiments and multi-wave surveys, competitive work climates increased impostor feelings, partly through the upward comparisons such climates force. Their conclusion states the finding plainly: impostorism is a feature not just of particular individuals but of particular work climates.
Feenstra, Begeny, Ryan, Rink, Stoker & Jordan (2020), Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 575024 · Feenstra, Phillips, Begeny & Ryan (2025), Social Psychological and Personality Science
Both sides of this debate accept your experience as real. The exhaustion, the intensity, the doubt: no paper on either side disputes that these happen. What the sides contest is the frame. Which name the experience carries, which cause it points to, and whether the thing that needs to change is you or the environment around you.
And the debate does not settle in the abstract. Decades in, it remains open because it can only resolve in the particulars of an individual case: this person, this history, this room.
Last updated 2026-07-27