In the Shadow of Self-Doubt: Investigating Impostor Syndrome's Impact on Unethical Behavior

Abstract: Given the pressure to perform (Hutchins, 2015) and psychological distress (Henning et al., 1998) that those with impostor feelings tend to experience, scholars have called for research investigating how impostorism influences ethical decision making (Cutri et al., 2021). Drawing upon moral disengagement theory (Bandura et al., 1996; Dang et al., 2017), we hypothesize that impostor feelings will lead to unethical behavior, and that moral disengagement drives these effects. Through a preliminary study with students working toward a master’s degree in accounting, we show a connection between feelings of impostorism and engagement in cheating. Further, we show that moral disengagement mediates this relationship. In addition to supporting our hypothesis, our work refutes the assumption that self-report measures suggesting lower levels of unethical behavior among impostors can be generalized to actual behavior.

Keywords: moral disengagement, ethics, impostor syndrome, impostorism, decision making