University students in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom have increasing levels of perfectionism, and this trend appears to be accelerating in response to modern economic pressures. The findings indicate that young people are increasingly suffering from a fear of failure, a psychological change that tends to exacerbate existing mental health problems. This study was recently published in the journal psychology bulletin.
Perfectionism is a psychological trait characterized by setting excessively high standards accompanied by harsh self-criticism. It’s not just about getting good grades or being proud of your work. Rather, it involves a chronic sense of inadequacy and a deep-seated belief that a person’s worth is completely tied to perfect performance.
Psychologists consider perfectionism to be a complex, multilayered trait. To help scientists understand their various effects, they are generally divided into two broad categories. The first category is perfectionistic striving. This represents an inner drive to meet immense personal standards and a drive to push oneself toward difficult goals.
The second category is perfectionistic concerns. This aspect includes an intense fear of making mistakes, chronic self-doubt, and a belief that others have unrealistically high expectations for themselves. Although both aspects can harm your mental health, perfectionist concerns are particularly associated with serious issues such as anxiety and depression.
The authors wanted to understand how these characteristics are changing over time among young people. Thomas Curran, associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Behavioral Sciences at the London School of Economics and Political Science, is a co-author of the study. He explained the rationale for revisiting this topic.
“In 2019, Andrew Hill and I published a meta-analysis showing that perfectionism has been on the rise among college students since the late 1980s,” said author Curran. the trap of perfection. “We wanted to know whether the rise is continuing or accelerating, and what is actually driving the rise.”
They suspected that contemporary events, such as economic instability and rising wealth inequality, might be accelerating these psychological changes. They also wanted to test cultural theories about why perfectionism arises in the first place. Sociologists and psychologists argue that modern market-driven societies place tremendous pressure on individuals to compete for limited resources.
This hyper-competitive environment tends to foster intense anxiety about personal achievement, leading young people to believe that they must be perfect in order to survive socially and economically. To evaluate these ideas, scientists examined certain economic indicators alongside psychological survey data. They looked at gross domestic product per capita, which is a country’s gross economic product divided by its population.
They also looked at income inequality, as measured by standard economic indicators that track economic disparities between society’s richest and poorest people. Additionally, the researchers sought to determine whether the psychological harm caused by perfectionism had changed. If perfectionism had simply become a normal and harmless part of modern life, the link to mental health problems might have been weakened.
To examine these historical patterns, the researchers conducted a cross-temporal meta-analysis. This statistical method involves collecting data from a variety of independent studies conducted over a long period of time to identify broader historical trends. By combining small studies, scientists can draw more precise conclusions about how populations change over time.
The authors collected survey data from 307 different samples of college students. A total of 82,939 university students from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom were included in the analysis. The data spanned 35 years, with specific information collected between 1989 and 2024.
The average age of participants in all combination studies was approximately 20 years. Approximately 71 percent of the students included in the analysis identified as female. All participants had completed a widely accepted psychological questionnaire designed to measure different types of perfectionism.
The researchers extracted the average score from each study and plotted it against the year the data was collected. They then used special statistical models to see whether the scores followed a straight line or a curve that accelerated over time. They controlled for variables such as participants’ age and gender to ensure the trends were accurate.
The analysis revealed that overall perfectionism has increased significantly among college students over the past 35 years. Self-directed perfectionism, the tendency to seek perfection in oneself, showed a steady and consistent upward trend. Personal standards and chronic doubts about daily behavior also increased in a linear trajectory.
The most dramatic changes concerned the way young people interacted with others and responded to failure. “Over 35 years, 307 samples, and approximately 83,000 students in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, perfectionism is increasing in every dimension we measure,” Curran said. He emphasized that the trajectory is not progressing at a single consistent pace across all traits.
“What’s most striking is that socially prescribed perfectionism, the sense that others demand perfection from you, is accelerating in a sharply upward curve that began in the early 2000s,” Curran told SciPost. “And because the association between perfectionism and depression and anxiety has remained stable over decades, increasing perfectionism means increasing distress at a population level.”
Another specific trait called concern about making mistakes showed the largest increase overall of all dimensions measured. This trait measures a person’s tendency to react negatively to small mistakes and equate mistakes with complete personal failure. This data suggests that today’s young people are far more afraid of making mistakes in public than previous generations.
When scientists divided certain traits into two broad categories, they found clear economic connections. Perfectionistic striving increased at a steady, linear rate over 35 years. The researchers found that a decline in gross domestic product per capita was associated with an increase in the level of these internal efforts.
“The economic picture fits very neatly in that a decline in GDP per capita predicts a sharp increase in perfectionistic strivings, and a rise in income inequality predicts a sharp increase in perfectionistic concerns,” Curran said. The authors suggest that when economic growth slows and young people perceive a lack of economic opportunity, they tend to compensate by working harder to succeed. They internalize the lack of economic opportunity as a signal that they must achieve more in order to survive.
Perfectionist concerns follow an accelerating curvilinear trajectory, indicating that fear of making mistakes and facing social judgment grows faster over time. Income inequality showed a strong relationship with this particular increase. As the gap between rich and poor widens, students develop a strong fear of falling behind socially.
When a society is highly unequal, the risk of making mistakes feels much higher. The authors suggest that this inequality creates a state of hypervigilance in which young people are constantly concerned about what others think. The study also revealed some regional differences.
American college students reported higher perfectionistic strivings but lower perfectionistic concerns compared to Canadian and British college students. Despite these differences in regional baselines, the overall historical trend of increasing perfectionism was consistent across all three English-speaking countries.
Although this study provides extensive data, readers should be careful not to draw too broad conclusions. Many commentators blame smartphones and social media for the current youth mental health crisis. However, this study provides evidence that technological change is not the only culprit.
“This acceleration started around 2000, about a decade before smartphones entered the lives of teenagers, which goes against the common belief that phones are the biggest suspect,” Curran said. He pointed out that structural economic changes provide a more consistent explanation for the timing of this psychological shift.
The researchers acknowledge that their methodology has some limitations. For example, this study utilized a self-reported survey rather than a clinical diagnosis by a medical professional. Self-report data records how people perceive their own struggles, but does not confirm whether more people cross the threshold to be diagnosed with a mental disorder such as generalized anxiety disorder.
Moreover, the economic links found in this study do not prove that economic changes directly force personality changes. “We can show that timing is much more compatible with structural conditions than it is with technology, because macroeconomic links are correlated, but we cannot claim strict causation,” Curran said. Reliance on data from three wealthy Western countries is another limitation.
“The data also comes from three countries with liberal market economies, so it is not possible to say what the trends are in the Nordic countries, for example,” Curran pointed out. The United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom share similar economic models and cultural values that emphasize individualism. It remains unclear whether youth in non-Western cultures and developing countries experience a similar acceleration in perfectionism.
Curran also stressed that because the study relied entirely on aggregate data from college students, its results cannot be automatically applied to broad generational categories. “And the methodological caveat is that we’re studying samples of college students at different points in time, not birth cohorts, so the ‘Gen Z’ framework overstates what the design can support,” he said.
Future research should attempt to track these characteristics across more diverse populations and educational backgrounds. Continued research is needed to understand the exact causes of this psychological change. To track these ongoing trends, researchers have created a new tool for the scientific community.
“We built Perfectionism Observatory (perfectionismobservatory.com), an open access platform, as a living meta-analysis that is updated as new data comes in. So the next step is to keep the big picture up to date,” Curran said. “Beyond that, I want to test economic mechanisms more directly and extend that research to societies with different inequality profiles, where structural arguments can actually be disguised.”
The authors suggest that treating mental health crises in young people may require more than just individual therapy and social media restrictions. Perhaps we need to address the broader economic and cultural environment that places such a heavy burden on young people. Despite the worrying trends, Curran stressed that the situation is not entirely dire.
“All I can say is that these closing words are hopeful,” Curran said. “Perfectionism scores remain in the middle of the range, well below the high end, meaning there is room to act before things get worse, not only with personal support such as therapy, but also with the economic circumstances in which young people are growing up.”
The study, “Perfectionism Accelerates Over Time: A Cross-Time Meta-Analytic Review of 35 Years of College Student Data,” was authored by Thomas Curran, Andrew Hill, and Pia Marie Pose.
