College students in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom are experiencing rising levels of perfectionism, a trend that appears to be accelerating in response to modern economic pressures. The findings indicate that young adults are increasingly struggling with fear of failure, a psychological shift that tends to worsen existing mental health challenges. This research was recently published in the journal Psychological Bulletin.
Perfectionism is a psychological trait characterized by setting excessively high standards accompanied by severe self-criticism. It is not simply about wanting to do well or taking pride in one’s work. Instead, it involves a chronic sense of inadequacy and a persistent belief that a person’s worth is tied entirely to flawless performance.
Psychologists view perfectionism as a complex, multi-layered trait. It is generally divided into two broad categories to help scientists understand its different effects. The first category is perfectionistic strivings. This describes the internal drive to meet immense personal standards and the motivation to push oneself toward difficult goals.
The second category is perfectionistic concerns. This aspect involves an intense fear of making mistakes, chronic self-doubt, and the belief that other people hold unrealistically high expectations of you. Both aspects can harm mental well-being, but perfectionistic concerns are especially linked to severe issues like anxiety and depression.
The authors wanted to understand how these traits are changing over time among young adults. Thomas Curran, an associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science, co-authored the study. He explained the rationale for revisiting this topic.
“In 2019, Andrew Hill and I published a meta-analysis showing perfectionism had been climbing among college students since the late 1980s,” said Curran, author of The Perfection Trap. “I wanted to know whether the rise was continuing, or speeding up, and what was actually driving it.”
They suspected that contemporary events like economic instability and rising wealth inequality might be accelerating these psychological changes. They also wanted to test cultural theories about why perfectionism develops in the first place. Sociologists and psychologists propose that modern, market-driven societies place immense pressure on individuals to compete for limited resources.
This hyper-competitive environment tends to foster intense anxiety about personal achievement, pushing young people to believe they must be flawless to survive socially and financially. To evaluate these ideas, the scientists examined specific economic indicators alongside psychological survey data. They looked at Gross Domestic Product per capita, which measures a country’s total economic output divided by its population.
They also looked at income inequality, measured by a standard economic metric, which tracks the financial gap between the richest and poorest members of a society. Additionally, the researchers sought to determine whether the psychological harm caused by perfectionism has shifted. If perfectionism has simply become a normal, harmless part of modern life, its link to mental health problems might have weakened.
To explore these historical patterns, the researchers conducted a cross-temporal meta-analysis. This statistical technique involves gathering data from many different independent studies conducted over a long period to identify broader historical trends. By combining smaller studies, scientists can draw more accurate conclusions about how a population changes over time.
The authors gathered survey data from 307 different samples of college students. In total, the analysis included 82,939 college students from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The data spanned a period of 35 years, with the specific information collected between 1989 and 2024.
The average age of the participants across all the combined studies was about 20 years old. Roughly 71 percent of the students included in the analysis identified as female. All of the participants had completed widely accepted psychological questionnaires designed to measure different types of perfectionism.
The researchers extracted the average scores from each study and plotted them against the year the data was collected. They then used specialized statistical models to see if the scores followed a straight line or a curved, accelerating path over time. They controlled for variables like the age and gender of the participants to ensure the trends were accurate.
The analysis revealed that overall perfectionism has increased significantly among college students over the past three and a half decades. Self-oriented perfectionism, which is the tendency to demand flawlessness from oneself, showed a steady and consistent upward climb. Personal standards and chronic doubts about daily actions also increased in a straight, linear trajectory.
The most dramatic shifts involved the ways young people relate to others and react to failure. “Across 35 years, 307 samples, and nearly 83,000 students in the US, UK, and Canada, perfectionism is rising on every dimension we measured,” Curran said. He emphasized that the trajectory is not moving at a single, consistent pace across all traits.
“The most striking part is that one form, socially prescribed perfectionism, the sense that other people demand perfection of you, is accelerating, on a curve that turned sharply upward around the early 2000s,” Curran told PsyPost. “And because perfectionism’s link to depression and anxiety has held steady over those decades, more perfectionism means more distress at the population level.”
Another specific trait called concern over mistakes showed the largest overall jump among all the measured dimensions. This trait measures a person’s tendency to react negatively to minor errors and equate mistakes with total personal failure. The data suggests that young people today are much more terrified of making public errors than previous generations were.
When the scientists grouped the specific traits into the two broader categories, they found distinct economic connections. Perfectionistic strivings increased at a steady, linear rate over the 35-year period. The researchers found that declining Gross Domestic Product per capita was associated with higher levels of these internal strivings.
“The economics mapped on very cleanly in so much as falling GDP per capita predicted steeper rises in perfectionistic striving, while rising income inequality predicted steeper rises in perfectionistic concern,” Curran said. The authors suggest that when economic growth slows and financial opportunities feel scarce, young people tend to compensate by pushing themselves harder to succeed. They internalize the lack of economic opportunity as a signal that they must achieve even more just to stay afloat.
Perfectionistic concerns followed an accelerating, curved trajectory, indicating that fears about making mistakes and facing social judgment are growing faster over time. Income inequality showed a strong relationship with this specific rise. As the gap between rich and poor widens, students appear to develop intense fears about falling behind socially.
The stakes for making a mistake feel much higher when society is highly unequal. The authors suggest that this inequality breeds a hyper-vigilant state where young people constantly worry about other people’s opinions. The study also revealed some regional differences.
American college students reported higher perfectionistic strivings but lower perfectionistic concerns than their peers in Canada and the United Kingdom. Despite these regional baseline differences, the overall historical trend of rising perfectionism was consistent across all three English-speaking nations.
While the study provides extensive data, readers should be cautious not to draw overly broad conclusions. Many commentators blame smartphones and social media for the current youth mental health crisis. However, the study provides evidence that changing technology is not the only culprit.
“The acceleration begins around 2000, roughly a decade before smartphones saturated teenage life, which rubs up against the popular idea that phones are the prime suspect,” Curran said. He noted that the structural economic shifts offer a more consistent explanation for the timing of this psychological change.
The researchers acknowledge several limitations in their methodology. For instance, the study utilized self-reported surveys rather than clinical diagnoses from medical professionals. Self-reported data captures how people perceive their own struggles, but it does not confirm whether more individuals are crossing the threshold into diagnosed psychiatric disorders like generalized anxiety.
Additionally, the economic connections found in the study do not prove that financial shifts directly force changes in personality. “The macroeconomic links are correlational, so we can show that the timing fits structural conditions far better than it fits technology, but we can’t claim strict causation,” Curran said. The reliance on data from three wealthy, Western nations is another limitation.
“The data also come from three liberal-market economies, so we can’t say what the trend looks like in, say, the Nordic countries,” Curran noted. The United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom share similar economic models and cultural values that emphasize individualism. It remains unknown whether young people in non-Western cultures or developing economies are experiencing the same acceleration in perfectionism.
Curran also highlighted that because the research relied entirely on aggregate data from college students, the findings cannot automatically be applied to broad generational categories. “And a methodological caution was that we study college-student samples at different points in time, not birth cohorts, so ‘Gen Z’ framing overstates what the design can support,” he said.
Future research should attempt to track these traits across more diverse populations and educational backgrounds. Understanding the exact causes of this psychological shift will require continued investigation. To help track these ongoing trends, the researchers have created a new tool for the scientific community.
“We’ve built an open-access platform, the Perfectionism Observatory (perfectionismobservatory.com), as a living meta-analysis that updates as new data come in, so the next step is keeping the picture current,” Curran said. “Beyond that, I want to test the economic mechanisms more directly and extend the work to societies with different inequality profiles, which is where the structural argument can really be falsified.”
The authors suggest that treating the youth mental health crisis might require more than just individual therapy or restricting social media. It will likely require addressing the broader economic and cultural environments that place such heavy burdens on young generations. Despite the concerning trends, Curran emphasized that the situation is not completely dire.
“Only that the closing note is a hopeful one,” Curran said. “Perfectionism scores still sit in the middle of their range, well short of any ceiling, which means there’s room to act before things get worse through individual support like therapy, but also through the economic conditions young people are growing up in.”
The study, “Perfectionism Is Accelerating Over Time: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analytic Review of 35 Years of College Student Data,” was authored by Thomas Curran, Andrew Hill, and Pia Marie Pose.
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