The Pressure Around the Person
Perfectionism is often described as a private trait, but its dimensions can also reflect the environments in which people are evaluated. This chapter examines cross-temporal evidence from college students in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom to ask which forms of perfectionism have changed, what economic patterns accompany those changes, and how far the evidence can take us without turning a population trend into a story about every individual.
A rising score can hide different trajectories
A cross-temporal meta-analysis compares results from samples collected at different points in time. It can show whether the average score reported by one group of college students differs from the average score reported by another group collected years earlier. It cannot follow the same people from childhood through college, and it cannot show that a particular person became more perfectionistic because of a particular event. The unit of evidence is the sample and its time period, not an individual life course.
That distinction is essential when the subject is perfectionism. A single total score could rise because students are setting higher standards, because they are more afraid of mistakes, because they feel more watched by other people, or because they interpret questionnaire responses differently. Those possibilities have different consequences. The 2026 Bulletin study therefore expanded beyond one measure and examined lower-order facets as well as the higher-order ideas of perfectionistic strivings and perfectionistic concerns.
The study searched for college-student data from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom across roughly 1988 to 2024. It reports 307 coded samples and 82,939 students in its abstract and methods, while its discussion describes 304 samples and 82,114 students for the temporal analyses. That difference appears to reflect distinct analytic subsets, so it is safer to describe the work as a very large synthesis of several hundred samples rather than treat one count as the denominator for every result. The included students were generally college-aged, and the paper could not establish that the pattern applies unchanged to people who do not attend college, to other countries, or to clinical populations.
The dimensions did not move as one block. Self-oriented perfectionism, personal standards, concerns over mistakes, and doubts about actions showed linear increases over time. Socially prescribed perfectionism followed a different trajectory: it was roughly flat from the late 1980s to around 2000 and then accelerated in a quadratic pattern. At the higher-order level, perfectionistic strivings increased linearly, whereas perfectionistic concerns rose nonlinearly and more sharply. The lower-order difference was especially striking for concerns over mistakes, which showed the largest reported increase, followed by doubts about actions, socially prescribed perfectionism, personal standards, and self-oriented perfectionism.
The reported changes are not just a statistical curiosity. Personal standards describe the height of the goal. Concerns over mistakes include reacting to error as failure and fearing judgment. Doubts about actions add uncertainty about whether a task was done correctly. Socially prescribed perfectionism adds the belief that other people demand flawless performance. If the first set rises modestly while the latter forms of concern rise faster, the population is not merely becoming more ambitious. It may be becoming more vigilant about how ambition is judged and whether mistakes reveal personal inadequacy.
The higher-order estimates put magnitude on that contrast. The predicted change from 1988 to 2024 was about 0.29 standard deviations for perfectionistic strivings and about 0.55 standard deviations for perfectionistic concerns.