Quiet

by Susan Cain

  The star system dominated Christianity long before the concept of movie stars even existed. The dominant evangelist of the First Great Awakening was a British showman named George Whitefield who drew standing-room-only crowds with his dramatic impersonations of biblical figures and unabashed weeping, shouting, and crying out. But where the First Great Awakening balanced drama with intellect and gave birth to universities like Princeton and Dartmouth, the Second Great Awakening was even more personality-driven; its leaders focused purely on drawing crowds. Believing, as many megachurch pastors do today, that too academic an approach would fail to pack tents, many evangelical leaders gave up on intellectual values altogether and embraced their roles as salesmen and entertainers. “My theology! I didn’t know I had any!” exclaimed the nineteenth-century evangelist D. L. Moody.

  This kind of oratory affected not only styles of worship, but also people’s ideas of who Jesus was. A 1925 advertising executive named Bruce Fairchild Barton published a book called The Man Nobody Knows. It presented Jesus as a superstar sales guy who “forged twelve men from the bottom ranks of business into an organization that conquered the world.” This Jesus was no lamb; this was “the world’s greatest business executive” and “The Founder of Modern Business.” The notion of Jesus as a role model for business leadership fell on extraordinarily receptive ears. The Man Nobody Knows became one of the best-selling nonfiction books of the twentieth century, according to Powell’s Books. See Adam S. McHugh, Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2009), 23–25. See also Neal Gabler, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 25–26.

  42. early Americans revered action: Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1962); see, for example, pp. 51 and 256–57.

  43. The 1828 presidential campaign: Neal Gabler, Life: The Movie, 28.

  44. John Quincy Adams, incidentally: Steven J. Rubenzer et al., “Assessing the U.S. Presidents Using the Revised NEO Personality Inventory,” Assessment 7, no. 4 (2000): 403–20.

  45. “Respect for individual human personality”: Harold Stearns, America and the Young Intellectual (New York: George H. Duran Co., 1921).

  46. “It is remarkable how much attention”: Henderson, “Media and the Rise of Celebrity Culture.”

  47. wandered lonely as a cloud: William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” 1802.

  48. repaired in solitude to Walden Pond: Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854.

  49. Americans who considered themselves shy: Bernardo Carducci and Philip G. Zimbardo, “Are You Shy?” Psychology Today, November 1, 1995.

  50. “Social anxiety disorder” … one in five of us: M. B. Stein, J. R. Walker, and D. R. Forde, “Setting Diagnostic Thresholds for Social Phobia: Considerations from a Community Survey of Social Anxiety,” American Journal of Psychiatry 151 (1994): 408–42.

  51. The most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (DSM-IV), 2000. See 300.23, “Social Phobia (Social Anxiety Disorder)”: “The diagnosis is appropriate only if the avoidance, fear, or anxious anticipation of encountering the social or performance situation interferes significantly with the person’s daily routine, occupational functioning, or social life, or if the person is markedly distressed about having the phobia.… In feared social or performance situations, individuals with Social Phobia experience concerns about embarrassment and are afraid that others will judge them to be anxious, weak, ‘crazy,’ or stupid. They may fear public speaking because of concern that others will notice their trembling hands or voice or they may experience extreme anxiety when conversing with others because of fear that they will appear inarticulate.… The fear or avoidance must interfere significantly with the person’s normal routine, occupational or academic functioning, or social activities or relationships, or the person must experience marked distress about having the phobia. For example, a person who is afraid of speaking in public would not receive a diagnosis of Social Phobia if this activity is not routinely encountered on the job or in the classroom and the person is not particularly distressed about it.”

  52. “It’s not enough … to be able to sit at your computer”: Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam, 2000), 32.

  53. a staple of airport bookshelves and business best-seller lists: See, for example, http://www.nationalpost.com/Business+Bestsellers/3927572/story.html.

  54. “all talking is selling and all selling involves talking”: Michael Erard, Um: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (New York: Pantheon, 2007), 156.

  55. more than 12,500 chapters in 113 countries: http://www.toastmasters.org/MainMenuCategories/WhatisToastmasters.aspx (accessed September 10, 2010).

  56. The promotional video: http://www.toastmasters.org/DVDclips.aspx (accessed July 29, 2010). Click on “Welcome to Toastmasters! The entire 15 minute story.”

  CHAPTER 2: THE MYTH OF CHARISMATIC LEADERSHIP

  1. President Clinton … 50 million other people: These names and statistics are according to Tony Robbins’s website and other promotional materials as of December 19, 2009.

  2. some $11 billion a year: Melanie Lindner, “What People Are Still Willing to Pay For,” Forbes, January 15, 2009. The $11 billion figure is for 2008 and is, according to Marketdata Enterprises, a research firm. This amount was forecast to grow by 6.2 percent annually through 2012.

  3. chairman of seven privately held companies: This figure is according to Robbins’s website.

  4. “hyperthymic” temperament: Hagop S. Akiskal, “The Evolutionary Significance of Affective Temperaments,” Medscape CME, published June 12, 2003, updated June 24, 2003.

  5. superhuman physical size: Steve Salerno made this point in his book Sham (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005), 75. He also made the later point about Robbins’s remark that he was once so poor that he kept his dishes in the bathtub.

  6. Founded in 1908 … “educating leaders who make a difference in the world”: Harvard Business School website, September 11, 2010.

  7. President George W. Bush … were HBS grads: Philip Delves Broughton, Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School (New York: Penguin, 2008), 2. See also www.reuters.com, Factbox: Jeffrey Skilling, June 24, 2010.

  8. will graduate into a business culture: Stanford Business School professor of applied psychology Thomas Harrell tracked Stanford MBAs who graduated between 1961 and 1965, and published a series of studies about them. He found that high earners and general managers tended to be outgoing and extroverted. See, e.g., Thomas W. Harrell and Bernard Alpert, “Attributes of Successful MBAs: A 20-Year Longitudinal Study,” Human Performance 2, no. 4 (1989): 301-322.

  9. “ ‘Here everyone knows that it’s important to be an extrovert’ ”: Reggie Garrison et al., “Managing Introversion and Extroversion in the Workplace,” Wharton Program for Working Professionals (WPWP) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Spring 2006).

  10. BOSS TO TED AND ALICE: Here I must apologize: I can’t recall the company that ran this ad, and haven’t been able to locate it.

  11. “DEPART FROM YOUR INHIBITIONS”: http://www.advertolog.com/amtrak/print-outdoor/depart-from-your-inhibitions-2110505/ (accessed September 11, 2010).

  12. a series of ads for the psychotropic drug Paxil: Christopher Lane, How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 127, 131.

  13. We perceive talkers as smarter: Delroy L. Paulhus and Kathy L. Morgan, “Perceptions of Intelligence in Leaderless Groups: The Dynamic Effects of Shyness and Acquaintance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72, no. 3 (1997): 581–91. See also Cameron Anderson and Gavin Kilduff, “Why Do Dominant Personalities Attain Influence in Face-to-Face Groups? The Competence Signaling Effects of Trait Dominance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96, no. 2 (2009): 49
1–503.

  14. two strangers met over the phone: William B. Swann Jr. and Peter J. Rentfrow, “Blirtatiousness: Cognitive, Behavioral, and Physiological Consequences of Rapid Responding,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 6 (2001): 1160–75.

  15. We also see talkers as leaders: Simon Taggar et al., “Leadership Emergence in Autonomous Work Teams: Antecedents and Outcomes,” Personnel Psychology 52, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 899–926. (“The person that speaks most is likely to be perceived as the leader.”)

  16. The more a person talks, the more other group members: James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 2005), 187.

  17. It also helps to speak fast: Howard Giles and Richard L. Street Jr., “Communicator Characteristics and Behavior,” in M. L. Knapp and G. R. Miller, eds., Handbook of Interpersonal Communication, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 103–61.

  18. college students were asked to solve math problems: Cameron Anderson and Gavin Kilduff, “Why Do Dominant Personalities Attain Influence in Face-to-Face Groups? The Competence-Signaling Effects of Trait Dominance.”

  19. A well-known study out of UC Berkeley: Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

  20. “the Bus to Abilene”: Kathrin Day Lassila, “A Brief History of Groupthink: Why Two, Three or Many Heads Aren’t Always Better Than One,” Yale Alumni Magazine, January/February 2008.

  21. Schwab … Tohmatsu: Del Jones, “Not All Successful CEOs Are Extroverts,” USA Today, June 7, 2006.

  22. “some locked themselves into their office”: Peter F. Drucker, The Leader of the Future 2: New Visions, Strategies, and Practices for the Next Era, edited by Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, and Richard Beckhard (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006), xi–xii.

  23. those considered charismatic by their top executives: Bradley Agle et al., “Does CEO Charisma Matter? An Empirical Analysis of the Relationships Among Organizational Performance, Environmental Uncertainty, and Top Management Team Perceptions of CEO Charisma,” Academy of Management Journal 49, no. 1 (2006): 161–74. See also Del Jones, “Not All Successful CEOs Are Extroverts.” For an excellent book on this topic, see Rakesh Khurana, Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

  24. the influential management theorist Jim Collins: Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap—and Others Don’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). Note that some have questioned whether the companies Collins profiled are as “great” as he claimed. See Bruce Niendorf and Kristine Beck, “Good to Great, or Just Good?” Academy of Management Perspectives 22, no. 4 (2008): 13–20. See also Bruce Resnick and Timothy Smunt, “Good to Great to …?” Academy of Management Perspectives 22, no. 4 (2008): 6–12.

  25. correlation between extroversion and leadership: Timothy Judge et al., “Personality and Leadership: A Qualitative and Quantitative Review,” Journal of Applied Psychology 87, no. 4 (2002): 765–80. See also David Brooks, “In Praise of Dullness,” New York Times, May 18, 2009, citing Steven Kaplan et al., “Which CEO Characteristics and Abilities Matter?” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 14195, July 2008, a study finding that CEO success is more strongly related to “execution skills” than to “team-related skills.” Brooks also cited another study by Murray Barrick, Michael Mount, and Timothy Judge, surveying a century’s worth of research into business leadership and finding that extroversion did not correlate well with CEO success, but that conscientiousness did.

  26. In the first study … fold more shirts: Adam M. Grant et al., “Reversing 57 the Extraverted Leadership Advantage: The Role of Employee Proactivity,” Academy of Management Journal 54, no. 3 (June 2011).

  27. “Often the leaders end up doing a lot of the talking”: Carmen Nobel, “Introverts: The Best Leaders for Proactive Employees,” Harvard Business School Working Knowledge: A First Look at Faculty Research, October 4, 2010.

  28. For years before the day in December 1955: I drew largely on Douglas Brinkley’s excellent biography, Rosa Parks: A Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2000). Note: Unlike King, Parks did come to believe that violence was sometimes a justifiable weapon of the oppressed.

  29. Moses, for example, was not: My analysis of Moses is based on my own reading of Exodus, especially 3:11, 4:1, 4:3, 4:10, 4:12–17, 6:12, 6:30, and Numbers 12:3. Others have made similar analyses; see, for example, http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/showthread.php?t=50284. See also Doug Ward, “The Meanings of Moses’ Meekness,” http://godward.org/Hebrew%20Roots/meanings_of_moses.htm. Also see Marissa Brostoff, “Rabbis Focus on Professional Development,” http://www.forward.com/articles/13971/ (accessed August 13, 2008).

  30. a “classic Connector” named Robert Horchow: Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (New York: Back Bay Books, 2002; originally published by Little, Brown, March 2000), 42–46.

  31. As of May 28, 2011: Craigslist fact sheet, available on its website, www.craigslist.com (accessed May 28, 2010). Other information about Craigslist comes from (1) phone interview between Craig Newmark and the author, December 4, 2006, (2) Idelle Davidson, “The Craigslist Phenomenon,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2004, and (3) Philip Weiss, “A Guy Named Craig,” New York magazine, January 8, 2006.

  32. “Guy Kawasaki an introvert?”: Maria Niles, post on Blogher, a blogging community for women, August 19, 2008. See http://www.blogher.com/social-media-introverts.

  33. “Wouldn’t it be a great irony”: Pete Cashmore, “Irony Alert: Social Media Introverts?” mashable.com, August 2008. See http://mashable.com/2008/08/15/irony-alert-social-media-introverts/.

  34. introverts are more likely than extroverts: Yair Amichai-Hamburger, “Personality and the Internet,” in The Social Net: Understanding Human Behavior in Cyberspace, edited by Yair Amichai-Hamburger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005): 27–56. See also Emily S. Orr et al., “The Influence of Shyness on the Use of Facebook in an Undergraduate Sample,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 12, no. 3 (2009); Levi R. Baker, “Shyness and Online Social Networking Services,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 27, no. 8 (2010). Richard N. Landers and John W. Lounsbury, “An Investigation of Big Five and Narrow Personality Traits in Relation to Internet Usage,” Computers in Human Behavior 22 (2006): 283–93. See also Luigi Anolli et al., “Personality of People Using Chat: An On-Line Research,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 8, no. 1 (2005). But note that extroverts tend to have more Facebook friends than do introverts: Pavica Sheldon, “The Relationship Between Unwillingness-to-Communicate and Students’ Facebook Use,” Journal of Media Psychology 20, no. 2, (2008): 67–75. This is unsurprising, as Facebook has come to be a place where people collect large quantities of friends.

  35. an average weekly attendance of 22,000: Pastor Rick and Kay Warren, Online Newsroom, http://www.rickwarrennews.com/ (accessed September 12, 2010).

  36. Contemporary evangelicalism says: For background on evangelicalism, I conducted a series of fascinating interviews with, among others, the effortlessly articulate Lauren Sandler, author of Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement (New York: Viking, 2006).

  37. “cry from the heart wondering how to fit in”: Mark Byron, “Evangelism for Introverts,” http://markbyron.typepad.com/main/2005/06/evangalism_for_.html (accessed June 27, 2005).

  38. “not serve on a parish committee”: Jim Moore, “I Want to Serve the Lord—But Not Serve on a Parish Committee,” http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/Catholic/2000/07/I-Want-To-Serve-The-Lord-But-Not-Serve-On-A-Parish-Committee.aspx

  39. “that fruitful miracle”: Jean Autret, William Burford, and Phillip J. Wolfe, trans. and ed., Marcel Proust on Reading Ruskin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).

  CHAPTER 3: WHEN COLLABORATION KILLS CREATIVITY

  1. “I am a horse for a single harness”: Albert Einstein, in “Forum and Century,” vol. 84, pp. 193–94 (the thirteenth in the Forum series Living
Philosophies, a collection of personal philosophies of famous people, published in 1931).

  2. “March 5, 1975”: The story of Stephen Wozniak throughout this chapter is drawn largely from his autobiography, iWoz (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). The description of Woz as being the “nerd soul” of Apple comes from http://valleywag.gawker.com/220602/wozniak-jobs-design-role-overstated.

  3. a series of studies on the nature of creativity: Donald W. MacKinnon, “The Nature and Nurture of Creative Talent” (Walter Van Dyke Bingham Lecture given at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, April 11, 1962). See also MacKinnon, “Personality and the Realization of Creative Potential,” Presidential Address presented at Western Psychological Association, Portland, Oregon, April 1964.

  4. One of the most interesting findings: See, for example, (1) Gregory J. Feist, “A Meta-Analysis of Personality in Scientific and Artistic Creativity,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 2, no. 4 (1998): 290–309; (2) Feist, “Autonomy and Independence,” Encyclopedia of Creativity, vol. 1 (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1999), 157–63; and (3) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), 65–68. There are some studies showing a correlation between extroversion and creativity, but in contrast to the studies by MacKinnon, Csikszentmihalyi, and Feist, which followed people whose careers had proven them to be exceptionally creative “in real life,” these tend to be studies of college students measuring subjects’ creativity in more casual ways, for example by analyzing their personal hobbies or by asking them to play creativity games like writing a story about a picture. It’s likely that extroverts would do better in high-arousal settings like these. It’s also possible, as the psychologist Uwe Wolfradt suggests, that the relationship between introversion and creativity is “discernable at a higher level of creativity only.” (Uwe Wolfradt, “Individual Differences in Creativity: Personality, Story Writing, and Hobbies,” European Journal of Personality 15, no. 4, [July/August 2001]: 297–310.)