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The Science of Perfectionism: Why High Standards Are Not the Problem

'I just have high standards' is the most common reframe of perfectionism — and the one that research most clearly challenges. Since 1991, when Hewitt and Flett proposed that perfectionism has a socially prescribed dimension (believing others demand flawlessness from you, not just demanding it of yourself), studies have steadily mapped how the trait mediates depression, anxiety, and the procrastination loop where not starting is safer than risking an imperfect result. Socially prescribed perfectionism has risen roughly 33% from 1989 to 2016 — making it one of the few psychological traits that got measurably worse across a generation. None of that is a verdict about character. It is a map of mechanisms.

~33%rise in socially prescribed perfectionism among college students from 1989 to 2016, across 41 studies and more than 41,000 participants — one of the sharpest cohort-level shifts recorded for any personality-adjacent trait ~18%of the variance in depression and anxiety mediated by perfectionism across 43 studies in Limburg et al.'s 2017 meta-analysis — with the concern-over-mistakes and socially prescribed dimensions carrying the largest share 3 dimensionsidentified by Hewitt and Flett's 1991 MPS — self-oriented (demanding perfection of yourself), other-oriented (demanding it of others), and socially prescribed (believing others demand it of you) — with the third dimension most strongly linked to psychopathology 43 studiessynthesized in Limburg et al.'s 2017 meta-analysis quantifying perfectionism's role as a transdiagnostic mediator of internalising psychopathology — spanning depression, anxiety, and related presentations

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