A meta-analysis examining perfectionism across birth cohorts found increases over several decades, with the largest rise in socially prescribed perfectionism — the belief that others demand perfection of you.
That specific component is the one most strongly associated with poor mental health outcomes, which makes the direction of the trend unfortunate.
The two components
The distinction between perfectionistic strivings and perfectionistic concerns runs through this literature and is essential to interpreting it.
Strivings means high personal standards and the pursuit of excellence. It correlates with conscientiousness, with achievement, and generally with positive outcomes. It is not, in itself, a problem.
Concerns means fear of failure, doubt about the adequacy of one's actions, sensitivity to criticism, and the belief that mistakes reveal something fundamental. It correlates with anxiety, depression, disordered eating and — importantly — with worse performance under pressure.
Studies measuring both find that girls and women score similarly or slightly higher on strivings and consistently higher on concerns.
The public conversation conflates them, treating perfectionism as a single trait to be either celebrated or cured. It is neither.
Why concerns damages performance
The intuition that fear of failure motivates is not well supported.
Fear of failure produces avoidance of situations where failure is possible, which means avoiding the difficulty required for improvement. It produces procrastination, because a task not started cannot be done badly. And it consumes working memory in the same way maths anxiety does, degrading performance on exactly the tasks that matter most.
Studies of performance under evaluation find that high perfectionistic concerns predicts worse rather than better outcomes when stakes are high, which is the reverse of what the trait is popularly believed to deliver.
How institutions reward it
Here is the uncomfortable part. Perfectionistic concerns produces behaviour that schools and employers reward heavily in the short run.
Work submitted early and polished. Extremely thorough preparation. Rapid response to feedback. Visible distress at falling short, read as commitment. Reliability, because a person afraid of failing does not miss deadlines.
An organisation observing these behaviours sees an excellent student or employee. The behaviours are real and the output is genuinely good.
What the institution does not see is the cost of producing it, and it has no mechanism for noticing until something breaks.
This is why perfectionistic concerns is so persistent. It is not a maladaptive pattern in the ordinary sense; it works, and it is reinforced constantly. The costs are borne privately and the benefits are visible publicly.
The socially prescribed component
The rising component specifically concerns the belief that others require perfection.
Proposed contributors include increased academic competition and credentialism, visible comparison through social media, parental expectation transmitted through highly involved parenting practices, and labour market conditions that make positional advantage feel necessary.
The interesting feature of socially prescribed perfectionism is that it is a belief about others, and beliefs about others can be inaccurate. Studies of perceived versus actual expectations find substantial gaps, with adolescents frequently overestimating what parents and teachers require.
This is a genuinely actionable finding. Explicitly stating what is actually expected — including that a grade below the top is acceptable — corrects a belief that is frequently just wrong.
What helps
Cognitive-behavioural approaches targeting perfectionism have reasonable evidence, particularly for the concerns component, and have been shown to reduce associated anxiety and depressive symptoms.
Self-compassion interventions have a growing evidence base. The mechanism is relevant: self-compassion involves responding to one's own failure as one would to a friend's, which directly targets the disproportionate response to error that defines the concerns component.
Explicit expectation-setting by adults, as above.
Deliberate exposure to survivable failure — the same lever that appears in the confidence and self-efficacy literature, appearing again because the underlying mechanism is the same. A person who has failed and been fine has evidence that contradicts the belief.
Behavioural experiments in which the person deliberately submits work at ninety per cent rather than perfecting it, and observes what actually happens, are a standard technique and are effective largely because the predicted catastrophe does not occur.
What does not help
Telling someone that perfectionism is a strength dressed as a weakness, which is the standard interview framing and reinforces exactly the belief that is causing the damage.
Praising the output without noticing the cost, which is what most institutions do by default.
And treating the strivings component as the problem. Ambition is not the issue. The belief that a mistake is a verdict is the issue, and conflating them leads to advice that asks people to care less, which they will not do and should not have to.