Published September 12, 2026. Last updated September 12, 2026.
Fear of success sounds like a contradiction the first time someone names it: hesitating right before the goal lands, a beat before it slips away entirely. The research behind that idea started with one story-completion study in the 1960s and has never produced a survey that counts how many people experience it. What exists instead is a founding sample, a 27-item scale built to replace it, a decade of replication attempts that mostly failed to confirm the original finding, and scattered studies in students and managers that measure the construct without ever totaling a population rate. This page carries every number from those studies with its sample, its data-collection year, and a link to the primary source, alongside the broader self-sabotage statistics this construct sits inside.
Key takeaways
- In Matina Horner’s founding study, 59 of the 90 University of Michigan undergraduate women (65.6 percent) tested in 1964 wrote story endings assigning social rejection to a woman succeeding at the top of her medical school class, against a much smaller share of the 88 men tested on the equivalent male-named story (Horner, 1972).
- Horner’s 1972 article separately reports incidence figures across a wider group of subjects of varying age, sex, education and occupation level tested between 1964 and 1971, a population distinct from the 90-woman founding sample and not reducible to a single percentage (Horner, 1972).
- No study located for this page, in any country or year, reports a population prevalence rate for fear of success.
- Tresemer’s 1976 review of more than 100 published studies using Horner’s story-completion method found no consistent evidence that women showed more fear-of-success imagery than men, and no consistent evidence that men showed more of it in response to a story about a successful woman (Tresemer, 1976).
- Zuckerman and Allison built a 27-item self-report Fear of Success Scale (fieldwork year not stated; publication is 1976) to replace the story-completion method, reporting internal-consistency reliability of .69 among men and .73 among women in their validation sample (Zuckerman & Allison, 1976).
- Among 263 predominantly Caucasian college women who completed fear of success, fear of failure, test anxiety and achievement motivation scales, all four measures proved factorially complex, their items overlapping across the intended categories; fieldwork year is not stated, publication is 1995 (Piedmont, 1995).
- Among 360 students in grades 7 through 12 across three urban British Columbia communities surveyed in the early 1980s, fear of the social consequences of academic success was higher in grades 7 through 9 than in grades 10 through 12, and higher in girls than boys among the younger group specifically (Ishiyama & Chabassol, 1985).
- Among 104 marketing managers (51 women, 53 men) surveyed for a 1997 study, fear of success scores correlated positively with imposter-phenomenon scores in both sexes; fieldwork year is not stated in the abstract, publication is 1997 (Fried-Buchalter, 1997).
Cite this page
APA: Eduard, S. (2026, September 12). Fear of success statistics: What the research actually counted. StumbleTowardTheLight. https://stumbletowardthelight.com/fear-of-success-statistics/
MLA: Eduard, Sebastian. “Fear of Success Statistics: What the Research Actually Counted.” StumbleTowardTheLight, 12 Sept. 2026, stumbletowardthelight.com/fear-of-success-statistics/.
The source table
| # | Statistic | Data collected | Source type | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 59 of 90 University of Michigan undergraduate women (65.6%) wrote fear-of-success story endings for a female-named lead character, against a much smaller share of 88 men on the male-named version | 1964 | primary study | Horner, 1972 |
| 2 | Incidence of fear-of-success imagery reported separately across subjects of varying age, sex, education and occupation, a broader population than the 90-woman founding sample | 1964 to 1971 | primary study | Horner, 1972 |
| 3 | Review of more than 100 published studies using Horner’s story-completion method; answers to whether women showed more fear-of-success imagery than men, and whether men showed more of it toward a successful-woman cue, were both no | Studies published through the mid-1970s; review published 1976 | derived (literature review) | Tresemer, 1976 |
| 4 | 27-item Fear of Success Scale built as a self-report alternative to story completion; internal-consistency reliability .69 for men, .73 for women in the validation sample | Fieldwork year not stated; 1976 is the publication year | primary study | Zuckerman & Allison, 1976 |
| 5 | 263 predominantly Caucasian college women completed fear of success, fear of failure, test anxiety and achievement motivation scales; all four proved factorially complex | Fieldwork year not stated; 1995 is the publication year | primary study | Piedmont, 1995 |
| 6 | 360 students in grades 7 to 12, three urban British Columbia communities; fear of social consequences of academic success higher in grades 7 to 9 than grades 10 to 12, and higher in girls than boys among the younger group | Early 1980s; the paper’s own dating is not more specific than its 1985 publication | primary study | Ishiyama & Chabassol, 1985 |
| 7 | 104 marketing managers (51 women, 53 men); fear of success scores correlated positively with imposter-phenomenon scores in both sexes | Fieldwork year not stated; 1997 is the publication year | primary study | Fried-Buchalter, 1997 |
| 8 | Across four longitudinal studies of the related construct of self-handicapping, participants reported a growing loss of competence satisfaction, worsening mood, rising substance use, and draining intrinsic motivation for their own jobs | Fieldwork year not stated; 2005 is the publication year | primary study | Zuckerman & Tsai, 2005 |
| 9 | No population prevalence figure for fear of success located, in any country or year | 2026 (this page’s verification pass) | derived (absence disclosed after checking rows 1 through 7) | see rows 1 through 7 |
How common is fear of success?
No survey has ever counted it. The number that stands in for a prevalence rate is 65.6 percent, the share of the 90 University of Michigan undergraduate women in Horner’s founding sample who wrote story endings assigning a successful woman social rejection, tested in 1964 (Horner, 1972). That is one sample, one campus, one cohort of 90 women tested a single time. The same article separately describes incidence across a broader group of varying age, sex, education and occupation tested through 1971, a figure the article does not reduce to a single reportable percentage. Half a century of replication attempts since have moved researchers away from story completion and toward self-report scales, but none of those later studies produced a rate either, because none of them set out to.
What causes fear of success?
Horner’s original account proposed a specific mechanism: women anticipating that competitive achievement would cost them socially, through the loss of femininity in others’ eyes or the loss of relationships, and moderating their performance to avoid that cost (Horner, 1972). Piedmont’s 1995 data complicate that mechanism directly. Testing 263 college women on fear of success, fear of failure, test anxiety and achievement motivation together, the personality domains that predicted the four measures were neuroticism and conscientiousness, general traits with no built-in reference to gender roles, and the four scales themselves loaded onto shared, overlapping factors (Piedmont, 1995). A person high in neuroticism and low in the steadying effect of conscientiousness scores as fearing several related things at once, success among them, a pattern that describes general vulnerability to anxiety under high-stakes evaluation, present in anyone who carries that trait combination. Readers interested in the mechanism that makes achievement itself feel unsafe can go deeper in the upper limit problem.
Is there such a thing as fear of success?
The construct exists in the sense that a validated scale measures something under that name and finds it correlated with related anxieties, but the specific claim Horner made about it, that it operates as a distinctly female fear of a specific social cost, has not held up. Tresemer’s 1976 review pulled together more than 100 published studies using Horner’s own story-completion technique and asked the field’s central questions directly: did women show more fear-of-success imagery than men across those studies, and did men show more of it when responding to a story about an achieving woman. Both answers came back no, and the review reported no consistent correlates of the imagery once the sex-difference hypothesis fell away (Tresemer, 1976). Zuckerman and Allison built their 27-item scale that same year (fieldwork year not stated; publication is 1976) specifically because story completion was proving unreliable to score consistently across labs, and their instrument found fear of success measurable in both sexes with comparable internal consistency, .69 for men and .73 for women (Zuckerman & Allison, 1976). The construct survived; the theory that it belonged mainly to women did not.
Why would someone fear success?
Later studies point toward reasons that have nothing to do with gender as the organizing variable. In 360 students across three urban British Columbia communities, fear of the social consequences of academic success ran higher among younger adolescents in grades 7 through 9 than among older ones in grades 10 through 12, and higher in girls than boys specifically within that younger group, a developmental pattern tied to peer visibility at a particular age (Ishiyama & Chabassol, 1985). Among 104 marketing managers, fear of success scored alongside the imposter phenomenon in both men and women, visible achievement functioning as exposure to judgment (Fried-Buchalter, 1997). That link to felt exposure connects to a broader pattern in self-sabotage research: across four longitudinal studies of the related habit of self-handicapping, arranging a built-in excuse before a result is known, participants reported a growing loss of competence satisfaction, worsening mood, rising substance use, and draining intrinsic motivation for their own jobs over time (Zuckerman & Tsai, 2005). Both constructs describe a person managing the risk of being seen clearly, one by predicting a bad outcome and one by avoiding a good one. More on the shared root is at why people self-sabotage and the psychology of self-sabotage.
Fear of success statistics: where the circulated percentages come from
A family of round numbers circulates online claiming that a fixed share of people, women, or professionals fear success, most often given as a flat percentage with no study attached. Two facts are checkable against that claim. First, the one number with a real origin, 65.6 percent, belongs to a single sample of 90 women tested at one university in 1964, and Horner’s own article never presents it as a prevalence figure (Horner, 1972). Second, the review literature that followed it, more than 100 studies surveyed by Tresemer alone, never converged on a replacement number, because the studies used different scales, different populations and different scoring methods, and produced inconsistent results on the very question the original figure claimed to answer (Tresemer, 1976). A percentage with no named study attached to it traces back to neither source. On this page and in what percentage of people self-sabotage, the honest answer to “how common is this” stays the same: no representative figure exists, and the closest real research is dated and sample-specific.
Methodology
Statistics on this page were selected by starting from the citation ledger’s existing verified entries for Horner (1972) and Piedmont (1995), reading each against its primary source, then searching for the replication and measurement literature the original theory produced: the Zuckerman and Allison scale, Tresemer’s review, and later studies in adolescent and professional samples. Every primary study was checked against its publishing journal record or an indexed full-text copy. Where a paper does not state a fieldwork year, that absence is recorded plainly, with the publication year stated separately. Sources last verified 2026-09-12.
Cite this page
APA: Eduard, S. (2026, September 12). Fear of success statistics: What the research actually counted. StumbleTowardTheLight. https://stumbletowardthelight.com/fear-of-success-statistics/
MLA: Eduard, Sebastian. “Fear of Success Statistics: What the Research Actually Counted.” StumbleTowardTheLight, 12 Sept. 2026, stumbletowardthelight.com/fear-of-success-statistics/.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of people fear success?
No study reports a population percentage. The number most often repeated, 65.6 percent, describes one sample of 90 University of Michigan undergraduate women tested in 1964 (Horner, 1972).
How common is fear of success in men?
Zuckerman and Allison’s scale (fieldwork year not stated; publication is 1976) measured fear of success in both sexes with comparable internal consistency, .69 for men and .73 for women, and Tresemer’s review of more than 100 studies found no consistent evidence that women scored higher than men on the original story-completion measure (Zuckerman & Allison, 1976; Tresemer, 1976).
What causes fear of success?
Piedmont’s 1995 data tie it primarily to the personality domains of neuroticism and conscientiousness, with fear of success, fear of failure and test anxiety loading onto shared, overlapping factors in 263 college women (Piedmont, 1995).
Is fear of success the same as fear of failure?
No study treats them as identical constructs. Piedmont’s data found the two scales factorially entangled in the same sample of 263 college women, their items sharing overlapping factors alongside test anxiety and achievement motivation (Piedmont, 1995).
Why would someone fear success?
Fried-Buchalter’s 1997 study of 104 marketing managers found fear of success scores rising alongside imposter-phenomenon scores in both sexes, a pattern consistent with visible achievement functioning as exposure to judgment (Fried-Buchalter, 1997).
Related reading
- Self-Sabotage Statistics: Every Verified Number, Traced and Dated
- The Upper Limit Problem: What Happens Right After Things Go Well
- Why do People Self Sabotage
References
Fried-Buchalter, S. (1997). Fear of success, fear of failure, and the imposter phenomenon among male and female marketing managers. Sex Roles, 37(11-12), 847-859.
Horner, M. S. (1972). Toward an understanding of achievement-related conflicts in women. Journal of Social Issues, 28(2), 157-176.
Ishiyama, F. I., & Chabassol, D. J. (1985). Adolescents’ fear of social consequences of academic success as a function of age and sex. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 14(1), 37-46.
Piedmont, R. L. (1995). Another look at fear of success, fear of failure, and test anxiety: A motivational analysis using the five-factor model. Sex Roles, 32(3-4), 139-158.
Tresemer, D. (1976). The cumulative record of research on “fear of success.” Sex Roles, 2(3), 217-236.
Zuckerman, M., & Allison, S. N. (1976). An objective measure of fear of success: Construction and validation. Journal of Personality Assessment, 40(4), 422-430.
Zuckerman, M., & Tsai, F. F. (2005). Costs of self-handicapping. Journal of Personality, 73(2), 411-442.