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.
I used to think of myself as an “introvert.” The more I allowed myself to use my own judgment of my situation and reason independently about others, the more it became clear that I experience (with some justification) most people as some combination of dangerously hostile and committed to derailing any really interesting interaction. The clearer and more accurate I make that judgment, the less costly it is to interact with people who deserve much more trust than average.
The latent need for beneficial interaction stays about the same as the perceived *availability* of it (and associated risk of trying for it) varies.
Yep.
I'm an outliner in social need (I'm happy spending weeks never talking to another human) but relatively affable and sociable, sometimes being "the life of the party" when I have reason to be at an event (even though I mostly don't go to parties or events).
Accordingly, my scores on extroversion swing by ~50 points between different instances of taking a big-five test, for more or less this reason.
(And because they ask questions like "you make friends easily, agree or disagree", to which I would literally answer "of course not, true friendships are rare and precious, and most people I meet are not remotely worthy of my friendship", but which I think I'm supposed reply "yes, people do like me, and it doesn't take long before we're friendly with each other and they're enjoying my company".)