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Holden Caulfield used to hunt phonies a few blocks from here, but times have changed. Now the phonies -- or people who think they are, anyway -- hunt themselves.
Case in point: On a recent evening, Columbia University held a well-attended workshop for young academics who feel like frauds.
These were duly vetted, highly successful scholars who nonetheless live in creeping fear of being found out. Exposed. Sent packing.
If that sounds familiar, you may have the impostor syndrome. In psychological terms, that's a cognitive distortion that prevents a person from internalizing any sense of accomplishment.
"It's like we have this trick scale," says Valerie Young, a traveling expert on the syndrome who gave the workshop at Columbia. Here's how that scale works: Self-doubt and negative feedback weigh heavily on the mind, but praise barely registers. You attribute your failures to a stable, inner core of ineptness. Meanwhile, you discount your successes as accidental or, worse, as just so many confidence jobs. Every positive is a false positive.
By many accounts, academics -- graduate students, junior professors, and even some full professors -- relate to this only a little less than they relate to eye strain.
The condition was first identified in 1978 by the psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, who...