by Susan Cain
5. Hans Eysenck: Hans J. Eysenck, Genius: The Natural History of Creativity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
6. “Innovation—the heart of the knowledge economy”: Malcolm Gladwell, “Why Your Bosses Want to Turn Your New Office into Greenwich Village,” The New Yorker, December 11, 2000.
7. “None of us is as smart as all of us”: Warren Bennis, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
8. “Michelangelo had assistants”: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2008).
9. organize workforces into teams: Steve Koslowski and Daniel Ilgen, “Enhancing the Effectiveness of Work Groups and Teams,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 7, no. 3 (2006): 77–124.
10. By 2000 an estimated half: Dennis J. Devine, “Teams in Organizations: Prevalence, Characteristics, and Effectiveness,” Small Group Research 20 (1999): 678–711.
11. today virtually all of them do: Frederick Morgeson et al., “Leadership in Teams: A Functional Approach to Understanding Leadership Structures and Processes,” Journal of Management 36, no. 1 (2010): 5–39.
12. 91 percent of high-level managers: Ibid.
13. The consultant Stephen Harvill told me: Author interview, October 26, 2010.
14. over 70 percent of today’s employees: Davis, “The Physical Environment of the Office.” See also James C. McElroy and Paula C. Morrow, “Employee Reactions to Office Redesign: A Naturally Occurring Quasi-Field Experiment in a Multi-Generational Setting,” Human Relations 63, no. 5 (2010): 609–36. See also Davis, “The Physical Environment of the Office”: open-plan offices are “the most popular office design” today. See also Joyce Gannon, “Firms Betting Open-Office Design, Amenities Lead to Happier, More Productive Workers,” Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh), February 9, 2003. See also Stephen Beacham, Real Estate Weekly, July 6, 2005. The first company to use an open plan in a high-rise building was Owens Corning, in 1969. Today, many companies use them, including Proctor & Gamble, Ernst & Young, GlaxoSmithKline, Alcoa, and H. J. Heinz. http://www.owenscorning.com/acquainted/about/history/1960.asp. See also Matthew Davis et al., “The Physical Environment of the Office: Contemporary and Emerging Issues,” in G. P. Hodgkinson and J. K. Ford, eds., International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, vol. 26 (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2011), 193–235: “… there was a ‘widespread introduction of open-plan and landscaped offices in North America in the 1960s and 1970s.’ ” But see Jennifer Ann McCusker, “Individuals and Open Space Office Design: The Relationship Between Personality and Satisfaction in an Open Space Work Environment,” dissertation, Organizational Studies, Alliant International University, April 12, 2002 (“the concept of open space design began in the mid 1960s with a group of German management consultants,” citing Karen A. Edelman, “Take Down the Walls,” Across the Board 34, no. 3 [1997]: 32–38).
15. The amount of space per employee shrank: Roger Vincent, “Office Walls Are Closing in on Corporate Workers,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2010.
16. “There has been a shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’ work”: Paul B. Brown, “The Case for Design,” Fast Company, June 2005.
17. Rival office manufacturer Herman Miller, Inc.: “New Executive Office-scapes: Moving from Private Offices to Open Environments,” Herman Miller Inc., 2003.
18. In 2006, the Ross School of Business: Dave Gershman, “Building Is ‘Heart and Soul’ of the Ross School of Business,” mlive.com, January 24, 2009. See also Kyle Swanson, “Business School Offers Preview of New Home, Slated to Open Next Semester,” Michigan Daily, September 15, 2008.
19. According to a 2002 nationwide survey: Christopher Barnes, “What Do Teachers Teach? A Survey of America’s Fourth and Eighth Grade Teachers,” conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis, University of Connecticut, Civic Report no. 28, September 2002. See also Robert E. Slavin, “Research on Cooperative Learning and Achievement: What We Know, What We Need to Know,” Contemporary Educational Psychology 21, no. 1 (1996): 43–69 (citing 1993 national survey findings that 79 percent of elementary school teachers and 62 percent of middle school teachers made sustained use of cooperative learning). Note that in “real life,” many teachers are simply throwing students into groups but not using “cooperative learning” per se, which involves a highly specific set of procedures, according to an e-mail sent to the author by Roger Johnson of the Cooperative Learning Center at the University of Minnesota.
20. “Cooperative learning”: Bruce Williams, Cooperative Learning: A Standard for High Achievement (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2004), 3–4.
21. Janet Farrall and Leonie Kronborg: Janet Farrall and Leonie Kronborg, “Leadership Development for the Gifted and Talented,” in Fusing Talent—Giftedness in Australian Schools, edited by M. McCann and F. Southern (Adelaide: The Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers, 1996).
22. “Employees are putting their whole lives up”: Radio interview with Kai Ryssdal, “Are Cubicles Going Extinct?”, Marketplace, from American Public Media, December 15, 2010.
23. A significant majority of the earliest computer enthusiasts: Sarah Holmes and Philip L. Kerr, “The IT Crowd: The Type Distribution in a Group of Information Technology Graduates,” Australian Psychological Type Review 9, no. 1 (2007): 31–38. See also Yair Amichai-Hamburger et al., “ ‘On the Internet No One Knows I’m an Introvert’: Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Internet Interaction,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 5, no. 2 (2002): 125–28.
24. “It’s a truism in tech”: Dave W. Smith, e-mail to the author, October 20, 2010.
25. “Why could that boy, whom I had beaten so easily”: See Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code (New York: Bantam Dell, 2009), 48.
26. three groups of expert violinists: K. Anders Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406.
27. “Serious study alone”: Neil Charness et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice in Chess Expertise,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 19 (2005): 151–65.
28. College students who tend to study alone: David Glenn, “New Book Lays Failure to Learn on Colleges’ Doorsteps,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 18, 2001.
29. Even elite athletes in team sports: Starkes and Ericsson, “Expert Performance in Sports: Advances in Research on Sports Expertise,” Human Kinetics (2003): 67–71.
30. In many fields, Ericsson told me: Interview with the author, April 13, 2010.
31. ten thousand hours of Deliberate Practice: By the age of eighteen, the best violinists in the Berlin Music Academy study had spent an average of over 7,000 hours practicing alone, about 2,000 hours more than the good violinists, and 4,000 hours more than the music teachers.
32. “intense curiosity or focused interest seems odd to their peers”: Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 177.
33. “because practicing music or studying math”: Ibid., 65.
34. Madeleine L’Engle: Ibid., 253–54.
35. “My dear Mr. Babbage”: Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin Volume 2: 1837–1843 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 67.
36. the Coding War Games: These are described in Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (New York: Dorset House, 1987).
37. A mountain of recent data on open-plan offices: See, for example, the following: (1) Vinesh Oommen et al., “Should Health Service Managers Embrace Open Plan Work Environments? A Review,” Asia Pacific Journal of Health Management 3, no. 2 (2008). (2) Aoife Brennan et al., “Traditional Versus Open Office Design: A Longitudinal Field Study,” Environment and Behavior 34 (2002): 279. (3) James C McElroy and Paula Morrow, “Employee Reactions to Office Redesign: A Naturally Occurring Quasi-Field Experiment in a Multi-Generational Setting,” Human Relations 63 (2010): 609. (4) Einar De Croon et al., “The Effect of Office Concepts on Worker Health and Performance: A Systemati
c Review of the Literature,” Ergonomics, 48, no. 2 (2005): 119–34. (5) J. Pejtersen et al., “Indoor Climate, Psychosocial Work Environment and Symptoms in Open-Plan Offices,” Indoor Air 16, no. 5 (2006): 392–401. (6) Herman Miller Research Summary, 2007, “It’s All About Me: The Benefits of Personal Control at Work.” (7) Paul Bell et al., Environmental Psychology (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 162. (8) Davis, “The Physical Environment of the Office.”
38. people learn better after a quiet stroll: Marc G. Berman et al., “The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature,” Psychological Science 19, no. 12 (2008): 1207–12. See also Stephen Kaplan and Marc Berman, “Directed Attention as a Common Resource for Executive Functioning and Self-Regulation,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 5, no. 1 (2010): 43–57.
39. Another study, of 38,000 knowledge workers: Davis et al., “The Physical Environment of the Office.”
40. Even multitasking … a myth: John Medina, Brain Rules (Seattle, WA: Pear Press, 2008), 87.
41. Backbone Entertainment: Mike Mika, interview with the author, July 12, 2006.
42. Reebok International: Kimberly Blanton, “Design It Yourself: Pleasing Offices Laid Out by the Workers Who Use Them Can Be a Big Advantage When Companies Compete for Talent,” Boston Globe, March 1, 2005.
43. For ten years, beginning in 2000: TEDx Midwest Talk, October 15, 2010. Also, e-mail to the author, November 5, 2010.
44. Kafka, for example: Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self (New York: Free Press, 2005), 103.
45. considerably more cheerful Theodor Geisel: Judith Morgan and Neil Morgan, Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel: A Biography (New York: DaCapo, 1996).
46. legendary advertising man Alex Osborn: Alex Osborn, Your Creative Power (W. Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1948).
47. group brainstorming doesn’t actually work: Marvin D. Dunnette et al., “The Effect of Group Participation on Brainstorming Effectiveness for Two Industrial Samples,” Journal of Applied Psychology 47, no. 1 (1963): 30–37.
48. some forty years of research: See, for example, Paul A. Mongeau and Mary Claire Morr, “Reconsidering Brainstorming,” Group Facilitation 1, no. 1 (1999): 14. See also Karan Girotra et al., “Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea,” Management Science 56, no. 4 (April 2010): 591–605. (The highest level innovation comes from a hybrid process in which people brainstorm on their own before sharing ideas with colleagues.)
49. “business people must be insane”: Adrian Furnham, “The Brainstorming Myth,” Business Strategy Review 11, no. 4 (2000): 21–28.
50. Groups brainstorming electronically: Paul Mongeau and Mary Claire Morr, “Reconsidering Brainstorming.”
51. The same is true of academic research: Charlan Nemeth and Jack Goncalo, “Creative Collaborations from Afar: The Benefits of Independent Authors,” Creativity Research Journal 17, no. 1 (2005): 1–8.
52. usually believe that their group performed much better: Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 66.
53. the fear of public humiliation: Susan K. Opt and Donald A. Loffredo, “Rethinking Communication Apprehension: A Myers-Briggs Perspective,” Journal of Psychology 134, no. 5 (2000): 556–70.
54. two NCAA basketball teams: James C. Moore and Jody A. Brylinsky, “Spectator Effect on Team Performance in College Basketball,” Journal of Sport Behavior 16, no. 2 (1993): 77.
55. behavioral economist Dan Ariely: Dan Ariely, “What’s the Value of a Big Bonus?” New York Times, November 19, 2008.
56. Gregory Berns: The Solomon Asch and Gregory Berns experiments are described in Gregory Berns, Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2008), 59–81. See also Sandra Blakeslee, “What Other People Say May Change What You See,” New York Times, June 28, 2005. And see Gregory S. Berns et al., “Neurobiological Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation,” Biological Psychiatry 58 (2005): 245–53.
57. heightened activation in the amygdala: In fact, in some iterations of the experiment, where the volunteers played with a group of computers rather than with a group of people, their amygdalae stayed quiet even when they disagreed with the computers. This suggests that people who don’t conform suffer not so much the fear of being wrong as the anxiety of being excluded from the group.
58. face-to-face interactions create trust: Belinda Luscombe, “Why E-Mail May Be Hurting Off-Line Relationships,” Time, June 22, 2010.
59. population density is correlated with innovation: Jonah Lehrer, “How the City Hurts Your Brain,” Boston Globe, January 2, 2009.
60. creating “flexible” open plans: Davis et al., “The Physical Environment of the Office.”
61. At Pixar Animation Studios: Bill Capodagli, “Magic in the Workplace: How Pixar and Disney Unleash the Creative Talent of Their Workforce,” Effectif, September/October 2010: 43–45.
62. Similarly, at Microsoft: Michelle Conlin, “Microsoft’s Meet-My-Mood Offices,” Bloomberg Businessweek, September 10, 2007.
CHAPTER 4: IS TEMPERAMENT DESTINY?
A general note on this chapter: Chapter 4 discusses the psychologist Jerome Kagan’s work on high reactivity, which some contemporary psychologists would consider to lie at the intersection of introversion and another trait known as “neuroticism.” For the sake of readability, I have not elucidated that distinction in the text.
1. For one of those studies, launched in 1989: This study is discussed at length in Jerome Kagan and Nancy Snidman, The Long Shadow of Temperament (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
2. “Carl Jung’s descriptions of the introvert and extrovert”: Ibid., 218.
3. reserved Tom and extroverted Ralph: Jerome Kagan, Galen’s Prophecy (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 158–61.
4. Some say that temperament is the foundation: See http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/Warfield3.html.
5. potent organ: Kagan and Snidman, The Long Shadow of Temperament, 10.
6. When the Frisbee looks like it’s headed straight for your nose: This image comes from an online video with Joseph Ledoux, a scientist at NYU who studies the neural basis of emotions, especially fear and anxiety. See “Fearful Brain in an Anxious World,” Science & the City, http://www.nyas.org/Podcasts/Atom.axd (accessed November 20, 2008).
7. “alert attention”: Elaine N. Aron, Psychotherapy and the Highly Sensitive Person (New York: Routledge, 2010), 14.
8. They literally use more eye movements: Various studies have documented these tendencies in high-reactive children. See, for example, Jerome Kagan, “Reflection-Impulsivity and Reading Ability in Primary Grade Children,” Child Development 363, no. 3 (1965): 609–28. See also Ellen Siegelman, “Reflective and Impulsive Observing Behavior,” Child Development 40, no. 4 (1969): 1213–22. These studies use the term “reflective” rather than “high-reactive,” but it’s a safe bet that they’re talking about the same group of children. Siegelman describes them as “preferring low-risk situations generally but choosing harder, more solitary intellectual tasks … less motorically active, and more cautious” (p. 1214). (Similar studies have been done on adults; see chapters 6 and 7.)
9. High-reactive kids also tend to think and feel deeply: Elaine Aron, The Highly Sensitive Child: Helping Our Children Thrive When the World Overwhelms Them (New York: Broadway Books), 2002.
10. If a high-reactive toddler breaks another child’s toy: See the studies by Grazyna Kochanska referred to in chapter 6.
11. how a group of kids should share a coveted toy: Winifred Gallagher (quoting Kagan), “How We Become What We Are.” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1994.
12. blue eyes, allergies, and hay fever … thin body and narrow face: Kagan, Galen’s Prophecy, 160–61.
13. Take Disney movies: Ibid., 161.
14. extroversion and introversion are physiologically: David G. Winter, Personality: Analysis and Interpretation of Lives (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 511–16.
15. 40 to 50 percent heritable: Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. and Matt McGue, “Genetic and Environmental Influences on Human Psychological Differences,” Journal of Neurobiology 54 (2003): 4–5.
16. Nazi eugenics and white supremacism: This has been written about in various places including, for example, Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac (New York: Penguin, 1993), 150.
17. “I have been dragged, kicking and screaming”: Gallagher (quoting Kagan), “How We Become What We Are.”
18. The publication of his early findings: Kramer, Listening to Prozac, 154.
19. Kagan ushers me inside: I conducted a series of interviews with Jerome Kagan between 2006 and 2010.
20. describes himself as having been an anxious: Jerome Kagan, An Argument for Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 4, 7.
21. public speaking is the number-one fear: Victoria Cunningham, Morty Lefkoe, and Lee Sechrest, “Eliminating Fears: An Intervention that Permanently Eliminates the Fear of Public Speaking,” Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy 13 (2006): 183–93.
22. Public speaking phobia has many causes: Gregory Berns, Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2008), 59–81.
23. introverts are significantly more likely: Susan K. Opt and Donald A. Loffredo, “Rethinking Communication Apprehension: A Myers-Briggs Perspective,” Journal of Psychology 134, no. 5 (2000): 556–70. See also Michael J. Beatty, James C. McCroskey, and Alan D. Heisel, “Communication Apprehension as Temperamental Expression: A Communibiological Paradigm,” Communication Monographs 65 (1998): 197–219. See also Peter D. Macintyre and Kimly A. Thivierge, “The Effects of Speaker Personality on Anticipated Reactions to Public Speaking,” Communication Research Reports 12, no. 2 (1995): 125–33.