”They will discover I’m a fraud!” The Imposter Syndrome Among Psychology Students

Abstract

The main purpose of this research was to explore the prevalence of the imposter syndrome and its associated factors among 130 Romanian psychology students (M = 21.77 years, SD = 3.51, 84.6% females). Our results suggested that 56.15% of the study participants experienced high and intense aspects of the imposter syndrome. Students who perceived themselves as impostors presented high levels of psychological distress and procrastination. We also explored the link between moral identity and the imposter syndrome and found that students who experience the syndrome associate higher importance to moral values, ​​compared to non-impostors. We tested confirmed a significant prediction model for the imposter syndrome, using depression, anxiety, procrastination, moral self, moral integrity and demographic variables as predictors, our model explaining 30.9% of the imposter syndrome's variance. We discuss the importance of these findings in designing effective intervention strategies to fight the imposter syndrome among students.