by Susan Cain
MORE ADVANCE NOISE FOR QUIET
“An intriguing and potentially life-altering examination of the human psyche that is sure to benefit both introverts and extroverts alike.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Gentle is powerful … Solitude is socially productive … These important counterintuitive ideas are among the many reasons to take Quiet to a quiet corner and absorb its brilliant, thought-provoking message.”
—ROSABETH MOSS KANTER, professor at Harvard Business School, author of Confidence and SuperCorp
“An informative, well-researched book on the power of quietness and the virtues of having a rich inner life. It dispels the myth that you have to be extroverted to be happy and successful.”
—JUDITH ORLOFF, M.D., author of Emotional Freedom
“In this engaging and beautifully written book, Susan Cain makes a powerful case for the wisdom of introspection. She also warns us ably about the downside to our culture’s noisiness, including all that it risks drowning out. Above the din, Susan’s own voice remains a compelling presence—thoughtful, generous, calm, and eloquent. Quiet deserves a very large readership.”
—CHRISTOPHER LANE, author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness
“Susan Cain’s quest to understand introversion, a beautifully wrought journey from the lab bench to the motivational speaker’s hall, offers convincing evidence for valuing substance over style, steak over sizzle, and qualities that are, in America, often derided. This book is brilliant, profound, full of feeling and brimming with insights.”
—SHERI FINK, M.D., author of War Hospital
“Brilliant, illuminating, empowering! Quiet gives not only a voice, but a path to homecoming for so many who’ve walked through the better part of their lives thinking the way they engage with the world is something in need of fixing.”
—JONATHAN FIELDS, author of Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance
“Once in a blue moon, a book comes along that gives us startling new insights. Quiet is that book: it’s part page-turner, part cutting-edge science. The implications for business are especially valuable: Quiet offers tips on how introverts can lead effectively, give winning speeches, avoid burnout, and choose the right roles. This charming, gracefully written, thoroughly researched book is simply masterful.”
—ADAM M. GRANT, PH.D., associate professor of management, the Wharton School of Business
STILL MORE ADVANCE NOISE FOR QUIET
“Shatters misconceptions … Cain consistently holds the reader’s interest by presenting individual profiles … and reporting on the latest studies. Her diligence, research, and passion for this important topic has richly paid off.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Quiet elevates the conversation about introverts in our outwardly oriented society to new heights. I think that many introverts will discover that, even though they didn’t know it, they have been waiting for this book all their lives.”
—ADAM S. MCHUGH, author of Introverts in the Church
“Susan Cain’s Quiet is wonderfully informative about the culture of the extravert ideal and the psychology of a sensitive temperament, and she is helpfully perceptive about how introverts can make the most of their personality preferences in all aspects of life. Society needs introverts, so everyone can benefit from the insights in this important book.”
—JONATHAN M. CHEEK, professor of psychology at Wellesley College, co-editor of Shyness: Perspectives on Research and Treatment
“A brilliant, important, and personally affecting book. Cain shows that, for all its virtue, America’s Extrovert Ideal takes up way too much oxygen. Cain herself is the perfect person to make this case—with winning grace and clarity she shows us what it looks like to think outside the group.”
—CHRISTINE KENNEALLY, author of The First Word
“What Susan Cain understands—and readers of this fascinating volume will soon appreciate—is something that psychology and our fast-moving and fast-talking society have been all too slow to realize: Not only is there really nothing wrong with being quiet, reflective, shy, and introverted, but there are distinct advantages to being this way.
—JAY BELSKY, Robert M. and Natalie Reid Dorn Professor, Human and Community Development, University of California, Davis
“Author Susan Cain exemplifies her own quiet power in this exquisitely written and highly readable page-turner. She brings important research and the introvert experience.”
—JENNIFER B. KAHNWEILER, PH.D., author of The Introverted Leader
“Several aspects of Quiet are remarkable. First, it is well informed by the research literature but not held captive by it. Second, it is exceptionally well written, and ‘reader friendly.’ Third, it is insightful. I am sure many people wonder why brash, impulsive behavior seems to be rewarded, whereas reflective, thoughtful behavior is overlooked. This book goes beyond such superficial impressions to a more penetrating analysis.”
—WILLIAM GRAZIANO, professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University
Copyright © 2012 by Susan Cain
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The BIS/BAS Scales on this page–this page copyright © 1994 by the American Psychological Association. Adapted with permission. From “Behavioral Inhibition, Behavioral Activation, and Affective Responses to Impending Reward and Punishment: The BIS/BAS Scales.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67(2): 319–33. The use of APA information does not imply endorsement by APA.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cain, Susan.
Quiet : the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking / Susan Cain.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Introverts. 2. Introversion. 3. Extroversion. 4. Interpersonal relations. I. Title.
BF698.35.I59C35 2012
155.2′32—dc22
2010053204
eISBN: 978-0-307-45220-7
Jacket design by Laura Duffy
Jacket photography by Joe Ginsberg/Getty Images
v3.1
To my childhood family
A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy’s feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight.… Indeed the presence of outstanding strengths presupposes that energy needed in other areas has been channeled away from them.
—ALLEN SHAWN
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
INTRODUCTION: The North and South of Temperament
PART ONE: THE EXTROVERT IDEAL
1. THE RISE OF THE “MIGHTY LIKEABLE FELLOW”: How Extroversion Became the Cultural Ideal
2. THE MYTH OF CHARISMATIC LEADERSHIP: The Culture of Personality, a Hundred Years Later
3. WHEN COLLABORATION KILLS CREATIVITY: The Rise of the New Groupthink and the Power of Working Alone
/> PART TWO: YOUR BIOLOGY, YOUR SELF?
4. IS TEMPERAMENT DESTINY?: Nature, Nurture, and the Orchid Hypothesis
5. BEYOND TEMPERAMENT: The Role of Free Will (and the Secret of Public Speaking for Introverts)
6. “FRANKLIN WAS A POLITICIAN, BUT ELEANOR SPOKE OUT OF CONSCIENCE”: Why Cool Is Overrated
7. WHY DID WALL STREET CRASH AND WARREN BUFFETT PROSPER?: How Introverts and Extroverts Think (and Process Dopamine) Differently
PART THREE: DO ALL CULTURES HAVE AN EXTROVERT IDEAL?
8. SOFT POWER: Asian-Americans and the Extrovert Ideal
PART FOUR: HOW TO LOVE, HOW TO WORK
9. WHEN SHOULD YOU ACT MORE EXTROVERTED THAN YOU REALLY ARE?
10. THE COMMUNICATION GAP: How to Talk to Members of the Opposite Type
11. ON COBBLERS AND GENERALS: How to Cultivate Quiet Kids in a World That Can’t Hear Them
CONCLUSION: Wonderland
A Note on the Dedication
A Note on the Words Introvert and Extrovert
Acknowledgments
Notes
Author’s Note
I have been working on this book officially since 2005, and unofficially for my entire adult life. I have spoken and written to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people about the topics covered inside, and have read as many books, scholarly papers, magazine articles, chat-room discussions, and blog posts. Some of these I mention in the book; others informed almost every sentence I wrote. Quiet stands on many shoulders, especially the scholars and researchers whose work taught me so much. In a perfect world, I would have named every one of my sources, mentors, and interviewees. But for the sake of readability, some names appear only in the Notes or Acknowledgments.
For similar reasons, I did not use ellipses or brackets in certain quotations but made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the speaker’s or writer’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original, the citations directing you to the full quotations appear in the Notes.
I’ve changed the names and identifying details of some of the people whose stories I tell, and in the stories of my own work as a lawyer and consultant. To protect the privacy of the participants in Charles di Cagno’s public speaking workshop, who did not plan to be included in a book when they signed up for the class, the story of my first evening in class is a composite based on several sessions; so is the story of Greg and Emily, which is based on many interviews with similar couples. Subject to the limitations of memory, all other stories are recounted as they happened or were told to me. I did not fact-check the stories people told me about themselves, but only included those I believed to be true.
INTRODUCTION
The North and South of Temperament
Montgomery, Alabama. December 1, 1955. Early evening. A public bus pulls to a stop and a sensibly dressed woman in her forties gets on. She carries herself erectly, despite having spent the day bent over an ironing board in a dingy basement tailor shop at the Montgomery Fair department store. Her feet are swollen, her shoulders ache. She sits in the first row of the Colored section and watches quietly as the bus fills with riders. Until the driver orders her to give her seat to a white passenger.
The woman utters a single word that ignites one of the most important civil rights protests of the twentieth century, one word that helps America find its better self.
The word is “No.”
The driver threatens to have her arrested.
“You may do that,” says Rosa Parks.
A police officer arrives. He asks Parks why she won’t move.
“Why do you all push us around?” she answers simply.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But the law is the law, and you’re under arrest.”
On the afternoon of her trial and conviction for disorderly conduct, the Montgomery Improvement Association holds a rally for Parks at the Holt Street Baptist Church, in the poorest section of town. Five thousand gather to support Parks’s lonely act of courage. They squeeze inside the church until its pews can hold no more. The rest wait patiently outside, listening through loudspeakers. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the crowd. “There comes a time that people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” he tells them. “There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an Alpine November.”
He praises Parks’s bravery and hugs her. She stands silently, her mere presence enough to galvanize the crowd. The association launches a city-wide bus boycott that lasts 381 days. The people trudge miles to work. They carpool with strangers. They change the course of American history.
I had always imagined Rosa Parks as a stately woman with a bold temperament, someone who could easily stand up to a busload of glowering passengers. But when she died in 2005 at the age of ninety-two, the flood of obituaries recalled her as soft-spoken, sweet, and small in stature. They said she was “timid and shy” but had “the courage of a lion.” They were full of phrases like “radical humility” and “quiet fortitude.” What does it mean to be quiet and have fortitude? these descriptions asked implicitly. How could you be shy and courageous?
Parks herself seemed aware of this paradox, calling her autobiography Quiet Strength—a title that challenges us to question our assumptions. Why shouldn’t quiet be strong? And what else can quiet do that we don’t give it credit for?
Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race. And the single most important aspect of personality—the “north and south of temperament,” as one scientist puts it—is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum. Our place on this continuum influences our choice of friends and mates, and how we make conversation, resolve differences, and show love. It affects the careers we choose and whether or not we succeed at them. It governs how likely we are to exercise, commit adultery, function well without sleep, learn from our mistakes, place big bets in the stock market, delay gratification, be a good leader, and ask “what if.”* It’s reflected in our brain pathways, neurotransmitters, and remote corners of our nervous systems. Today introversion and extroversion are two of the most exhaustively researched subjects in personality psychology, arousing the curiosity of hundreds of scientists.
These researchers have made exciting discoveries aided by the latest technology, but they’re part of a long and storied tradition. Poets and philosophers have been thinking about introverts and extroverts since the dawn of recorded time. Both personality types appear in the Bible and in the writings of Greek and Roman physicians, and some evolutionary psychologists say that the history of these types reaches back even farther than that: the animal kingdom also boasts “introverts” and “extroverts,” as we’ll see, from fruit flies to pumpkinseed fish to rhesus monkeys. As with other complementary pairings—masculinity and femininity, East and West, liberal and conservative—humanity would be unrecognizable, and vastly diminished, without both personality styles.
Take the partnership of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.: a formidable orator refusing to give up his seat on a segregated bus wouldn’t have had the same effect as a modest woman who’d clearly prefer to keep silent but for the exigencies of the situation. And Parks didn’t have the stuff to thrill a crowd if she’d tried to stand up and announce that she had a dream. But with King’s help, she didn’t have to.
Yet today we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We’re told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable. We see ourselves as a nation of extroverts—which means that we’ve lost sight of who we really are. Depending on which study you consult, one third to one half of Americans are introverts—in other words, one out of every two or three people you know. (Given that the United States is among the most extroverted of nations, the number must be at least as high in other parts of the world.) If you’re not an introvert yourself, you are surely raising, managing, married to, or coupled
with one.
If these statistics surprise you, that’s probably because so many people pretend to be extroverts. Closet introverts pass undetected on playgrounds, in high school locker rooms, and in the corridors of corporate America. Some fool even themselves, until some life event—a layoff, an empty nest, an inheritance that frees them to spend time as they like—jolts them into taking stock of their true natures. You have only to raise the subject of this book with your friends and acquaintances to find that the most unlikely people consider themselves introverts.
It makes sense that so many introverts hide even from themselves. We live with a value system that I call the Extrovert Ideal—the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight. The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favors quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in groups. We like to think that we value individuality, but all too often we admire one type of individual—the kind who’s comfortable “putting himself out there.” Sure, we allow technologically gifted loners who launch companies in garages to have any personality they please, but they are the exceptions, not the rule, and our tolerance extends mainly to those who get fabulously wealthy or hold the promise of doing so.
Introversion—along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.
The Extrovert Ideal has been documented in many studies, though this research has never been grouped under a single name. Talkative people, for example, are rated as smarter, better-looking, more interesting, and more desirable as friends. Velocity of speech counts as well as volume: we rank fast talkers as more competent and likable than slow ones. The same dynamics apply in groups, where research shows that the voluble are considered smarter than the reticent—even though there’s zero correlation between the gift of gab and good ideas. Even the word introvert is stigmatized—one informal study, by psychologist Laurie Helgoe, found that introverts described their own physical appearance in vivid language (“green-blue eyes,” “exotic,” “high cheekbones”), but when asked to describe generic introverts they drew a bland and distasteful picture (“ungainly,” “neutral colors,” “skin problems”).