A Study on Association between Social Comparison, Imposter Syndrome and Future Anxiety among Young Adults

Abstract

Imposter syndrome refers to the persistent belief that an individual is undeserving

of success despite having clear evidence of competence and achievements. It has been linked to

social comparison tendencies and to anxiety an individual’s psychological state. This study

examines the relationship between imposter syndrome, social comparison and dark future anxiety

among emerging adults aged 18  to 29 years. The data was collected from participants through

standardized psychological assessment. It shows that when one tends to engage in excessive social

comparison with others anxiety rises higher, and if anxiety rises the feeling of imposter rises along.

The findings showed that sub dimension of social comparison, ability comparison was

significantly positive with dark future anxiety, and results that ability

comparison is also significantly positive with imposter syndrome,  which

suggests that individual who often compares their ability with other individual are more prone to

experience higher level of anxiety and imposter feeling. However, opinion comparison has no

significant relationship with dark anxiety,  and similarly opinion comparison was also

shown no significant relationship with imposter syndrome,  whereas, it was found

significantly strong positive relationship which suggests that higher the

anxiety was associated with greater imposter feelings.