The Psychology of Self-Doubt

We all have times when we feel like a fraud. Psychologist Kevin Cokley studies the corrosive effects of self-doubt, and how we can turn that negative voice in our heads into an ally.

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[A woman carrying a briefcase walks on a tightrope.]

Success 2.0: The Psychology of Self-Doubt

By Hidden Brain Staff

/ May 22, 2023

We all have times when we feel like a fraud. Psychologist Kevin Cokley studies the corrosive effects of self-doubt, and how we can turn that negative voice in our heads into an ally.

If you like this show, please check out our new podcast, My Unsung Hero! And if you’d like to support our work, you can do so at support.hiddenbrain.org.

Additional Resources:

BOOKS:

Making Black Lives Matter: Confronting Anti-Black Racism, edited by Kevin Cokley, Cognella Academic Publishing, 2022.

The Myth of Black Anti-Intellectualism: A True Psychology of African American Students, Kevin O. Cokley, Praeger, 2014.

RESEARCH:

An Examination of the Impact of Minority Status Stress and Impostor Feelings on the Mental Health of Diverse Ethnic Minority College Students. Kevin Cokley et al. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development. 2013.

Impostor feelings as a moderator and mediator of the relationship between perceived discrimination and mental health among racial/ethnic minority college students. Kevin Cokley et al. Journal of Counseling Psychology. 2017.

Self-esteem as a mediator of the link between perfectionism and the impostor phenomenon. Kevin Cokley et al. Personality and Individual Differences. 2018.

Women–Particularly Underrepresented Minority Women–and Early-Career Academics Feel like Impostors in Fields that Value Brilliance, Melis Muradoglu, et. al, Journal of Educational Psychology, 2021.

Commentary: Prevalence, Predictors, and Treatment of Imposter Syndrome: A Systematic Review, Dena M. Bravata, et. al, Journal of Mental Health and Clinical Psychology, 2020.

Feeling Like an Imposter: The Effect of Perceived Classroom Competition on the Daily Psychological Experiences of First-Generation College Students, Elizabeth A. Canning, et. al, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2020.

An Examination of the Impact of Racial and Ethnic Identity, Impostor Feelings, and Minority Status Stress on the Mental Health of Black College Students, Shannon McClain, et. al, Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 2016.

Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000.

The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention, Pauline Rose Clance & Suzanne Imes, Psychotherapy Theory, Research and Practice, 1978.

GRAB BAG:

Viola Davis on 60 Minutes: all artists have “imposter syndrome”, 2020.

Michele Obama describes her battles with impostor syndrome, 2018.

Transcript

*The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode.
Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.*

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At the Olympic Games in 2021, one athlete arrived in Tokyo with a mountain of expectations on her four foot, eight inch frame.Sports announcer 1: Five medals in Rio, four of them gold, and could do even better than that this time around here in Tokyo.Sports announcer 2: If you don't think that that's hard, then you really don't understand gymnastics.Shankar Vedantam: People didn't just expect her to win gold medals in gymnastics, they expected magic.Sports announcer 3: So I mean, she has just set herself so far apart from the rest of the field and not just on the competition floor.Sports announcer 4: Simone Biles, representing the United States of America.Sports announcer 5: Simone Biles' pursuit of history starts tonight.Shankar Vedantam: Four days into the games, Simone Biles pulled out of the competition.Simone Biles: I've just never felt like this going into a competition before and I tried to go out here and have fun. And warm up in the back, went a little bit better, but then once I came out here, I was like, "No, mental is not there."Shankar Vedantam: The world was stunned. An athlete with seemingly otherworldly powers was struggling. From the outside looking in it seemed hard to understand and it raised a question, if a world champion can be toppled by these emotions, what is does it mean for the rest of us? This week on Hidden Brain, the strange psychology of the voice inside our heads that says the world may think you are amazing, but you are really just a fraud.Shankar Vedantam: It's hard to see ourselves clearly. This is true in all manner of situations, but it can be especially true when we are confronting a challenge. At such moments, many of us start to doubt ourselves. We think we are unequal to the task. At the University of Texas at Austin, Kevin Cokley researches the psychology of self doubt. He studies the corrosive effects these doubts can have on our wellbeing, but also how we might turn our internal misgivings into an ally. Kevin Cokley, welcome to Hidden Brain.Kevin Cokley: Thank you for having me.Shankar Vedantam: Kevin, you're a psychologist who studies the phenomenon of self doubt, yet you yourself have not been immune to such doubts. I want to take you back to when you were 29 years old, you had just completed your PhD, you had begun teaching, can you describe the fears that went through your mind as you prepared for class each day?Kevin Cokley: Yes. I was a young assistant professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and I can recall very vividly the feeling that I had walking the hallways of the psychology department there and seeing on the walls these publications by my new colleagues, very accomplished colleagues and I had come out of graduate school with having only one publication. I believe that I was hired on the basis that people saw potential in me, particularly in terms of my teaching, but I knew that I had a lot to prove in terms of research. And so when I was walking those hallways I had this sense of, wow, can I do this? And it was incredibly stressful. It sort of had me doubting whether in fact I belonged, whether I deserved to be there, and I was aware that I was one of only a few black professors at the university. And so I did not want to do anything that would result in students seeing me or believing me to not be qualified to be the professor. So I made sure that I wore sports coats and wore ties to class every day. I had a briefcase that I bought because in my m

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Original source

📄 clance_imes_imposter_syndrome_15940560361372241715.pdf