I’ve been a ‘people person’ since before I could talk. But am I an extrovert? | Well actually

About 10 years ago, I took the Big Five personality test, known for being brutally honest. I had to laugh a little when I saw my scores: I ranked in the 91st percentile for neuroticism.

When I shared that ranking, my friend Alessandra immediately responded: “Hon, I love you, but that is not news.”

It wasn’t, but neither was my score in one other area: extroversion. There, I ranked in the 97th percentile. It brought me back to high school, when my pop-psychology-loving English teacher made our class take a Myers-Briggs personality inventory test. My results were inconclusive in three out of the four categories – but I was, unquestionably, an extrovert.

I’d been a “people person” since before I could talk. Once I did start to talk, I never stopped. Making friends and communicating have always been some of the truest joys of my life. But my outspokenness was a thin veneer covering layers of insecurity and anxiety. Sometimes, being with other people was the only distraction from the constant disquiet in my head.

It felt right to call myself an extrovert, although I didn’t always feel I fit others’ perception of one. I’ve always had to balance my anxious side with my outgoing side. People who saw me making jokes at a party or making friends on the first day of summer camp didn’t understand what was happening when I had a panic attack. People who teased me about my many, many fears and neuroses were surprised when I could easily give a speech in front of a crowd, or stay calm in an emergency.

Around the same time I took the Big Five test, introverts were having a pop culture moment. Susan Cain’s 2012 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, which several people have described to me as “life-changing”, was an instant bestseller.

In Quiet, Cain argues passionately that introverts are misunderstood and underappreciated, based both on her experience and that of many others. Cain backs up her anecdotes with lots of studies showing that an introverted temperament seems to be inborn, and that many children who are sensitive to stimuli grow up to be quietly powerful thinkers and artists. Introverts are, Cain writes, too often encouraged to change themselves to fit “the Extrovert Ideal”, which she describes as western society’s “omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight”.

Quiet helped introverts find their voices – and many were saying that they didn’t like people like me. There were hundreds of articles about how annoying and rude extroverts were. It’s one of the biggest ironies of the social media age: one of the most hated groups of people is, well, people-people.

This, perhaps unsurprisingly, made me a little anxious. Did being an extrovert mean I was loud, obnoxious, pushy and just generally bad company by nature? That there was no way I could change? I’d embraced being an extrovert, but being disliked for who you are never feels good.

Cain may be right that Western society often favors extroverts. One 2019 study at the University of Toronto showed that extroverts have a “small, persistent advantage” in the workplace. Psychiatric literature also has a bias against introversion: there’s also a long history of using “introversion” as a criteria for various mental illnesses, especially personality disorders. Even in the more recent 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which suggests a new model to diagnose and treat personality disorders, “extroversion” is considered a mark of a healthy, standard personality.

“The archetypal extrovert,” says Cain, “prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt.”

That, I thought, did not describe me at all. I’m full of doubt, and love to contemplate. Risk-taking? I don’t even like roller coasters.

Critical reviews of the book, including one by a psychiatrist, Dr Ravi Chandra, say that Cain labels too many traits as “introversion”. I would have to agree that introverts do not have a monopoly on being sensitive, risk-averse or cerebral – I’ve seen those phrases on my own school progress reports, right next to “talks too much”.

Like many things in life, extroversion and introversion seem to be on a spectrum. What of “ambiverts”, those who fit into neither extreme? Recent research shows that many people, perhaps even more than half of the population, fall into this third category. Some researchers even think it’s ambiverts, not extroverts, who have the biggest advantage in our society.

So what does it even mean to be an extrovert or an introvert?

“It’s where you get your energy from.”

I’ve heard this particular definition from friends who were frustrated with the pop culture discourse about introversion and extroversion. It wasn’t about being quiet or being loud, they’d insist. Those were stereotypes. The bottom line was that introverts recharge by spending time with themselves. Extroverts recharge from spending time with others.

It made sense: a text from one of my siblings or a hug from an old friend does energize me. I traveled alone to Iceland for my 30th birthday, and while I loved exploring Reykjavik and the countryside by myself, I wished I had someone with me to talk to about what I’d seen and done.

But it has taken us a while to get to those definitions. Carl Jung, the influential early 20th century psychologist and psychiatrist, was the first to describe introversion and extroversion; however, his categories were quite different from our modern, mainstream ones.

In his book Psychological Types, Jung described introversion as “a movement of interest away from the object to the subject, and his own psychological practices”. “The subject” meant oneself. Extroversion, or as he spelled it, “extraversion”, was thus “a transfer of interest from subject to object”.

“The object” can mean other people, but also “situations [and] experiences”, says Anastacia Favela, a therapist with a master’s degree in Jungian studies from University of Essex. “He saw the extrovert as someone who approaches the outside world as it calls him to be … [while] the introvert listens to themself.”

According to this model, introverts were more likely to be independent, stubborn and nonconformist, while extroverts were more likely to be followers, concerned with the opinions of those around them.

Jung himself identified as an introvert, and spoke a bit condescendingly of the extroverted in Psychological Types: “Provided he is not too much of a busybody, too pushing, and too superficial, he can be a distinctly useful member of the community.” It seems the discourse about “annoying extroverts” is over a hundred years old.

Jung’s work laid the foundation for another famous model of personality. In Merve Emre’s book The Personality Brokers, she describes magazine columnist Katharine Cooks Briggs writing an article called Meet Yourself, a kind of proto-personality test based on Psychological Types, in 1926. Briggs would go on to create, with her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test.

The MBTI helped spread the terms “introversion” and “extroversion” to a wider audience. It is widely regarded as pseudoscientific, however – psychologists Randy Stein and Alexander B Swan have described it as “exist[ing] in a parallel universe to social and personality psychology”. While Jung enjoyed a correspondence with Briggs, he may not have agreed with the way she and her followers used his terms. Later in life, he complained in an interview about his life’s work, known as The Houston Films, that “people … catch a word and then everything is schematized to fit that word. There is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert … They are only terms to designate a certain penchant, a certain tendency.”

Jung and Briggs weren’t the last word on the topic. “In the early 20th century, some American and British psychologists rejected the methodologies of Freud and Jung in favor of more empirical approaches,” says MC Flux, a neuroscientist and psychologist from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

In the 1940s, the British American psychologist Raymond Cattell used statistical analysis to taxonomize 16 personality traits, one of which he labeled “extraversion”. A decade later, Hans Eysenck, a German British psychologist, concluded from brain wave studies that extroverts’ arousal levels were typically low, and thus needed to seek stimulation outside themselves, while introverts, who had high arousal levels, didn’t.

After Eysenck came the Five Factor Model of Personality, also known as the Big Five. The Big Five Personality Inventory test rates its takers on openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism – it’s the test that told me my levels of neuroticism were practically off the charts. Here, extraversion is associated with cheerfulness, high energy and spontaneity.

Cattell and Eysenck’s studies have been criticized for basing their data on personality surveys and questionnaires, which are notoriously unreliable. And while the Big Five model is still used in academia, it is controversial. Many experts have critiqued how it defines its criteria – especially extroversion. For instance, some studies using the Big Five apply the term “extroversion” when they mean “positivity”, which this study suggests could lead to mistaken assumptions that social people are less likely to be depressed or anxious.

In addition to these loose and changing definitions of introversion and extroversion, very few formative studies on personality take into consideration trauma, personal history or cultural differences – perhaps unsurprising for Cattell and Eysenck, both of whom worked with white supremacists and were supporters of eugenics. Nor did these studies take disability and neurodivergence into account. For instance, people with ADHD are more likely to need outside stimulation, regardless of whether they tend to be more outgoing or quiet.

So, it’s complicated. The contemporary explanation of “where you get your energy from” seems to be a slightly watered-down hybrid of Jung, and many US and British studies. There do seem to be certain traits that we can label “introversion” and “extraversion”. But these concepts are not as tightly defined as many think.

Maybe the introvert-extrovert binary isn’t as scientific as I once thought. Nearly everybody believes in something without solid proof, though, especially when it’s useful to them. For many it is clearly helpful to see themselves as an introvert. Being an extrovert, or at least a person with many extrovert qualities, did seem to benefit me in many ways. But did the label itself help?

“The thing about ‘introversion and extroversion’ is that it’s a model,” says Flux, who believes in statistician George Box’s adage: “All models are [false], some models are useful.” Perhaps the question is what we do with this model. For instance, how much would a contemporary therapist take being an introvert or extrovert into account?

The answer? Not that much.

“When a client tells me they are an ‘introvert’ or an ‘extrovert’,” says Alison Coffey, a licensed mental health counselor in Iowa. “I look at that as information about how they see themselves in the world, and also how they prefer others to see them.”

Identifying with labels such as these, she explains, can help us explain ourselves to others. However, she says: “I always get the sense that people … see themselves as awkward when they are really just being humans.”

I have known for years that my anxiety manifested in a very “extroverted” way. When I felt anxious, I didn’t withdraw. I directed my anxiety outward – dominating conversations, blurting things out, oversharing. Perhaps that’s why I am quick to describe myself as an “anxious extrovert”. Having a label allowed me to explain myself.

“Every one of us is born either an extravert or an introvert, and remains an extravert and introvert to the end of his days,” Katherine Briggs is quoted as saying, in The Personality Brokers. This is likely at least partly true: many studies on twins have shown a genetic link to temperament.

But there are also studies showing that traits can change over time, and that people can become more or less introverted in certain situations. For example, some say they have become more introverted since the pandemic. I became quieter, and even a bit shy, when I lived in New York: being in a loud, energetic city made me crave solitude, and nervous about speaking to strangers. When I moved back to Los Angeles, I found myself smiling at strangers again, happy to talk with anyone who wanted to talk to me.

When I began researching introversion and extroversion, I was describing myself as a “born extrovert”. Now I wonder if that’s true. And even if it is, how does that help me? Perhaps, if I want to label myself, it’s better to describe myself as “extroverted”, rather than “an extrovert”. It’s only one part of my character.

I also might be a little less anxious than I was 10 years ago. Last month, I re-took a Big Five Personality Quiz. My extroversion score hasn’t changed: I still rank in the high 90s. I was pleasantly surprised to see, though, that I am now only in the 71st percentile for neuroticism. Now that’s news.