Annals of Psychology: Not Fooling Anyone

The dubious rise of impostor syndrome.

- By Leslie Jamison

Long before Pauline Clance developed the idea of the impostor phenomenon now, to her frustration, more commonly referred to as impostor syndrome she was known by the nickname Tiny. Born in 1938 and raised in Baptist Valley, in Appalachian Virginia, she was the youngest of six children, the daughter of a sawmill operator who struggled to keep food on the table and gas in the tank of his timber truck. Tiny was ambitious-her photograph appeared in the local newspaper after she climbed onto a table to deliver her rebuttal during a debate tournament but she was always second-guessing herself. After nearly every test she took (and usually aced), she would tell her mother, "I think I failed it." She was shocked when she beat the football team captain for class president. She was the first in her family to go to college a high-school counsellor warned her, "You'll be doing well if you get C's" after which she earned a Ph.D. in psychology, at the University of Kentucky. But, everywhere she went, Clance felt the same nagging sense of self-doubt, the suspicion that she'd somehow tricked everyone else into thinking she belonged.