Quiet

by Susan Cain

  47. Raven Standard Progressive Matrices: Vidhu Mohan and Dalip Kumar, “Qualitative Analysis of the Performance of Introverts and Extroverts on Standard Progressive Matrices,” British Journal of Psychology 67, no. 3 (1976): 391–97.

  48. personality traits of effective call-center employees: Interview with the author, February 13, 2007.

  49. if you were staffing an investment bank: Interview with the author, July 7, 2010.

  50. men who are shown erotic pictures: Camelia Kuhnen et al., “Nucleus Accumbens Activation Mediates the Influence of Reward Cues on Financial Risk Taking,” NeuroReport 19, no. 5 (2008): 509–13.

  51. all introverts are constantly … vigilant about threats: Indeed, many contemporary personality psychologists would say that threat-vigilance is more characteristic of a trait known as “neuroticism” than of introversion per se.

  52. threat-vigilance is more characteristic of a trait: But harm avoidance is correlated with both introversion and neuroticism (both traits are associated with Jerry Kagan’s “high reactivity” and Elaine Aron’s “high sensitivity”). See Mary E. Stewart et al., “Personality Correlates of Happiness and Sadness: EPQ-R and TPQ Compared,” Personality and Individual Differences 38, no. 5 (2005): 1085–96.

  53. “If you want to determine”: can be found at http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/ccarver/sclBISBAS.html. I first came across this scale in Jonathan Haidt’s excellent book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 34.

  54. “become independent of the social environment”: Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 16.

  55. “Psychological theories usually assume”: Mihalyi Csikszentmilhalyi, The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), xii.

  56. you probably find that your energy is boundless: The same goes for happiness. Research suggests that buzz and other positive emotions seem to come a little easier to extroverts, and that extroverts as a group are happier. But when psychologists compare happy extroverts with happy introverts, they find that the two groups share many of the same characteristics—self-esteem; freedom from anxiety; satisfaction with their life work—and that those features predict happiness more strongly than extroversion itself does. See Peter Hills and Michael Argyle, “Happiness, Introversion-Extraversion and Happy Introverts,” Personality and Individual Differences 30 (2001): 595–608.

  57. “Release Your Inner Extrovert”: BusinessWeek online column, November 26, 2008.

  58. Chuck Prince: For an account of Chuck Prince’s persona, see, for example, Mara Der Hovanesian, “Rewiring Chuck Prince,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, February 20, 2006.

  59. Seth Klarman: For information on Klarman, see, for example, Charles Klein, “Klarman Tops Griffin as Investors Hunt for ‘Margin of Safety,’ ” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, June 11, 2010. See also Geraldine Fabrikant, “Manager Frets Over Market but Still Outdoes It,” New York Times, May 13, 2007.

  60. Michael Lewis: Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).

  61. Warren Buffett: Warren Buffett’s story, as related in this chapter, comes from an excellent biography: Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (New York: Bantam Books, 2008).

  62. “inner scorecard”: Some psychologists would relate Warren Buffett’s self-direction not necessarily to introversion but to a different phenomenon called “internal locus of control.”

  CHAPTER 8: SOFT POWER

  1. Mike Wei: The interviews with Mike Wei and others from Cupertino, related throughout this chapter, were conducted with the author at various stages between 2006 and 2010.

  2. article called “The New White Flight”: Suein Hwang, “The New White Flight,” Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2005.

  3. 53 were National Merit Scholarship … 27 percent higher than the nationwide average: Monta Vista High School website, as of May 31, 2010.

  4. Talking is simply not a focus: Richard C. Levin, “Top of the Class: The Rise of Asia’s Universities,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2010.

  5. the San Jose Mercury News ran an article: Sarah Lubman, “East West Teaching Traditions Collide,” San Jose Mercury News, February 23, 1998.

  6. “colleges can learn to listen to their sound of silence”: Heejung Kim, “We Talk, Therefore We Think? A Cultural Analysis of the Effect of Talking on Thinking,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, no. 4 (2002): 828–42.

  7. The Journal of Research in Personality: Robert R. McCrae, “Human Nature and Culture: A Trait Perspective,” Journal of Research in Personality 38 (2004): 3–14.

  8. Americans are some of the most extroverted: See, for example, David G. Winter, Personality: Analysis and Interpretation of Lives (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 459.

  9. One study comparing eight- to ten-year-old children: Xinyin Chen et al., “Social Reputation and Peer Relationships in Chinese and Canadian Children: A Cross-Cultural Study,” Child Development 63, no. 6 (1992): 1336–43. See also W. Ray Crozier, Shyness: Development, Consolidation and Change (Routledge, 2001), 147.

  10. Chinese high school students tell researchers: Michael Harris Bond, Beyond the Chinese Face: Insights from Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 62.

  11. Another study asked Asian-Americans: Kim, “We Talk, Therefore We Think?”

  12. Asian attitudes to the spoken word: See, for example, Heejung Kim and Hazel Markus, “Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Silence: An Analysis of Talking as a Cultural Practice,” in Engaging Cultural Differences in Liberal Democracies, edited by Richard K. Shweder et al. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), 432–52.

  13. proverbs from the East: Some of these come from the epigraph of the article by Heejung Kim and Hazel Markus, cited above.

  14. grueling Ming dynasty–era jinshi exam: Nicholas Kristof, “The Model Students,” New York Times, May 14, 2006.

  15. pictures of men in dominance poses: Jonathan Freeman et al., “Culture Shapes a Mesolimbic Response to Signals of Dominance and Subordination that Associates with Behavior,” NeuroImage 47 (2009): 353–59.

  16. “It is only those from an explicit tradition”: Harris Bond, Beyond the Chinese Face, 53.

  17. taijin kyofusho: Carl Elliott, Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 71.

  18. Tibetan Buddhist monks find inner peace: Marc Kaufman, “Meditation Gives Brain a Charge, Study Finds,” Washington Post, January 3, 2005.

  19. “Their civility has been well documented”: Lydia Millet, “The Humblest of Victims,” New York Times, August 7, 2005.

  20. Westernization of the past several decades: See, for example, Xinyin Chen et al., “Social Functioning and Adjustment in Chinese Children: The Imprint of Historical Time,” Child Development 76, no. 1 (2005): 182–95.

  21. One study comparing European-American: C. S. Huntsinger and P. E. Jose, “A Longitudinal Investigation of Personality and Social Adjustment Among Chinese American and European American Adolescents,” Child Development 77, no. 5 (2006): 1309–24. Indeed, the same thing seems to be happening to Chinese kids in China as the country Westernizes, according to a series of longitudinal studies measuring changes in social attitudes. While shyness was associated with social and academic achievement for elementary school children as recently as 1990, by 2002 it predicted peer rejection and even depression. See Chen, “Social Functioning and Adjustment in Chinese Children.”

  22. The journalist Nicholas Lemann: “Jews in Second Place,” Slate, June 25, 1996.

  23. “A … E … U … O … I”: These vowels were presented out of the usual sequence at Preston Ni’s seminar.

  24. Gandhi was, according to his autobiography: The story of Gandhi related in this chapter comes primarily from Gandhi: An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), esp. 6, 20, 40–41, 59, 60–62,
90–91.

  25. The TIMSS exam: I originally learned about this from Malcom Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2008).

  26. In 1995, for example, the first year the TIMSS was given: “Pursuing Excellence: A Study of U.S. Eighth-Grade Mathematics and Science Teaching, Learning Curriculum, and Achievement in International Context, Initial Findings from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study,” U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Pursuing Excellence, NCES 97-198 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996).

  27. In 2007, when researchers measured: TIMSS Executive Summary. The nations whose students fill out more of the questionnaire also tend to have students who do well on the TIMSS test: Erling E. Boe et al., “Student Task Persistence in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study: A Major Source of Achievement Differences at the National, Classroom and Student Levels” (Research Rep. No. 2002-TIMSS1) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, Center for Research and Evaluation in Social Policy). Note that this study was based on 1995 data.

  28. cross-cultural psychologist Priscilla Blinco: Priscilla Blinco, “Task Persistence in Japanese Elementary Schools,” in Windows on Japanese Education, edited by Edward R. Beauchamp (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991). Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this study in his book Outliers.

  CHAPTER 9: WHEN SHOULD YOU ACT MORE EXTROVERTED THAN YOU REALLY ARE?

  1. Meet Professor Brian Little: The stories about Brian Little throughout this chapter come from numerous telephone and e-mail interviews with the author between 2006 and 2010.

  2. Hippocrates, Milton, Schopenhauer, Jung: Please see A Note on the Words Introvert and Extrovert for more on this point.

  3. Walter Mischel: For an overview of the person-situation debate, see, for example, David C. Funder, The Personality Puzzle (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 118–44. See also Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda, “Reconciling Processing Dynamics and Personality Dispositions,” Annual Review of Psychology 49 (1998): 229–58. In further support of the premise that there truly is such a thing as a fixed personality: We know now that people who score as introverts on personality tests tend to have different physiologies and probably inherit some different genes from those who measure as extroverts. We also know that personality traits predict an impressive variety of important life outcomes. If you’re an extrovert, you’re more likely to have a wide circle of friends, have risky sex, get into accidents, and excel at people-oriented work like sales, human resources, and teaching. (This doesn’t mean that you will do these things—only that you’re more likely than your typical introvert to do them.) If you’re an introvert, you’re more likely to excel in high school, in college, and in the land of advanced degrees, to have smaller social networks, to stay married to your original partner, and to pursue autonomous work like art, research, math, and engineering. Extroversion and introversion even predict the psychological challenges you might face: depression and anxiety for introverts (think Woody Allen); hostility, narcissism, and overconfidence for extroverts (think Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, drunk with rage against a white whale).

  In addition, there are studies showing that the personality of a seventy-year-old can be predicted with remarkable accuracy from early adulthood on. In other words, despite the remarkable variety of situations that we experience in a lifetime, our core traits remain constant. It’s not that our personalities don’t evolve; Kagan’s research on the malleability of high-reactive people has singlehandedly disproved this notion. But we tend to stick to predictable patterns. If you were the tenth most introverted person in your high school class, your behavior may fluctuate over time, but you probably still find yourself ranked around tenth at your fiftieth reunion. At that class reunion, you’ll also notice that many of your classmates will be more introverted than you remember them being in high school: quieter, more self-contained, and less in need of excitement. Also more emotionally stable, agreeable, and conscientious. All of these traits grow more pronounced with age. Psychologists call this process “intrinsic maturation,” and they’ve found these same patterns of personality development in countries as diverse as Germany, the UK, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Turkey. They’ve also found them in chimps and monkeys.

  This makes evolutionary sense. High levels of extroversion probably help with mating, which is why most of us are at our most sociable during our teenage and young adult years. But when it comes to keeping marriages stable and raising children, having a restless desire to hit every party in town may be less useful than the urge to stay home and love the one you’re with. Also, a certain degree of introspection may help us age with equanimity. If the task of the first half of life is to put yourself out there, the task of the second half is to make sense of where you’ve been.

  4. social life is performance: See, for example, Carl Elliott, Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 47.

  5. Jack Welch advised in a BusinessWeek: Jack Welch, “Release Your Inner Extrovert,” BusinessWeek online, November 26, 2008.

  6. Free Trait Theory: For an overview of Free Trait Theory, see, for example, Brian R. Little, “Free Traits, Personal Projects, and Ideo-Tapes: Three Tiers for Personality Psychology,” Psychological Inquiry 7, no. 4 (1996): 340–44.

  7. “To thine own self be true”: Actually, this advice comes not so much from Shakespeare as from his character Polonius in Hamlet.

  8. research psychologist named Richard Lippa: Richard Lippa, “Expressive Control, Expressive Consistency, and the Correspondence Between Expressive Behavior and Personality,” Journal of Behavior and Personality 36, no. 3 (1976): 438–61. Indeed, psychologists have found that some people who claim not to be shy in a written questionnaire are quite adept at concealing those aspects of shyness that they can control consciously, such as talking to members of the opposite sex and speaking for long periods of time. But they often “leak” their shyness unwittingly, with tense body postures and facial expressions.

  9. psychologists call “self-monitoring”: Mark Snyder, “Self-Monitoring of Expressive Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 30, no. 4 (1974): 526–37.

  10. experience less stress while doing so: Joyce E. Bono and Meredith A. Vey, “Personality and Emotional Performance: Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Self-Monitoring,” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology” 12, no. 2 (2007): 177–92.

  11. “Restorative niche” is Professor Little’s term: See, for example, Brian Little, “Free Traits and Personal Contexts: Expanding a Social Ecological Model of Well-Being,” in Person-Environment Psychology: New Directions and Perspectives, edited by W. Bruce Walsh et al. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000).

  12. “a Free Trait Agreement”: See, for example, Brian Little and Maryann F. Joseph, “Personal Projects and Free Traits: Mutable Selves and Well Beings,” in Personal Project Pursuit: Goals, Action, and Human Flourishing, edited by Brian R. Little et al. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007), 395.

  13. “Emotional labor”: Howard S. Friedman, “The Role of Emotional Expression in Coronary Heart Disease,” in In Search of the Coronary-Prone: Beyond Type A, edited by A. W. Siegman et al. (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989), 149–68.

  14. people who suppress negative emotions: Melinda Wenner, “Smile! It Could Make You Happier: Making an Emotional Face—or Suppressing One—Influences Your Feelings,” Scientific American Mind, October 14, 2009, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smile-it-could-make-you-happier.

  CHAPTER 10: THE COMMUNICATION GAP

  1. people who value intimacy highly: Randy J. Larsen and David M. Buss, Personality Psychology: Domains of Knowledge About Human Nature (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 353.

  2. “Extroverts seem to need people as a forum”: E-mail from William Graziano to the author, July 31, 2010.

  3. In a study of 132 college students: Jens B. A
spendorf and Susanne Wilpers, “Personality Effects on Social Relationships,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 6 (1998): 1531–44.

  4. so-called Big Five traits: Agreeableness is defined later in this chapter. “Openness to Experience” measures curiosity, openness to new ideas, and appreciation for art, invention, and unusual experiences; “Conscientious” people are disciplined, dutiful, efficient, and organized; “Emotional Stability” measures freedom from negative emotions.

  5. sit them down in front of a computer screen: Benjamin M. Wilkowski et al., “Agreeableness and the Prolonged Spatial Processing of Antisocial and Prosocial Information,” Journal of Research in Personality 40, no. 6 (2006): 1152–68. See also Daniel Nettle, Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter on agreeableness.

  6. equally likely to be agreeable: Under the “Big Five” definitions of personality, extroversion and agreeableness are by definition orthogonal. See, for example, Colin G. DeYoung et al., “Testing Predictions from Personality Neuroscience: Brain Structure and the Big Five,” Psychological Science 21, no. 6 (2010): 820–28: “Agreeableness appears to identify the collection of traits related to altruism: one’s concern for the needs, desires, and rights of others (as opposed to one’s enjoyment of others, which appears to be related primarily to Extraversion).”

  7. latter are “confrontive copers”: See, for example: (1) Donald A. Loffredo and Susan K. Opt, “Argumentation and Myers-Briggs Personality Type Preferences,” paper presented at the National Communication Association Convention, Atlanta, GA; (2) Rick Howard and Maeve McKillen, “Extraversion and Performance in the Perceptual Maze Test,” Personality and Individual Differences 11, no. 4 (1990): 391–96; (3) Robert L. Geist and David G. Gilbert, “Correlates of Expressed and Felt Emotion During Marital Conflict: Satisfaction, Personality, Process and Outcome,” Personality and Individual Differences 21, no. 1 (1996): 49–60; (4) E. Michael Nussbaum, “How Introverts Versus Extroverts Approach Small-Group Argumentative Discussions,” The Elementary School Journal 102, no. 3 (2002): 183–97.