The Types of Perfectionism: Every Model, Explained

8 min read · Reviewed against current psychological research

You looked up “types of perfectionism” and got two completely different answers. One article gave you three types with names like self-oriented and socially prescribed. Another gave you two, adaptive and maladaptive, and implied one of them is fine to keep.

Neither is wrong. They’re different models, built by different research groups, cutting the same thing along different lines. This article covers both, what they agree on, and which one is more useful for working out what to do.

Where the idea started

Before anyone built a scale, a clinician noticed the split you’re looking for.

In 1978, Don Hamachek distinguished normal perfectionism from neurotic perfectionism. Normal perfectionists, in his description, were oriented toward doing things well and took satisfaction from it. Neurotic perfectionists were oriented toward not failing, and satisfaction never arrived because the standard moved (Hamachek, 1978).

That paper is nearly fifty years old and it holds up better than most of what followed. Every model below is, in some sense, an attempt to measure the distinction Hamachek described from a consulting room.

Model one: who the standards are aimed at

The most cited framework comes from Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett, whose Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale sorts perfectionism by direction rather than by flavour.

Self-oriented perfectionism means the demands come from you. You set standards nobody asked for and hold yourself to them.

Other-oriented perfectionism means you point them outward. Colleagues who cut corners are hard to work with, and delegating feels like accepting a worse result.

Socially prescribed perfectionism means you believe others demand perfection from you. Not that you want to be flawless, but that flawless is the price of acceptance, and that falling short will cost you standing.

That third one is where the harm concentrates. A 2022 review in Clinical Psychology Review argued for treating socially prescribed perfectionism as a public health concern in its own right, describing it as a chronic source of pressure that produces helplessness and hopelessness at high levels, with established links to depression and suicidal ideation (Flett et al., 2022).

Worth sitting with, because it reframes the problem. If your perfectionism is mostly socially prescribed, the demand you’re straining against was never yours.

Model two: strivings versus concerns

The second framework came out of a different measurement tradition and splits perfectionism by function rather than direction.

Perfectionistic strivings are the pursuit itself: high personal standards, wanting excellence, caring about the quality of what you produce.

Perfectionistic concerns are the fear attached to it: dread of mistakes, doubt about your actions, the sense that falling short would be exposing.

This is the split people mean when they say adaptive and maladaptive. Stoeber and Otto’s 2006 review is the standard reference, and the pattern across the literature is fairly consistent: concerns predict psychiatric symptoms and distress, while strivings often track with self-efficacy and performance (Stoeber & Otto, 2006).

So the two-model confusion resolves once you notice they answer different questions. One asks where the pressure comes from. The other asks whether it’s the wanting or the fearing that’s hurting you.

Model three: the facets underneath

The strivings and concerns split didn’t arrive fully formed. It was assembled from a more granular scale.

Randy Frost and colleagues built a 35-item measure with six subscales: concern over mistakes, personal standards, parental expectations, parental criticism, doubts about actions, and organisation (Frost et al., 1990). Researchers later found organisation only loosely related to the rest and recommended leaving it out of totals, and a 1998 reanalysis argued the scale worked better with four dimensions than six.

Two things are worth taking from that list even if you never see the questionnaire.

First, doubts about actions is a named, measurable component. The specific experience of finishing something and not being able to tell whether it’s adequate is not a personal quirk. It’s a subscale.

Second, two of the six are about parents. The scale’s authors judged in 1990 that where the standards came from was part of the construct itself, which anticipates the finding that perceived parental expectations have risen sharply since.

Is “healthy perfectionism” a real thing?

This is genuinely contested, and most articles present it as settled in whichever direction suits their conclusion.

The case for: strivings really do correlate with better outcomes across a lot of studies, so treating all perfectionism as pathology throws away a real distinction.

The case against: Flett and Hewitt have argued at length that if a trait is genuinely healthy, calling it perfectionism drains the word of meaning. Their position is roughly that what people label adaptive perfectionism is better described as conscientiousness or high standards, and that reserving “perfectionism” for the damaging version keeps the concept clinically useful.

There’s also a measurement problem worth knowing about. Strivings and concerns are correlated, so a person high in one is often somewhat high in the other. Some of the apparently benign effects of strivings only appear cleanly once concerns are statistically removed, which is a real analytic move rather than a description of anyone’s actual experience.

The honest position: high standards without the fear look fine in the data. Whether to call that perfectionism is a naming argument, and you don’t need to resolve it to work out what’s happening to you.

Model four: crossing the two

One more framework is worth knowing, because it answers the objection you probably had reading the strivings and concerns split.

If they’re separate dimensions rather than ends of one scale, then you can be high or low on each independently, which gives four combinations rather than two. That’s the 2 x 2 model: non-perfectionism (low on both), pure personal standards (high standards, low fear), pure evaluative concerns (high fear, no particular standards), and mixed perfectionism (high on both) (Gaudreau & Thompson, 2010).

Pure evaluative concerns is the combination people rarely have language for, and it’s bleak in a specific way: the dread of falling short without the compensating pull of wanting something excellent. All of the cost, none of the drive.

The model has published critics who argue it’s unparsimonious and encourages reading meaning into statistically nonsignificant results. That objection is fair. The four-box picture is still the most intuitive way to see why two people described as perfectionists can have almost nothing in common.

Why the distinction is practical, not academic

Here’s the clearest demonstration that the dimensions behave differently, and it comes from an unexpected place.

A meta-analysis of procrastination found perfectionistic concerns positively associated with putting things off (r = .23) and perfectionistic strivings negatively associated with it (r = -.22). Same construct, opposite directions (Sirois et al., 2017). We cover that in full in a separate piece on perfectionism and procrastination.

Two components pulling opposite ways is why generic advice about perfectionism so often misses. “Lower your standards” targets strivings, which for many people is the half that isn’t causing trouble.

Why the models keep multiplying

Four frameworks for one construct looks like a field that can’t make up its mind. There’s a specific reason for it, and knowing it will save you from over-trusting any single result.

The dimensions overlap. People with demanding standards tend also to fear falling short, so strivings and concerns are correlated rather than independent. That creates a statistical problem: if you want to know what high standards do on their own, you have to remove the shared variance first.

Researchers do this routinely, and it’s a legitimate technique. It’s also why some of the cheerful findings about strivings need reading carefully. “High standards predict self-efficacy once you statistically remove the fear” is a real result about a component. It isn’t a description of a person you’d meet, because in actual people the two arrive together.

Work using bifactor models has tried to separate a general perfectionism factor from what’s specific to each dimension, with concern over mistakes serving as the reference point (Gäde et al., 2017). The technical detail matters less than the implication: even the researchers building these models treat the strivings and concerns split as a working simplification rather than a settled fact about how perfectionism is organised.

Which is a reasonable argument for holding all four models loosely and using whichever one makes your own pattern legible.

Working out which one is loudest for you

You don’t need a scale. Three questions get most of the way.

Whose voice is it? When you imagine falling short, is the disappointment yours or someone else’s? An imagined boss, parent, or unspecified audience points at the socially prescribed dimension.

Is it the wanting or the dreading? Notice whether the energy feels like pull towards something good or push away from something bad. Strivings feel like ambition. Concerns feel like avoidance wearing ambition’s clothes.

What happens after you succeed? Strivings tend to produce satisfaction, however brief. Concerns produce relief, then the next thing. If your wins feel like near-misses that happened not to go wrong, that’s concerns.

When to talk to a professional

Perfectionism isn’t a diagnosis, and there’s no threshold to clear before it’s worth taking seriously.

Worth raising with someone qualified: if the standards are costing more than they return, if falling short reliably produces something closer to shame than disappointment, or if the pattern sits alongside persistent anxiety, low mood, or disordered eating. The socially prescribed dimension in particular has documented links to serious outcomes, and it responds to treatment rather than to willpower.

The takeaway

Two models, one agreement. Whether you cut perfectionism by direction or by function, the harmful part is the fear of falling short rather than the standard itself.

That matters because it tells you what to aim at. The goal was never to care less about your work. It’s to stop treating a shortfall as information about your worth, which is a different operation and a more achievable one. Our full guide to perfectionism covers the wider picture, and the signs of perfectionism is the place to start if you are still working out whether this describes you.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Hamachek, D. E. (1978). Psychodynamics of normal and neurotic perfectionism. Psychology: A Journal of Human Behavior, 15, 27–33.
2. Hewitt, P. L., & Flett, G. L. (1991). Perfectionism in the self and social contexts: conceptualization, assessment, and association with psychopathology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(3), 456–470.
3. Frost, R. O., Marten, P., Lahart, C., & Rosenblate, R. (1990). The dimensions of perfectionism. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 14(5), 449–468.
4. Stoeber, J., & Otto, K. (2006). Positive conceptions of perfectionism: approaches, evidence, challenges. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(4), 295–319. DOI
5. Flett, G. L., Hewitt, P. L., Nepon, T., Sherry, S. B., & Smith, M. (2022). The destructiveness and public health significance of socially prescribed perfectionism. Clinical Psychology Review, 93, 102130.
6. Gaudreau, P., & Thompson, A. (2010). Testing a 2 x 2 model of dispositional perfectionism. Personality and Individual Differences, 48(5), 532–537.
7. Gäde, J. C., Schermelleh-Engel, K., & Klein, A. G. (2017). Disentangling the common variance of perfectionistic strivings and perfectionistic concerns: a bifactor model of perfectionism. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 160.
8. Sirois, F. M., Molnar, D. S., & Hirsch, J. K. (2017). A meta-analytic and conceptual update on the associations between procrastination and multidimensional perfectionism. European Journal of Personality, 31(2), 137–159.