Quiet

by Susan Cain

  The explanation for this stark difference has to do with how the two cultures define respect. As we saw in chapter 8, many Asian people show esteem by minimizing conflict. But Israelis, say the researchers, “are not likely to view [disagreement] as a sign of disrespect, but as a signal that the opposing party is concerned and is passionately engaged in the task.”

  We might say the same of Greg and Emily. When Emily lowers her voice and flattens her affect during fights with Greg, she thinks she’s being respectful by taking the trouble not to let her negative emotions show. But Greg thinks she’s checking out or, worse, that she doesn’t give a damn. Similarly, when Greg lets his anger fly, he assumes that Emily feels, as he does, that this is a healthy and honest expression of their deeply committed relationship. But to Emily, it’s as if Greg has suddenly turned on her.

  In her book Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, Carol Tavris recounts a story about a Bengali cobra that liked to bite passing villagers. One day a swami—a man who has achieved self-mastery—convinces the snake that biting is wrong. The cobra vows to stop immediately, and does. Before long, the village boys grow unafraid of the snake and start to abuse him. Battered and bloodied, the snake complains to the swami that this is what came of keeping his promise.

  “I told you not to bite,” said the swami, “but I did not tell you not to hiss.”

  “Many people, like the swami’s cobra, confuse the hiss with the bite,” writes Tavris.

  Many people—like Greg and Emily. Both have much to learn from the swami’s story: Greg to stop biting, Emily that it’s OK for him—and for her—to hiss.

  Greg can start by changing his assumptions about anger. He believes, as most of us do, that venting anger lets off steam. The “catharsis hypothesis”—that aggression builds up inside us until it’s healthily released—dates back to the Greeks, was revived by Freud, and gained steam during the “let it all hang out” 1960s of punching bags and primal screams. But the catharsis hypothesis is a myth—a plausible one, an elegant one, but a myth nonetheless. Scores of studies have shown that venting doesn’t soothe anger; it fuels it.

  We’re best off when we don’t allow ourselves to go to our angry place. Amazingly, neuroscientists have even found that people who use Botox, which prevents them from making angry faces, seem to be less anger-prone than those who don’t, because the very act of frowning triggers the amygdala to process negative emotions. And anger is not just damaging in the moment; for days afterward, venters have repair work to do with their partners. Despite the popular fantasy of fabulous sex after fighting, many couples say that it takes time to feel loving again.

  What can Greg do to calm down when he feels his fury mounting? He can take a deep breath. He can take a ten-minute break. And he can ask himself whether the thing that’s making him so angry is really that important. If not, he might let it go. But if it is, then he’ll want to phrase his needs not as personal attacks but as neutral discussion items. “You’re so antisocial!” can become “Can we figure out a way to organize our weekends that works for us both?”

  This advice would hold even if Emily weren’t a sensitive introvert (no one likes to feel dominated or disrespected), but it so happens that Greg’s married to a woman who is especially put off by anger. So he needs to respond to the conflict-avoidant wife he has, not the confrontational one that he wishes, at least in the heat of the moment, he were married to.

  Now let’s look at Emily’s side of the equation. What could she be doing differently? She’s right to protest when Greg bites—when he attacks unfairly—but what about when he hisses? Emily might address her own counterproductive reactions to anger, among them her tendency to slip into a cycle of guilt and defensiveness. We know from chapter 6 that many introverts are prone from earliest childhood to strong guilt feelings; we also know that we all tend to project our own reactions onto others. Because conflict-avoidant Emily would never “bite” or even hiss unless Greg had done something truly horrible, on some level she processes his bite to mean that she’s terribly guilty—of something, anything, who knows what? Emily’s guilt feels so intolerable that she tends to deny the validity of all of Greg’s claims—the legitimate ones along with those exaggerated by anger. This, of course, leads to a vicious cycle in which she shuts down her natural empathy and Greg feels unheard.

  So Emily needs to accept that it’s OK to be in the wrong. At first she may have trouble puzzling out when she is and when she isn’t; the fact that Greg expresses his grievances with such passion makes it hard to sort this out. But Emily must try not to get dragged into this morass. When Greg makes legitimate points, she should acknowledge them, not only to be a good partner to her husband, but also to teach herself that it’s OK to have transgressed. This will make it easier for her not to feel hurt—and to fight back—when Greg’s claims are unjustified.

  Fight back? But Emily hates fighting.

  That’s OK. She needs to become more comfortable with the sound of her own hiss. Introverts may be hesitant to cause disharmony, but, like the passive snake, they should be equally worried about encouraging vitriol from their partners. And fighting back may not invite retaliation, as Emily fears; instead it may encourage Greg to back off. She need not put on a huge display. Often, a firm “that’s not OK with me” will do.

  Every once in a while, Emily might also want to step outside her usual comfort zone and let her own anger fly. Remember, for Greg, heat means connection. In the same way that the extroverted players in the football game study felt warmly toward their fellow competitors, so Greg may feel closer to Emily if she can take on just a little of the coloration of a pumped-up player, ready to take the field.

  Emily can also overcome her own distaste for Greg’s behavior by reminding herself that he’s not really as aggressive as he seems. John, an introvert I interviewed who has a great relationship with his fiery wife, describes how he learned to do this after twenty-five years of marriage:

  When Jennifer’s after me about something, she’s really after me. If I went to bed without tidying the kitchen, the next morning she’ll shout at me, “This kitchen is filthy!” I come in and look around the kitchen. There are three or four cups out; it’s not filthy. But the drama with which she imbues such moments is natural to her. That’s her way of saying, Gee, when you get a chance I’d appreciate it if you could just tidy up the kitchen a little more. If she did say it that way to me, I would say, I’d be happy to, and I’m sorry that I didn’t do it sooner. But because she comes at me with that two-hundred-mile-per-hour freight-train energy, I want to bridle and say, Too bad. The reason I don’t is because we’ve been married for twenty-five years, and I’ve come to understand that Jennifer didn’t put me in a life-threatening situation when she spoke that way.

  So what’s John’s secret for relating to his forceful wife? He lets her know that her words were unacceptable, but he also tries to listen to their meaning. “I try to tap into my empathy,” he says. “I take her tone out of the equation. I take out the assault on my senses, and I try to get to what she’s trying to say.”

  And what Jennifer is trying to say, underneath her freight-train words, is often quite simple: Respect me. Pay attention to me. Love me.

  Greg and Emily now have valuable insights about how to talk through their differences. But there’s one more question they need to answer: Why exactly do they experience those Friday-night dinner parties so differently? We know that Emily’s nervous system probably goes into overdrive when she enters a room full of people. And we know that Greg feels the opposite: propelled toward people, conversations, events, anything that gives him that dopamine-fueled, go-for-it sensation that extroverts crave. But let’s dig a little deeper into the anatomy of cocktail-hour chatter. The key to bridging Greg and Emily’s differences lies in the details.

  Some years ago, thirty-two pairs of introverts and extroverts, all of them strangers to each other, chatted on the phone for a few minutes as part of an experiment conducted by a neuroscientist
named Dr. Matthew Lieberman, then a graduate student at Harvard. When they hung up, they were asked to fill out detailed questionnaires, rating how they’d felt and behaved during the conversation. How much did you like your conversational partner? How friendly were you? How much would you like to interact with this person again? They were also asked to put themselves in the shoes of their conversational partners: How much did your partner like you? How sensitive was she to you? How encouraging?

  Lieberman and his team compared the answers and also listened in on the conversations and made their own judgments about how the parties felt about each other. They found that the extroverts were a lot more accurate than the introverts in assessing whether their partner liked talking to them. These findings suggest that extroverts are better at decoding social cues than introverts. At first, this seems unsurprising, writes Lieberman; it echoes the popular assumption that extroverts are better at reading social situations. The only problem, as Lieberman showed through a further twist to his experiment, is that this assumption is not quite right.

  Lieberman and his team asked a select group of participants to listen to a tape of the conversations they’d just had—before filling out the questionnaire. In this group, he found, there was no difference between introverts and extroverts in their ability to read social cues. Why?

  The answer is that the subjects who listened to the tape recording were able to decode social cues without having to do anything else at the same time. And introverts are pretty fine decoders, according to several studies predating the Lieberman experiments. One of these studies actually found that introverts were better decoders than extroverts.

  But these studies measured how well introverts observe social dynamics, not how well they participate in them. Participation places a very different set of demands on the brain than observing does. It requires a kind of mental multitasking: the ability to process a lot of short-term information at once without becoming distracted or overly stressed. This is just the sort of brain functioning that extroverts tend to be well suited for. In other words, extroverts are sociable because their brains are good at handling competing demands on their attention—which is just what dinner-party conversation involves. In contrast, introverts often feel repelled by social events that force them to attend to many people at once.

  Consider that the simplest social interaction between two people requires performing an astonishing array of tasks: interpreting what the other person is saying; reading body language and facial expressions; smoothly taking turns talking and listening; responding to what the other person said; assessing whether you’re being understood; determining whether you’re well received, and, if not, figuring out how to improve or remove yourself from the situation. Think of what it takes to juggle all this at once! And that’s just a one-on-one conversation. Now imagine the multitasking required in a group setting like a dinner party.

  So when introverts assume the observer role, as when they write novels, or contemplate unified field theory—or fall quiet at dinner parties—they’re not demonstrating a failure of will or a lack of energy. They’re simply doing what they’re constitutionally suited for.

  The Lieberman experiment helps us understand what trips up introverts socially. It doesn’t show us how they can shine.

  Consider the case of an unassuming-looking fellow named Jon Berghoff. Jon is a stereotypical introvert, right down to his physical appearance: lean, wiry body; sharply etched nose and cheekbones; thoughtful expression on his bespectacled face. He’s not much of a talker, but what he says is carefully considered, especially when he’s in a group: “If I’m in a room with ten people and I have a choice between talking and not talking,” he says, “I’m the one not talking. When people ask, ‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’ I’m the guy they’re saying it to.”

  Jon is also a standout salesman, and has been ever since he was a teenager. In the summer of 1999, when he was still a junior in high school, he started working as an entry-level distributor, selling Cutco kitchen products. The job had him going into customers’ homes, selling knives. It was one of the most intimate sales situations imaginable, not in a boardroom or a car dealership, but inside a potential client’s kitchen, selling them a product they’d use daily to help put food on the table.

  Within Jon’s first eight weeks on the job, he sold $50,000 worth of knives. He went on to be the company’s top representative from over 40,000 new recruits that year. By the year 2000, when he was still a high school senior, Jon had generated more than $135,000 in commissions and had broken more than twenty-five national and regional sales records. Meanwhile, back in high school, he was still a socially awkward guy who hid inside the library at lunchtime. But by 2002 he’d recruited, hired, and trained ninety other sales reps, and increased territory sales 500 percent over the previous year. Since then, Jon has launched Global Empowerment Coaching, his own personal coaching and sales training business. To date he’s given hundreds of speeches, training seminars, and private consultations to more than 30,000 salespeople and managers.

  What’s the secret of Jon’s success? One important clue comes from an experiment by the developmental psychologist Avril Thorne, now a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Thorne gathered fifty-two young women—twenty-six introverts and twenty-six extroverts—and assigned them to two different conversational pairings. Each person had one ten-minute conversation with a partner of her own type and a second conversation of equal length with her “dispositional opposite.” Thorne’s team taped the conversations and asked the participants to listen to a playback tape.

  This process revealed some surprising findings. The introverts and extroverts participated about equally, giving the lie to the idea that introverts always talk less. But the introvert pairs tended to focus on one or two serious subjects of conversation, while the extrovert pairs chose lighter-hearted and wider-ranging topics. Often the introverts discussed problems or conflicts in their lives: school, work, friendships, and so on. Perhaps because of this fondness for “problem talk,” they tended to adopt the role of adviser, taking turns counseling each other on the problem at hand. The extroverts, by contrast, were more likely to offer casual information about themselves that established commonality with the other person: You have a new dog? That’s great. A friend of mine has an amazing tank of saltwater fish!

  But the most interesting part of Thorne’s experiment was how much the two types appreciated each other. Introverts talking to extroverts chose cheerier topics, reported making conversation more easily, and described conversing with extroverts as a “breath of fresh air.” In contrast, the extroverts felt that they could relax more with introvert partners and were freer to confide their problems. They didn’t feel pressure to be falsely upbeat.

  These are useful pieces of social information. Introverts and extroverts sometimes feel mutually put off, but Thorne’s research suggests how much each has to offer the other. Extroverts need to know that introverts—who often seem to disdain the superficial—may be only too happy to be tugged along to a more lighthearted place; and introverts, who sometimes feel as if their propensity for problem talk makes them a drag, should know that they make it safe for others to get serious.

  Thorne’s research also helps us to understand Jon Berghoff’s astonishing success at sales. He has turned his affinity for serious conversation, and for adopting an advisory role rather than a persuasive one, into a kind of therapy for his prospects. “I discovered early on that people don’t buy from me because they understand what I’m selling,” explains Jon. “They buy because they feel understood.”

  Jon also benefits from his natural tendency to ask a lot of questions and to listen closely to the answers. “I got to the point where I could walk into someone’s house and instead of trying to sell them some knives, I’d ask a hundred questions in a row. I could manage the entire conversation just by asking the right questions.” Today, in his coaching business, Jon does the same thing. “I try to tune in to the
radio station of the person I’m working with. I pay attention to the energy they exude. It’s easy for me to do that because I’m in my head a lot, anyways.”

  But doesn’t salesmanship require the ability to get excited, to pump people up? Not according to Jon. “A lot of people believe that selling requires being a fast talker, or knowing how to use charisma to persuade. Those things do require an extroverted way of communicating. But in sales there’s a truism that ‘we have two ears and one mouth and we should use them proportionately.’ I believe that’s what makes someone really good at selling or consulting—the number-one thing is they’ve got to really listen well. When I look at the top salespeople in my organization, none of those extroverted qualities are the key to their success.”

  And now back to Greg and Emily’s impasse. We’ve just acquired two crucial pieces of information: first, Emily’s distaste for conversational multitasking is real and explicable; and second, when introverts are able to experience conversations in their own way, they make deep and enjoyable connections with others.

  It was only once they accepted these two realities that Greg and Emily found a way to break their stalemate. Instead of focusing on the number of dinner parties they’d give, they started talking about the format of the parties. Instead of seating everyone around a big table, which would require the kind of all-hands conversational multitasking Emily dislikes so much, why not serve dinner buffet style, with people eating in small, casual conversational groupings on the sofas and floor pillows? This would allow Greg to gravitate to his usual spot at the center of the room and Emily to hers on the outskirts, where she could have the kind of intimate, one-on-one conversations she enjoys.

  This issue solved, the couple was now free to address the thornier question of how many parties to give. After some back-and-forth, they agreed on two evenings a month—twenty-four dinners a year—instead of fifty-two. Emily still doesn’t look forward to these events. But she sometimes enjoys them in spite of herself. And Greg gets to host the evenings he enjoys so much, to hold on to his identity, and to be with the person he most adores—all at the same time.