Impostor Syndrome and Cultural Rules

January 6, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

Many years ago, I was talking with a successful business consultant. He had a PhD in business from a prestigious school, was on the faculty of another pretigious business school, and for several years now, corporations were paying him large sums to come in for a day or two. Still, he didn’t feel secure. “I keep thinking, What if they find out?”

I remembered that conversation when a thread on impostor syndrome showed up in my Twitter feed. What set people off was this tweet in response to someone who had tweeted about her own feelings of being an impostor.

True, it’s the individual’s problem, not society’s. Society doesn’t suffer if you feel like an impostor. But that doesn’t mean that social factors are irrelevant. What if impostor syndrome is more prevalent and more persistent among women than men? That would certainly suggest that the causes are social and not just psychological. In fact, many of the responses to this tweet argued that a person’s race, class, gender, age and other social variables might affect the probability that they would feel like an impostor. Or as Nathalie Olah in the Guardian (here) put it, “what seems more likely is that impostor syndrome is a rather natural reaction of anyone from a working-class, disadvantaged or minority background to the various biases they face on a daily basis.”

The studies on these variables are far from unanimous, if only because there’s no standardized way of measuring the crucial variable of feeling like an impostor. But I’d like to throw in one more variable — culture. My guess is that impostor syndrome is more prevalent and more deeply affecting in societies that emphasize success, societies like, oh I don’t know, the United States.

The British, by contrast, seem not so obsessed by success. In some instances, not being a success and not having the right stuff can put a person one up on the others in the room. I’m thinking here of Humiliation, a party game played by literature professors in Changing Places by British novelist David Lodge. Each person has to name a literary work, preferably one in the canon, that they have never read. You get a point for every other player who in fact has read it. The winner will be the one who has not read the classics that a lit professor would be expected to be familiar with — in other words, the biggest impostor.

Presumably, for the British and for less success-obsessed Americans the game is just a bit of fun. But for Howard Ringbaum, a success-driven American professor, the game creates an unresolvable conflict. “He has a pathological urge to succeed and a pathological fear of being thought uncultured, and this game set his two obsessions at war with each other, because he could succeed in the game only by exposing a gap in his culture.”

Ringbaum and Humiliation are fictions invented by a novelist. But Kate Fox is an anthropologist, and in Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, she describes a similar game of “competitive self-deprecation” when real Brits talk about their home-improvement projects.

When showing visitors the results of your DIY efforts . . . a strict modesty rule applies. Even if you are highly skilled, you must always play down your achievements, and if possible play up your most embarrassing mistakes and blunders...  ‘I managed to burst three pipes just laying the carpet!’  ‘We bought an expensive carpet, but I ruined it by cutting it four inches short, so I had to build some bookcases to cover the gap.’ ‘You think that’s bad: it took me an hour and three cups of tea to put up a coat-hook board, and then I found I’d hung it upside-down!’

Here’s more British fun: In a dinner-party scene in the film “Notting Hill,” the competition involves not a specific area like literature or home-improvement but more or less the total self. Except for the newcomer in their midst – a famous actress (played by Julia Roberts), the guests all know one another well, and as the the host says, “I've long suspected, that we really are the most desperate lot of under-achievers.” At dessert time, there’s one extra brownie, and the host says he will award the brownie to “the saddest act here.”

The video is nearly four minutes long, but it’s worth watching.   

I can’t think of anything similar in American novels or films. Maybe such scenes exist, and in any case, the connection between cultural fictions and real life is not always clear. But the larger point is that impostor syndrome depends on the rules of the game. Where the rules of everyday life allow for the disclosure of personal flaws,  people will be less likely to feel like an impostor and that feeling will be less salient.

I Do Not Like Thee, Dr. Phil

January 4, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’ve had that title in my head for years now, but I’ve never written the blog post that goes with it. That’s partly because I don’t think that many people know this nursery rhyme.

I do not like thee Dr. Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.

Exactly right. I do not like Dr. Phil, yet I would be hard pressed to articulate the reason why. In order to do so, I’d have to watch a lot of his TV segments, and since I don’t like him, I’d find that unpleasant, so I don’t. Which is the other reason I never wrote that post.

But now we have this photo of the dining room in Dr. Phil’s house.

(Click for a larger view.)

Would you refer a friend to a therapist whose dining room featured cartoonish animal statuary and a wall display of a dozen military-style guns? It’s not a decision you’ll have to make. Dr. Phil has not been licensed to practice since the earlier part of this century.

Also, there are some minor factual quibbles, which William Hughes at AVClub (here) raises and dismisses.

McGraw does not currently live in the California estate, which is now owned by the family trust and occupied at present by McGraw’s son. And there’s no evidence that he had any impact on its decoration, beyond, presumably, footing at least some of the cash for its eclectic collection of guns, “FUCK” paintings, and big giant lips. And yet, we have to assume that McGraw has at least stood in this building in its current state, muttering approvingly of the dining room gun wall, the gaudy Star Wars art, and, in what has quickly become our favorite touch, the legion of small Lego-ish bears scattered around the home, including two who are dressed up like Batman and the Joker, because hey, fuck it, that’s fun.

The larger point is first that sometimes your initial impression of a person, immediate and without rational thought, is right; and second, that you may have to wait a long time — until you see their dining room decor — to know that you were right.

Mrs. Maisel Gets One Right

December 26, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

Since the new season of Mrs. Maisel dropped not long ago, my post from nearly two years ago about its language anachronisms (here) has been getting some action. It’s still the most frequently viewed and commented-on item on this blog, and some of the newer comments made it clear that the anachronisms were still in bloom.

I watched first couple of episodes recently, and sure enough, in Episode 2, “It’s the Sixties, Man!” we got contextualize.

In a blog post (here) about trendy words at the ASA meetings, I  cited contextualize, but that was a report from academia in 2013, not New York family life in the early 1960s.

To the show’s credit, it did have a period-perfect language moment. Joel has been speaking with the older Chinese couple who own the Chinatown space he has rented, planning to turn it into a club. He discovers that the space includes a Chinese gambling parlor. Worried about trouble from the police, he meets with the owners. After some back-and-forth to deal with Joel’s fears, the couple — through their translator,* the young med-student Mei — allude to a murder, significantly raising Joel’s level of anxiety.

After the Chinese couple leave, Joel is discussing the matter with Mei. What about the murder, he asks.

Talk of the “put-on” and “putting you on” came on the scene in the late 1950s, starting among young, hip people like Mei and eventually spreading throughout the society. I thought that its use had declined in the 21st century, but Google nGrams shows that at least until 2000, it was still found in books.

Still, my impression is that we rarely refer to “putting people on” these days. But what has replaced it?

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* Another anachronism for anyone still keeping score — a language anachronism of sorts : the owners are speaking Mandarin. In the early 1960s, the language spoken in Chinatown was Cantonese. Immigration from Mandarin-speaking areas of China did not begin until the 1970s at the earliest.

Acting and Reacting as an Agent of Culture — Moi?

December 21, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

A long time ago I heard Margaret Mead speak, and one of the only things I remember her saying was this: “A society has to teach its cultural ideas to its children in terms so clear that even a social scientist can understand them.”

I am, allegedly, a social scientist, but only an encounter with something very unusual can jar me into seeing my own culture. Like most people, I usually take it for granted, like the air we breathe. That was the point of the previous post, where a psychologist was urging dog owners to give their dogs more choice. It took this extending of human culture to canines to remind me of the great emphasis American culture gives to individual independence and choice. All those times that I had heard parents, me included, ask their kids if they wanted Cheerios or Chex, it had never occurred to me that we were drilling a particular American value into the minds of our little tots. I thought we were just being parents.

I had a similar cultural-blindness experience a few years ago. A student born and raised in Turkey came for his obligatory meeting with his advisor — me. He was a grown man in his forties. “What courses I should take?” he asked. I explained about the core requirements and recommended he take the first in the sequence. “And then there are the electives” I said and showed him the list.

“Which courses I should take?

I explained that these were electives. He could take any of the ones we were offering that semester. If you’re interested in family, you could take that course, I said. If you’re interested in religion, we have that elective.

“Yes, but which ones I should take.”

I found it incredibly frustrating. What was so complicated about the concept of electives? It did not occur to me that our differences were cultural. I was so thoroughly an American I that could not imagine anyone rejecting the freedom to make their own choice of courses. Who would not seize that opportunity? Only someone who did not understand.

In retrospect, I now think that he did in fact understand. He just didn’t think it was such a great idea that the choice should be made by him rather than by a professor — department chair no less — who knew much more about the courses and the instructors. Maybe he was right.

There’s something else to be said for his approach. It creates a personal link between the advisor and the student in a way that the independent-choice model conveniently avoids. When he was asking me to choose courses for him, the thought crossed my mind that I could tell him to sign up for some of the low-enrolled courses that were in danger of being cancelled — courses students were avoiding because of the reputation of the course, the instructor, or both. That certainly would have made things easier for me as department chair. But I now felt that I had to look out for his best interests as well. I felt an obligation that was different and perhaps stronger that what I would feel towards other students.

As I say, when all this was happening, I didn’t think about the underlying cultural differences. I just felt uncomfortable. I will leave for another post the time when he presented me with a large assortment of almonds, figs, pistachios, etc., while I tried to explain to him the university rules about gifts.