Notes

This book gives general information. It isn't medical or psychological advice, and it's no substitute for a doctor or therapist who knows your situation.

I've kept sources out of the chapters so they read easily. Here they are by chapter, with the limits I'm aware of. Where a chapter isn't listed, it rests on my own reasoning.

Chapter 2. The idea that safety behaviours maintain anxiety comes from Paul Salkovskis, "The importance of behaviour in the maintenance of anxiety and panic", Behavioural Psychotherapy 19, 1991, pages 6 to 19. That paper is theory and contains no data. Wells and colleagues, Behavior Therapy 26, 1995, pages 153 to 161, found in eight patients with social phobia that one session of exposure with safety behaviours dropped did better than exposure alone. The pooled analysis is Meulders and colleagues, Clinical Psychology Review 45, 2016, pages 144 to 156. It covered 20 studies and found a lean towards dropping safety behaviours that fell short of statistical significance. Treat the idea as a clinical model with some support.

Chapter 3. Arntz, Rauner and van den Hout, "If I feel anxious, there must be danger", Behaviour Research and Therapy 33, 1995, pages 917 to 925. The participants were 162 patients with various anxiety problems and 24 people without. They rated written stories, so this is a study of judgements on paper, and it can't show what causes what. The distinction between specific and general doubt is mine.

Chapter 4. Savitsky and Gilovich, "The illusion of transparency and the alleviation of speech anxiety", Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 39, 2003, pages 618 to 625. I've given no figures because I could only confirm the summary. The T-shirt studies are in Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78, 2000, pages 211 to 222. Wearers predicted that 46 per cent of observers would notice the shirt, and 23 per cent did. Only 15 students wore the shirt, so take the direction of the result and not the exact numbers. Clance and Imes, "The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women", Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice 15, 1978, pages 241 to 247, is a clinical description of mostly white, middle-class American women, with no comparison group. The authors thought the pattern was rarer in men, and later work hasn't supported that. The review is Bravata and colleagues, Journal of General Internal Medicine 35, 2020, pages 1252 to 1275. It covered 62 studies and 14,161 participants. Of the 33 studies that compared the sexes, 16 found higher rates in women and 17 found no difference. It found no published trials of any treatment, which is one reason this book promises little. Eleven of its studies looked at ethnic minority groups, nearly all of them students. Its summary calls the rates particularly high, but the body of the review reports only that the feelings were common in those groups and gives no pooled comparison with anyone else, so "common" is as far as I've gone. It adds that the questionnaires were developed on samples with few non-white people in them. All but one of the authors worked for or advised the company that paid for the review. The status studies are Anderson, Brion, Moore and Kennedy, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 103, 2012, pages 718 to 735. A later paper by Tenney and colleagues in the same journal, volume 116, 2019, found that overconfidence stated in words was penalised once it was exposed. Kruger and Dunning, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, 1999, pages 1121 to 1134. In one of their studies the top quarter scored at the 86th percentile and placed themselves at the 68th. Critics argue that much of the famous pattern is what you'd get from noisy self-estimates and a general tendency to rate oneself above average. Gignac and Zajenkowski, Intelligence 80, 2020, is one such critique, and others have disputed it in turn.

Chapter 5. Norem and Cantor, "Defensive pessimism: harnessing anxiety as motivation", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51, 1986, pages 1208 to 1217. The participants were students doing laboratory puzzles. The detail that the interference took the form of encouragement comes from later descriptions of the study. Later work links defensive pessimism with more anxiety even where performance holds up. The cycle of over-preparation is described in Pauline Clance's 1985 book "The Impostor Phenomenon", from her clinical work.

Chapter 6. Berglas and Jones, "Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, 1978, pages 405 to 417. Gilovich and Medvec, "The experience of regret", Psychological Review 102, 1995, pages 379 to 395. That paper reviews their own studies, first reported in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67, 1994, pages 357 to 365. The cross-cultural studies are Gilovich, Wang, Regan and Nishina, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 34, 2003, pages 61 to 71. Yeung and Feldman, Collabra: Psychology 8, 2022, repeated four of the 1994 studies with 988 Americans online. Three held up with weaker effects and one didn't. Golub, Gilbert and Wilson, "Anticipating one's troubles", Emotion 9, 2009, pages 277 to 281. I've confirmed the summary of that paper and not its details.

Chapter 7. Rudman, "Self-promotion as a risk factor for women", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, 1998, pages 629 to 645. Three experiments, confirmed from the summary. The penalty for self-promoting women disappeared when the person judging was a man who depended on her performance. The account of humility is mine.

Chapter 8. Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer and Vohs, "Bad is stronger than good", Review of General Psychology 5, 2001, pages 323 to 370. It's a narrative review, which means the authors chose which studies to discuss, and at least one philosopher has argued the general claim is too loosely defined to test. Swann, Wenzlaff, Krull and Pelham, Journal of Abnormal Psychology 101, 1992, pages 293 to 306, with small groups. Kwang and Swann, Personality and Social Psychology Review 14, 2010, pages 263 to 280, pooled the research and concluded that praise governs how people feel while agreement with their self-view governs what they believe and seek out.

Chapter 9. Salkovskis and Kobori, Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry 49, 2015, pages 203 to 208. The participants were 153 people with obsessive compulsive disorder, 50 with panic disorder and 52 without either. It relies on people's recollections. The authors say prospective and experimental studies are still needed.

Chapter 10. Bandura, "Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change", Psychological Review 84, 1977, pages 191 to 215, and his 1997 book "Self-efficacy: the exercise of control". The review of work performance is Stajkovic and Luthans, Psychological Bulletin 124, 1998, pages 240 to 261, with 114 studies, 21,616 participants and an average correlation of .38. It was weaker for complex tasks. The argument that the link runs mostly from past performance to belief is Sitzmann and Yeo, Personnel Psychology 66, 2013, pages 531 to 568. Bandura had already disputed earlier studies in this line, in Journal of Management 38, 2012, pages 9 to 44. The figure of about ten attempts is my guess.

Chapter 11. Kamins and Dweck, Developmental Psychology 35, 1999, pages 835 to 847, with children of five and six, who acted out the tasks and the setback in role-play. The step from that study to adults who were "the clever one" is mine. The argument about context is Feenstra and colleagues, "Contextualizing the impostor 'syndrome'", Frontiers in Psychology 11, 2020, article 575024. It's an opinion piece with no new data. Cokley and colleagues, Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development 41, 2013, pages 82 to 95, studied 240 ethnic minority students at one American university. The list of origins is my summary and not a research finding.

Chapter 12. Behavioural experiments: McMillan and Lee, Clinical Psychology Review 30, 2010, pages 467 to 478, covering 14 studies and 644 participants. Plans in "when, then" form: Gollwitzer and Sheeran, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38, 2006, pages 69 to 119, covering 94 tests with a medium to large effect. The advice to speak early and to drop the opening apology is my own.

Chapter 13. Breines and Chen, "Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation", Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 38, 2012, pages 1133 to 1143. Four experiments, mostly with students. The guidance on therapy is the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, clinical guideline 159, "Social anxiety disorder: recognition, assessment and treatment", 2013.

One thing I left out on purpose. You may have read that men apply for jobs when they meet 60 per cent of the requirements and women only when they meet all of them. The figure traces back to a 2008 business journal article that mentioned an unpublished company report, and nobody has been able to produce the research behind it. I haven't used it.