Impostor Syndrome
The impostor syndrome, sometimes called impostor phenomenon or fraud syndrome, is a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. The term was coined by clinical psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978.
Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.
The impostor syndrome, in which competent people find it impossible to believe in their own competence, can be viewed as complementary to the Dunning–Kruger effect, in which incompetent people find it impossible to believe in their own incompetence.
Feel like you might suffer from Impostor Syndrome? Take this test to see! Here are a few example questions. All of the questions are rated on a 1-5 scale, with 1 being “not at all true” and 5 being “very true.”
- I have often succeeded on a test or task even though I was afraid that I would not do well before I undertook the task.
- I can give the impression that I’m more competent than I really am.
- When people praise me for something I’ve accomplished, I’m afraid I won’t be able to live up to their expectations of me in the future.
- I rarely do a project or task as well as I’d like to do it.
- It’s hard for me to accept compliments or praise about my intelligence or accomplishments.
The Literature” was actually pretty smart when taken as a system, but that we individual puny brains just weren’t bright enough to integrate all that information. I went on to claim that, if there was some way to automatically integrate information from the peer-review literature, we could probably glean a lot of new insights.
-
Neuroscientist Bradley Voytek’s response when challenged at a conference by panelists suggesting that his research was “data rich, but theory poor.”
Not only is this a very clever response, but it highlights the major crux of neuroscience at the moment. This is probably the best response that I have seen on the issue.
Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, Noted Psychiatrist, Apologizes for Study on Gay ‘Cure’ ⇢
This happened.
Dr. Robert Spitzer was a pretty prominent advocate for removing homosexuality from the DSM decades ago. He began studying reparative therapy and published his controversial study, which claimed that reparative therapy could be successful for “highly motivated” individuals that wanted to covert from homosexuality to heterosexuality. Years later, he know regrets his actions and is now aplogizing.
I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some “highly motivated” individuals.
It is interesting to note that the original article was only published on the grounds that the publisher was going to print commentaries from other psychologists that opposed his “study.” The original study was full of experimental flaws and Dr. Spitzer made some curious assumptions and conclusions from his study.
One note: the NYTimes article linked above claims that “Dr. Spitzer could not control how his study was interpreted by everyone,” and while this is inherently true, all researchers have and obligation to ensure that their study is interpreted appropriately and have a duty to publicly correct any misinterpretations that may arise from their work. He declined to do so.
Read the draft of apology here.
I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.
-
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
I highly recommend this book to anyone that is interested in sociopathy or psychopathy. I linked the amazon page above.
(via approachingsignificance)
The Marshmallow Test
Kids are given the option to either 1) eat a marshmallow, or 2) sit in front of the marshmallow alone and wait for the adult to come back and receive 2 marshmallows.
The reactions are great.
Psychologists are so cruel; I love it.
I just wanted to see this video again.
Impostor Syndrome
The impostor syndrome, sometimes called impostor phenomenon or fraud syndrome, is a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. The term was coined by clinical psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978.
Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.
The impostor syndrome, in which competent people find it impossible to believe in their own competence, can be viewed as complementary to the Dunning–Kruger effect, in which incompetent people find it impossible to believe in their own incompetence.
Feel like you might suffer from Impostor Syndrome? Take this test to see! Here are a few example questions. All of the questions are rated on a 1-5 scale, with 1 being “not at all true” and 5 being “very true.”
- I have often succeeded on a test or task even though I was afraid that I would not do well before I undertook the task.
- I can give the impression that I’m more competent than I really am.
- When people praise me for something I’ve accomplished, I’m afraid I won’t be able to live up to their expectations of me in the future.
- I rarely do a project or task as well as I’d like to do it.
- It’s hard for me to accept compliments or praise about my intelligence or accomplishments.
I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.
-
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
I highly recommend this book to anyone that is interested in sociopathy or psychopathy. I linked the amazon page above.
Spectacular Brain Images Reveal Surprisingly Simple Structure
Stunning new visuals of the brain reveal a deceptively simple pattern of organization in the wiring of this complex organ.
Instead of nerve fibers travelling willy-nilly through the brain like spaghetti, as some imaging has suggested, the new portraits reveal two-dimensional sheets of parallel fibers crisscrossing other sheets at right angles in a gridlike structure that folds and contorts with the convolutions of the brain.
This same pattern appeared in the brains of humans, rhesus monkeys, owl monkeys, marmosets and galagos, researchers report today (March 29) in the journal Science.
» via Live Science
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
- Albert Einstein
The Marshmallow Test
Kids are given the option to either 1) eat a marshmallow, or 2) sit in front of the marshmallow alone and wait for the adult to come back and receive 2 marshmallows.
The reactions are great.
Psychologists are so cruel; I love it.
If television and movies have taught me anything about science, it is that the death of a researcher or research scientist is never an accident; it is ALWAYS foul play.
Holding a Gun Makes You Think Others Are Too
Wielding a gun increases a person’s bias to see guns in the hands of others, new research from the University of Notre Dame shows.
Regardless of the situation the observers found themselves in, the study showed that responding with a gun biased observers to report “gun present” more than did responding with a ball. Thus, by virtue of affording the subject the opportunity to use a gun, he or she was more likely to classify objects in a scene as a gun and, as a result, to engage in threat-induced behavior, such as raising a firearm to shoot.
“Beliefs, expectations and emotions can all influence an observer’s ability to detect and to categorize objects as guns,” Brockmole says. “Now we know that a person’s ability to act in certain ways can bias their recognition of objects as well, and in dramatic ways. It seems that people have a hard time separating their thoughts about what they perceive and their thoughts about how they can or should act.”
Image Credit: 1911 (by Dubtastic)
Would You Kill One Person to Save Five? New Research on a Classic Debate
The classic trolly dilemma, now in virtual reality. Why has it taken so long to do this? You see a lot of these dilemmas in evolutionary psychology as proof for certain hypotheses. Now, researchers have created a virtual dilemma to assess the classic trolly dilemma. Imagining the scenario is one thing, but seeing real-life people and situations and making a similar decision is another. What the article doesn’t mention is that when the participants have to physically push a person onto the track to save the five others, there is a huge drop off in the number of participants that would kill one to save five.
Imagine you are a train-yard operator who sees an out-of-control boxcar running down a track that five workers are repairing. The workers won’t have time to get out of the way unless you flip a switch to change the car to another track. But another worker is on the second track. You have just seconds to make a decision: let the five workers die — or kill the one. What do you do?
This dilemma is a famous philosophical conundrum that was originally called the “trolley problem.” Now a team from Michigan State University’s psychology department has used virtual-reality technology to test how we respond psychologically and physiologically when faced with this problem.
The two opposing philosophical approaches to the trolley problem are the utilitarian one (kill one guy in order save the others) and the do-no-harm approach (let God or nature take its course, but don’t make an active choice to kill another person).
In many years of surveys, the vast majority of people — usually about 90% — have chosen to kill the one and save the five. But until now, there’s never been a study examining how people would react in a lifelike setting with real-looking potential victims.