When People Call Themselves Perfectionists, Science Says They Usually Mean It

Ask around at any workplace, university, or dinner table and you will find people who describe themselves, without hesitation or prompting, as perfectionists. The label has become part of the cultural vocabulary, attached to athletes, surgeons, students, and anyone who confesses to agonizing over details. For decades, however, personality psychologists have been skeptical of this kind of self-identification. Perfectionism, in the research literature, is measured with long multidimensional questionnaires that probe standards, order, criticism from others, and doubts about one’s actions. A single yes-or-no claim of being a perfectionist seemed too blunt an instrument to capture such a layered construct. A new study published in Current Psychology by Danielle S. Molnar of Brock University and colleagues, including pioneering perfectionism researchers Paul L. Hewitt and Gordon L. Flett, now offers the most systematic test to date of whether that blunt instrument actually works. The answer, largely, is yes, with important caveats about who gets to wear the label.

The research team recruited 988 American emerging adults, young people aged roughly eighteen to their late twenties, a developmental window that psychologists have long identified as the period when perfectionistic tendencies crystallize and collide with academic, professional, and social pressures. The sample was 54.7 percent women, 62.9 percent White, and 66.3 percent heterosexual, with an average age of 22.42 years. Crucially, participants were recruited through the CloudResearch Connect platform with procedures specifically designed to approximate United States population benchmarks across key demographic characteristics, an effort to correct a long-standing weakness in perfectionism research, where samples have often been narrow, homogeneous groups of college students. All data were collected through online surveys hosted on the Qualtrics platform, and the study’s hypotheses and analytic strategy were pre-registered before data collection, a transparency practice that guards against the selective reporting that has plagued parts of personality science.

The central question was deceptively simple: when someone says they are a perfectionist, does that self-label actually correspond to elevated scores on established measures of trait perfectionism? To answer it, the researchers assessed multidimensional trait perfectionism using not one but three of the field’s most influential measurement frameworks. These included the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale developed by Frost and colleagues in 1990, often abbreviated MPS-F, which captures concerns such as excessive doubt about actions and overly high parental expectations; the Hewitt and Flett Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale from 1991, known as MPS-HF, which distinguishes self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially prescribed perfectionism; and the SCOPE model, a newer conceptualization that organizes perfectionistic tendencies into self-critical, standards, order, and evaluative concerns dimensions. By anchoring the validation in three independent traditions, the team ensured that a positive result could not be dismissed as an artifact of one particular questionnaire’s quirks.

The findings were striking in their consistency. Self-identified perfectionism was robustly associated with higher levels of multidimensional trait perfectionism across all three measurement frameworks. In plain terms, people who call themselves perfectionists really do score higher on the traits that psychologists measure with validated instruments. This supports the construct validity of self-identification as an indicator, meaning the label is not just a casual boast or a pop-culture badge but a meaningful signal of an underlying personality disposition. For researchers who study perfectionism, this matters enormously, because self-identification is increasingly used as a recruitment tool. Studies of perfectionists in sport and the performing arts, for example, have screened participants precisely by asking whether they consider themselves perfectionists. The new results suggest that this practice, despite limited prior empirical validation, rests on solid ground.

But the study did not stop at validation. The researchers also examined whether rates of self-identified perfectionism and levels of specific perfectionism dimensions varied across demographic groups defined by gender, sexual orientation, race, and socioeconomic status. They did. This demographic layer of the analysis is perhaps the study’s most socially significant contribution, because it situates perfectionism within broader social contexts rather than treating it as a purely individual quirk. Perfectionism does not develop in a vacuum. It is shaped by family expectations, cultural narratives about achievement, experiences of discrimination, and the pressure to prove oneself in environments where one’s group is underrepresented or stereotyped. Prior work has hinted at these dynamics, from studies linking perceived racial discrimination to socially prescribed perfectionism among African American adolescents to research on the intense achievement pressures documented in affluent communities and in scholarship on the so-called future girl, the young woman expected to excel at everything in post-feminist culture.

The technical centerpiece of the demographic analysis was a methodological upgrade. Although the pre-registration had specified the use of the popular PROCESS macro to test whether the links between self-identified perfectionism and trait perfectionism dimensions varied across demographic characteristics, the team instead implemented a multi-group model comparison approach using the MPlus statistical software. Rather than estimating separate moderation models for each perfectionism dimension, this approach allowed the researchers to simultaneously examine associations across all three trait perfectionism models, directly comparing statistically constrained and unconstrained models to evaluate whether the strength of the associations differed between groups. The result was a more integrated and parsimonious test, one that answers the moderation question across the entire nomological network of perfectionism at once rather than piecemeal. It is the kind of analytic rigor that reviewers and methodologists have been urging in a field where moderation claims are often tested one dimension at a time with varying results.

One moderator stood out: socioeconomic status. SES moderated the relations between self-identified perfectionism and multidimensional trait perfectionism, meaning that the correspondence between the self-label and the measured trait was not uniform across the economic spectrum. The authors point to a rich literature that helps explain why class might matter here. First-generation college students report family achievement guilt and stress overload as they navigate upward mobility. High socioeconomic status individuals from affluent backgrounds show uniquely elevated entitlement, and research on high-achieving youth at socioeconomic extremes documents perfectionism at both ends of the class ladder, driven by different mechanisms. For young people from economically pressured families, perfectionism may be fused with survival, with the sense that any misstep could cost hard-won opportunities. For privileged youth, it may reflect internalized expectations of excellence as a birthright. Either way, the meaning and expression of the perfectionist label appears to bend under economic gravity.

The study arrives at a moment when perfectionism is increasingly framed as a public health concern rather than a harmless personality style. Meta-analytic work by Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill found that perfectionism has been rising across birth cohorts of college students from 1989 to 2016, and a follow-up cross-temporal meta-analysis of thirty-five years of data suggests the trend is accelerating. Perfectionism, particularly its socially prescribed form, in which people feel that significant others demand flawlessness of them, has been linked in meta-analyses to psychopathology, social anxiety, depressive disorders, poor sleep, disordered eating, and even suicide risk. An umbrella review of a decade of meta-analyses on multidimensional perfectionism underscores how pervasively the construct correlates with compromised well-being. Against this backdrop, having a cheap, fast, person-centered indicator that reliably flags elevated perfectionism, namely simply asking people whether they identify as perfectionists, could prove valuable for screening, outreach, and large-scale epidemiological research.

The authors are careful to frame self-identified perfectionism as a complement to, not a replacement for, traditional trait-based assessment. Their theoretical anchor is the Comprehensive Model of Perfectionistic Behaviour proposed by Hewitt and colleagues, which describes a perfectionistic personality style operating at three levels: a multidimensional trait component, which is the focus of the current work, plus two relational components reflecting perfectionistic self-presentation and the perfectionistic self-relationship. A self-label, in this framing, captures something a questionnaire alone may miss, the person’s own narrative identity as a perfectionist, which qualitative work with adolescents suggests is often accompanied by vivid, distressing self-understandings. The study also models good open science: the pre-registration is publicly available on AsPredicted, and the materials and data are posted on the Open Science Framework. Funded in part by the Canada Research Chairs Program and approved by Brock University’s research ethics board, the work signals where perfectionism science is heading, toward measurement that is demographically aware, theoretically integrated, and honest about the social worlds in which the pursuit of perfection takes root.

Subject of Research: Validation of self-identified perfectionism as an indicator of multidimensional trait perfectionism in American emerging adults

Article Title: Validating self-identified perfectionism as an indicator of trait perfectionism and examining differences across key demographic characteristics

Article References: Molnar, D. S., Blackburn, M., Puffer, H., Zinga, D., Hewitt, P. L., & Flett, G. L. (2026). Validating self-identified perfectionism as an indicator of trait perfectionism and examining differences across key demographic characteristics. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1530. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10081-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10081-0

Keywords: perfectionism, trait perfectionism, self-identification, emerging adults, psychometrics, socioeconomic status, gender differences, sexual orientation, personality assessment, socially prescribed perfectionism, Current Psychology, moderation analysis