Against Extroversion

There’s a common idea in pop psychology that people are either “extroverts” or “introverts”. This isn’t totally wrong but I don’t think the usual division is a good way to think about it, for two reasons.

The simpler and less important reason is that it’s actually more like a normal distribution, not a binary division. Most people are about average, and some are outliers in one direction or the other.

Okay sure you probably knew that. What’s more important is that the psychological propensity that gets described as “extroversion” is actually two different things, and they’re not related to each other very strongly.

The first thing is how much socializing you need. Some people suffer if they’re not around people constantly. They have to be out and about and meeting lots of friends or else they’re gonna have a hard time. Other people are pretty much fine as hermits. They can mostly live on their own, send a text to their mom every now and then, and see a friend every couple of weeks, and they’re fine. There are a decent number of couples where the husband and wife can be perfectly happy while seeing no one except each other for months on end.

The second thing is how much socializing takes out of you. Some people get drained by spending two hours at a low-key event with close friends. Some people can spend a week exchanging business cards at an industry conference or partying with strangers at Burning Man and keep going without pausing to rest.

(And again, of course both of these are more like bell curves than sharp binaries, and most people are somewhere in the middle.)

The usual model of extroversion claims that these are two facets of the same thing, and will mostly go along with each other. But in my experience that’s not true at all, and they seem mostly unrelated. There are people who are outliers on one of these, but pretty much normal on the other. There are (fewer) people who are outliers on both of these, and all four of those combinations seem about equally common.

People are all over the map but cluster towards the center. Personally I’m maybe +0.5 standard deviations on “socializing need”, and I used to be about +1 or 1.5 standard deviations on “socializing cost” when I was a young awkward nerd, but now that I’m an older nerd with better interpersonal skills I’m roughly median. You can add more complexity to this if you want to—most obviously, “socializing need” is not one thing, and different people get very different things out of “socializing”—but I find that this two-factor model gets at the heart of what people care about, here, without being too unwieldy.