Two Thirds of Women and One in Ten Men: What Happened to Horner's Fear of Success Score

“After first-term finals, Anne finds herself at the top of her medical school class.”

That sentence, as reproduced in a 2003 replication paper by Jennifer Engle (I did not see Horner’s own wording), was handed to undergraduates in the 1960s, and they were asked to finish the story. Women got Anne. Men got John. Their endings became one of the most quoted results in the psychology of achievement.

The short version of what became of it: the story-completion numbers are real, but the conclusion drawn from them, that women carry a stable motive to avoid success, did not survive the follow-up work. What did survive is narrower and applies to anyone.

What did Horner’s study actually report?

Matina Horner’s University of Michigan dissertation (1968) gave students a projective cue, a short opening line they continue as a story, and had the stories scored for fear-of-success imagery: social rejection, worry about femininity, denial of the success, or bizarre endings. Two secondary sources I opened give the headline figure as 65 percent of women versus 10 percent of men (Engle 2003) and as 66 percent versus 9 percent (Hawkins and Pingree, 1975). The gap probably reflects rounding or counting; I could not reach the dissertation or the 1972 paper in the Journal of Social Issues (volume 28, issue 2) to settle it.

The illustrations quoted from Horner are vivid. One woman’s Anne “drops down to ninth in the class and then marries the boy who graduates number one.” A man’s John “is pleased with himself” and “continues working hard and eventually graduates at the top of his class.” Time covered the work on March 20, 1972, reporting that more than 65 percent of the women tied the girl’s success to depression, illness or death, while 90 percent of the men tied the boy’s success to happiness and prosperity. Time also reported that men showed a “spurt of motivation” in competition and women did not, but I only saw that in the magazine’s summary, not in the data.

Why did the design invite another reading?

Look at who answered what. Women read about a woman; men read about a man. Nobody wrote about the other sex’s medical student. So the study cannot separate two stories: women projecting their own fear, or readers of both sexes expecting a woman at the top of a medical class to pay a social price.

Monahan, Kuhn and Shaver (1974) argued for the second reading, and the evidence tilted their way. Hawkins and Pingree (1975, a conference paper from the ERIC archive) gave 476 children from third to twelfth grade the Anne or John cue with success or failure, using rating scales. Success made the person look much happier regardless of sex. Where sex did matter was niceness: a successful woman rated as somewhat less nice than a successful man. Their summary line: “women do not fear success so much as society fears successful women.”

Engle’s replication adds to the picture. She cites Cherry and Deaux (1978), who found about 60 percent of respondents of both sexes wrote negatively about John succeeding in nursing school, and Yoder and Schleicher (1996), where 25 to 40 percent wrote negatively about Anne and John in both traditional and nontraditional fields. Negative endings follow the mismatch between person and field, not the author’s sex.

What did the measurement critics find?

Zuckerman and Wheeler (1975, Psychological Bulletin, 82, 932-946) reviewed the fantasy-based measure. I read their paper only as characterized by later authors, not in full. A 1980 paper by Zuckerman, Larrance, Porac and Blanck summarizes their point: the “successful medical student” cue may tap attitudes toward medical school rather than a general trait, and since men and women got different cues, their scores are not strictly comparable. The same paper reports that, after Horner, no reliable sex differences were found and the score was not consistently tied to any behavior.

Scoring was a second problem. According to a South African thesis summarizing the literature, Tresemer scored the same stories under several coding schemes and got considerably different fear-of-success rates, and Condry and Dyer (1976) concluded it was unclear whether differences between studies came from treatments or from an unreliable measure. That thesis is a secondary source; I did not open Condry and Dyer’s article itself.

David Tresemer’s own arc is worth knowing. His 1974 Psychology Today piece was titled “Popular, but Unproven.” He later said, again per the thesis, that the review had been overinterpreted and was meant as a caution against using fear of success as a personality explanation, not as a burial of the idea.

Did the original students bear it out?

Partly. Hoffman (1977) re-contacted 72 men and 86 women from Horner’s 1965 sample, which she described as 177 students. Women who scored high in 1965 scored lower nine years on, and women high in fear of success in 1965 were significantly more likely to become pregnant when they were on the verge of success relative to their husbands or boyfriends. Men’s scores were inconsistent between the two time points, and recoding the 1965 stories turned up more male fear of success than Horner had reported. Hoffman doubted the measure for men. This is one follow-up, from abstract-level reading.

What about the product side?

A morning-proof app can get you out of bed and can document that you did it. It cannot tell you whether you are quietly keeping your results small to avoid what a good run would commit you to, and a streak of early mornings can raise other people’s expectations of you as easily as it raises yours. DontSnooze gives you 30 seconds to record video proof after the alarm, or a random camera-roll photo goes to your friends; that is leverage on one act, not a read on why you slow down just before something works.

What is still useful from the idea?

Stripped of the gendered claim, one finding holds up in a small lab form. In Zuckerman, Larrance, Porac and Blanck (1980, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 503-513), people scoring high on a fear-of-success questionnaire reacted differently to doing well on puzzles: after success they showed lower intrinsic motivation and made fewer internal attributions, in both males and females. After failure the two groups did not differ. The measure there was the questionnaire, not Horner’s stories, and the task was puzzles.

That points toward something plain. Succeeding changes what people expect of you, and some people respond by credit-shifting or easing off. I read that as consistent with work on self-handicapping, where creating an excuse in advance protects you from the verdict, and with the pattern in why people stall at ninety percent of a goal. A change of job or city, the subject of the habit-discontinuity research, is a moment when other people’s expectations of you reset, which is the same variable seen from the other side. None of that was tested on morning routines, and I would not claim it was.

Where does the evidence stop?

The 1968 data come from one midwestern undergraduate sample in a decade when fewer than one doctor in ten was a woman (Engle’s figure, citing 1972 labor statistics). The cue is a single scenario. The best objective measure has middling reliability. And I worked from reviews and abstracts for most of the critique. Fear of success as a trait is unproven. Fear of what success obligates you to is a reasonable, testable idea that nobody has yet tested on how people wake up.