Perfectionism tends to get treated as an overachiever’s flaw at worst, and secretly a competitive edge at best, the thing that keeps standards high even if it makes people a little miserable along the way. Two studies looking at what perfectionism actually does, compared to simply striving for excellence, suggest that supposed edge is largely an illusion, and that the drive toward flawlessness is both getting more common and doing real damage.
The clearest evidence comes from a 2025 study by Patrick Gaudreau and Adrien Benoit, published in the British Journal of Psychology, which surveyed 376 graduate students, most pursuing master’s degrees, some doctorates. The researchers tested a model distinguishing perfectionism, the drive for flawless, unattainable standards, from what they call excellencism, striving for high but genuinely attainable standards, confirming through statistical analysis that these are two separate traits, not opposite ends of one spectrum. Students who leaned more toward perfectionism did report somewhat higher research self-efficacy and satisfaction with their own productivity in the short term. But once that short-term satisfaction was accounted for, those same perfectionism-leaning students also showed significantly more academic burnout, higher dropout intentions, and a stronger tendency to mask their flaws and struggles from their supervisors. The researchers describe perfectionism as functioning like a double-edged sword, offering a fleeting sense of accomplishment while quietly increasing the risk of burning out entirely.
A second study helps show that this isn’t a niche academic concern, it reflects a broader cultural shift. In a 2019 meta-analysis by Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill, published in Psychological Bulletin, the researchers statistically combined 164 samples covering 41,641 American, Canadian, and British college students, tracking scores on a standard perfectionism measure from 1989 to 2016. Across that 27-year span, all three dimensions the researchers tracked, the standards people set for themselves, the standards they impose on others, and their belief that the world demands they be flawless, rose steadily. The belief that others demand perfection climbed the most sharply of the three, a trend the researchers linked to a broader cultural shift toward competitive, meritocratic pressure since the 1980s. Perfectionism, in other words, isn’t just an individual personality quirk, it’s been quietly climbing across an entire generation.
Together, these two studies suggest perfectionism deserves a much less flattering reputation than it usually gets. Gaudreau and Benoit’s research shows that even in a setting where perfectionism might seem like an asset, competitive graduate research, it comes bundled with real costs, burnout and dropout risk that outweigh its short-lived boost to self-reported productivity. Curran and Hill’s research shows that more and more young people are absorbing exactly this pattern, particularly the belief that flawlessness is externally demanded of them rather than something they’ve chosen to pursue. Between the two, perfection looks less like a high standard worth aspiring to and more like a trap that’s become more common precisely as its costs have become clearer.
It’s worth being honest about what these two studies don’t establish. Gaudreau and Benoit’s research is correlational and specific to graduate students in one academic context, so while the pattern is a meaningful early test of the excellencism-perfectionism distinction, it doesn’t necessarily generalize to every workplace or life stage. Curran and Hill’s meta-analysis is built from cross-sectional data comparing different cohorts over time rather than tracking the same individuals across decades, which is the standard and reasonable approach for this kind of research, but it can’t fully separate generational change from other shifts happening over the same period.
Within those honest limits, the research offers a genuinely useful distinction for anyone caught between high standards and impossible ones. Striving for excellence, real, attainable goals pursued with care, looks psychologically healthy across both studies. Striving for perfection, standards that can never actually be met, looks like a slow trade of long-term wellbeing for a short-term feeling of accomplishment. The myth isn’t that high standards matter. It’s that flawlessness was ever the standard worth chasing.