The impostor phenomenon refers to feelings of intellectual phoniness experienced by high achieving individuals (Clance & Imes, 1978), despite objective evidence to the contrary. These individuals report doubts about their abilities that they believe to be overestimated by others and, as a consequence, fear that they will be found out. That is, impostors believe others will discover that they are not truly intelligent, but are in fact, “impostors” (Clance, 1985). Clance observes that repeat successes fail to weaken impostors’ feelings of fraudulence or to strengthen a belief in their ability. Impostors react either by extreme overpreparation, or by initial procrastination followed by frenzied preparation (Chrisman, Pieper, Clance, Holland, & Glickauf-Hughes, 1995; Clance & Imes, 1978). If the task is successful, a sense of accomplishment and relief is experienced. However, once a new achievement task is encountered, feelings of anxiety and self-doubt recur and the cycle of self-doubt continues (Clance, Dingman, Reviere, & Stober, 1995; Leary, 1995).

Because a perception that success earned through hard work cannot truly reflect ability, impostors fail to recognize their achievements as the outcome of ability or talent (Covington & Omelich, 1985). Instead, they are likely to attribute their successful achievement to factors such as effort, believing that they must work harder than others, or to luck, convinced that their success is due to factors temporarily stacked in their favor. Either way they forfeit the affirmation of a job well done (Topping & Kimmel, 1985). As a consequence, impostors experience guilt or shame about their successes, believing that eventually it will be apparent to others that they lack strong intellectual abilities (Cowman & Ferrari, 2002; Thompson & Richardson, 2001). Impostors report symptoms that include generalized anxiety, depression, lack of self-confidence, frustration, low self-esteem, and also a tendency to report concern over mistakes, and to reject objective evidence of their successes (Chrisman et al., 1995; Clance & Imes, 1978; Imes & Clance, 1984; Thompson, Foreman, & Martin, 2000). In short, impostors negate all external evidence of their ability, discrediting positive affirmations from others about their successful outcomes while overgeneralizing the implications of poor performance to their self-concept (Clance & O’Toole, 1988).

Cowman and Ferrari (2002) found that shame-proneness and self-handicapping best predicted impostor fears among students. Consistent with this outcome, Ferrari, and Thompson (2004) found that impostor scores by students correlated positively with favorable impression management strategies, and that impostors were more likely than were nonimpostors to engage actively in self- handicapping acts in order to reduce the likelihood of unexpected performance success. Together, these studies suggest that impostors may sabotage their task performances, perhaps to demonstrate that they do not deserve their obtained successes – to show they are, in fact, frauds. Within a college context, the opportunity to engage in destructive behaviors may include cheating in assignments and examinations, or plagiarizing written works. These dishonest academic behaviors may result in high grades or “success”, but the student would demonstrate that he or she was a “fraud” and not deserving of the high performance s/he obtained if caught. Because impostors state that they self-handicap, and that they believe they do not deserve their successes (Cowman & Ferrari), it is possible that impostors would engage in academic dishonesty in order to “prove” to others that they do not deserve success. If impostors engage in self-handicapping, then it seems possible that impostors might cheat more than other students do, and that they would need to cheat in such a way as to increase their likelihood of being caught.

Dishonest academic behaviors of plagiarism and cheating were used as the target behaviors in the present study because prevalence of up to 70% among students has been reported (Storch, Storch, & Clark, 2002; Whitley & Keith-Spiegel, 2002). Whitley and Keith-Spiegel, in their review of the literature on college students, reported that academic dishonesty such as cheating and plagiarism was higher among students who feel pressure to succeed and who claim a history of such dishonesty in the past. Moreover, persons who engage in academic dishonesty have moderate expectations for success, anticipate high rewards for their success, and are competitive about obtaining good grades.

Such a profile seems opposite to the characteristics of an impostor (who does not believe success is warranted) in college settings. The alternative hypothesis that impostors would not cheat as an academic self-handicapping strategy seems probable and logical. Impostors, compared to nonimpostors, would not report the use of dishonest means (cheating and plagiarism) to obtain academic success. In the present study we explored whether increased or decreased reports of academic dishonesty were most likely among impostors, compared to nonimpostors.

Participants completed Clance’s (1985) 20-item self-reported unidimensional Impostor Phenomenon Scale (CIPS), to assess individuals’ experience of impostor fears. Sample items are “I can give the impression that I’m more competent than I really am” and “At times I feel my success is due to some kind of luck”. Respondents indicate their endorsement of items on 5-point scales with end-point designations not at all true (1), and very true (5). The CIPS has high levels of internal consistency with alphas ranging from 0.84 to 0.96 (Holmes, Kertay, Adamson, Holland, & Clance, 1993; Prince, 1989). Within the present sample, coefficient alpha was 0.91 (M = 54.24; SD = 13.27). All participants also completed Roig and DeTommaso’s (1995) Academic Practices Survey, a 24-item scale that assesses students’ understanding and practices associated with (1) plagiarism when asked to perform a written assignment (16-items: “I’ve added sources not read to the reference section of a paper”; “I’ve taken one or two sentences from someone else’s written work, changed them moderately, and inserted this information into my paper.); and, (2) cheating while completing an examination (8-items: “Copied answers from another student during an examination”; “Used hidden notes, books, or calculators during an examination even though such use was prohibited”). All items are rated on a 5-point scale (1 = never; 5 = very frequently), and the authors report good construct validity and internal consistency on the whole scale (alpha = 0.81; Roig & DeTommaso, 1995; Roig, personal communication, April 2002). Within the present sample, coefficient alpha for the plagiarism subscale was 0.89 (M = 27.91, SD = 4.81) and 0.76 for the cheating subscale (M = 12.64, SD = 3.76). Despite the fact that both subscale scores were significantly related in the present study (r = 0.77, p < .001), these scores were kept independent given the authors’ intent for the measure (Roig & DeTommaso).

In addition, all participants completed both sections of Paulhus’ (1991) Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR), a well-known, reliable and valid 40-item measure of social desirability responding (see Endler & Parker, 1998, for details). According to Paulhus (1984; 1991), other social desirability measures frequently mix self-deception enhancement (SDE; responding honestly but with an inflated, distorted sense of confidence, overclaiming one’s successes, and self-inflation of one’s skills) with impression management (IM; the more traditional notion of social desirability providing a measure of “faking” or “lying” on self-report measures). The BIDR is a 7-point Likert scale (1 = not true; 7 = very true) that differentiates these two related but independent components of responding into two 20-item, self-report subscales. With the present sample, alpha on the SDE subscale was 0.70 (M = 85.52, SD = 10.52), and on the IM subscale was 0.76: M = 76.09, SD = 15.83).

During a large testing session, a research assistant distributed to college students the three psychometric scales along with a demographic sheet (assessing age, sex, year in school, race, GPA, and parents’ college education experiences), in counterbalanced order, after each student had returned a signed, confidential consent form. Participants took approximately 20 minutes to complete all scales. After all scales had been collected, the assistant explained the purpose of this study.

Mean scores for impostors and nonimpostors on the social desirability and academic dishonesty subscale scores are presented in Table 1. The omnibus analysis revealed a significant main effect for impostor category, Wilks’ Lambda F(4, 58) = 6.88, p < .01, across these four subscale measures. Nonimpostors compared to impostors were significantly more likely to cheat in examinations, univariate F(1, 61) = 7.13, p < .01, and to plagiarize in written assignments, univariate F(1, 61) = 6.79, p < .04. These results indicate that perhaps among college student’, in order to succeed in school, nonimpostors engage in dishonest behaviors more often than do impostors. Alternatively, it is possible that impostors simply do not report academic dishonesty. Given the prevalence of cheating and plagiarism among college students (Davis, Grover, Becker, & McGregor, 1992), educators and instructors should monitor the behaviors of students and should assess what may prompt academic dishonesty (Roig & Ballew, 1994). Appropriate school and administrative interventions to prevent academic dishonesty need to be established (Storch et al., 2002).

Related to the concept of impostors, in the present brief study it has been shown that the academic success of impostors is less likely to be due to dishonest academic practices. Cozzarelli and Major (1990) and others (e.g., King & Cooley, 1995; Leary, Patton, Orlando, & Wagoner Funk, 2000) claimed that impostors have strong cognitive intelligence skills despite their belief to the contrary. Results gained in the present study suggest that impostors do not handicap their academic performance through dishonest practices, even though they engage in self-sabotaging behaviors in everyday situations and experimental tasks (Cowman & Ferrari, 2002; Ferrari et al., 2004). It should be noted that the psychometric self-report scales were administered together in the same testing session to convenient samples. There might have been contextual effects affecting responses given the perceived relationship between underlying constructs (Council, 1993). Future researchers may need to focus on such potential factors. In summary, it seems impostors are persons who are less likely to “cheat their way to the top”. In contrast, nonimpostors are more likely to practice academic dishonesty in order to succeed.

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