When Alexander Skarsgård won an Emmy and later a Golden Globe for Big Little Lies, he later said in a 2018 interview that he didn’t know what to do with the trophies — proud of them, but unable to bring himself to display them.
Call it a genuine inhibition rather than false modesty: a discomfort with being seen as having risen above everyone else that traces to an unwritten code with a name, even though almost nobody had to be taught it directly.
The ten rules nobody wrote down until someone did
The code is called the Law of Jante, and it wasn’t handed down by a philosopher or a sociologist. It came from a 1933 novel by the Danish-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose, set in a fictional town modeled on his own, in which he wrote out ten rules governing how a person in a small, tightly bound community is allowed to think about themselves. You’re not to think you are anything special. You’re not to think you are as good as the rest of us. You’re not to imagine yourself better, smarter, or more important than anyone else. You’re not to think you’re good at anything, and you’re certainly not to think you can teach the rest of us something we don’t already know.
Sandemose wrote it as satire, a portrait of the suffocating side of small-town conformity. It escaped the novel almost immediately and became something closer to an accepted description of a real cultural tendency across Scandinavia, one that shows up in everything from workplace norms to how people talk, or don’t talk, about their own achievements.
Commentators disagree about what the law actually costs a society that lives by it. Some point to it as one contributor to the region’s consistently high happiness rankings, the idea being that a culture where nobody is allowed to feel superior is also a culture where almost nobody is allowed to feel worthless. Others have tried to draw a darker line from the same norm to Scandinavia’s supposedly elevated suicide rates — but that premise doesn’t hold up. A 2020 World Happiness Report chapter calls this a myth built on outdated 1970s–80s data; current Nordic suicide rates sit close to the European average. What’s more interesting than the myth itself is the argument some have made about why it persists: that a rule against ever standing out could double as a rule against ever being seen clearly, including when you’re struggling. I don’t think that’s settled science either. But it’s pointing at a real tension: a norm built to protect the group can end up costing something to the individuals inside it.
What happens when you’re the one who stands out
The rules are mostly about restraint, but the psychological cost lands hardest on the person doing well. If your culture’s baseline expectation is that nobody should think themselves better than anyone else, succeeding visibly puts you in violation of a rule you never agreed to but absorbed anyway. Skarsgård’s discomfort with his own awards is the mild, famous version of something a lot of high achievers across the region describe more privately: a felt need to downplay real accomplishment, deflect credit reflexively, and treat visible success as something to apologize for rather than claim.
A different phenomenon, a plausible overlap
I want to be careful here about what is actually established and what is my own connecting of two separate literatures, because they come from different traditions and haven’t, as far as I’ve found, been formally studied together. The impostor phenomenon was defined in 1978 by the psychologists Clance and Imes, describing high-achieving people who privately feel like frauds despite clear external evidence of competence, and who attribute their success to luck or timing rather than to anything real about themselves. That research grew out of clinical work with individuals, largely independent of any specific national culture.
The Jante literature, meanwhile, is cultural and sociological, describing a shared norm rather than an individual psychological pattern. Nobody that I’m aware of has run a study putting the two side by side and measuring whether Jante-shaped cultures produce impostor phenomenon at higher rates. What I can say is that the mechanisms line up suspiciously well: impostor phenomenon is sustained by a felt gap between how competent you appear and how competent you believe yourself to be, and a culture that actively discourages you from acknowledging your own competence out loud is a remarkably efficient way to keep that gap wide open, whether or not anyone designed it that way on purpose.
A quieter version of the same instinct
I recognize a cousin of this in my own cultural background more than I expected to when I started reading about Jante. Georgian culture didn’t hand down ten explicit rules, but there’s a comparable instinct against openly claiming your own accomplishments, a sense that naming your own success plainly reads as arrogance rather than honesty. I’ve caught myself, mid-sentence, downgrading something I actually did well into something that “just kind of happened,” and I don’t think that reflex is really about humility. It’s closer to preemptively managing how my success might be received, which is a subtly different thing dressed up to look the same.
The two instincts, Jante’s outward-facing restraint and impostor phenomenon’s inward-facing doubt, reinforce each other in a way that’s easy to miss from inside either one. If the culture around you keeps signaling that naming your own competence is a small social violation, you get very little outside practice at sitting with the plain fact of having done something well. Without that practice, the inward doubt has nothing pushing back against it. Think of them less as the same phenomenon wearing different names, and more like a lock paired with an environment that keeps forging the key that fits it.
None of this means the norm is without value. Cultures built around not thinking yourself better than anyone else tend to produce real, measurable social goods: trust, cohesion, a floor under how badly any one person can be treated relative to everyone else. I don’t think the fix is abandoning the norm. It’s noticing when the reflex to downplay your own work has quietly become the same feeling the psychologists were describing all along, and treating that feeling as information rather than as confirmation that you actually are the fraud you’re afraid of being. Skarsgård, for what it’s worth, kept the trophies — he just needed somewhere out of sight to put them. That’s the version worth aiming for: not silencing the discomfort, just refusing to let it talk you out of what you actually did.