Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can\'t Stop Talking pdfdrive com

The
Long Long Dances
. “The troubles of others moved him more, as did also
the teeming beauty of life: moved him, compelled him, to seize a pen
and write about them. [He was moved by] walking in the hills, listening
to a Schubert impromptu, watching nightly from his armchair the
smashing of bone and flesh that made up so much of the nine o’clock
news.”
The description of such characters as thin-skinned is meant
metaphorically, but it turns out that it’s actually quite literal. Among the
tests researchers use to measure personality traits are skin conductance
tests, which record how much people sweat in response to noises, strong
emotions, and other stimuli. High-reactive introverts sweat more; low-
reactive extroverts sweat less. Their skin is literally “thicker,” more
impervious to stimuli, cooler to the touch. In fact, according to some of
the scientists I spoke to, this is where our notion of being socially “cool”
comes from; the lower-reactive you are, the cooler your skin, the cooler
you 
are
. (Incidentally, sociopaths lie at the extreme end of this coolness
barometer, with extremely low levels of arousal, skin conductance, and
anxiety. There is some evidence that sociopaths have damaged
amygdalae.)
Lie detectors (polygraphs) are partially skin conductance tests. They
operate on the theory that lying causes anxiety, which triggers the skin
to perspire imperceptibly. When I was in college, I applied for a summer
job as a secretary at a large jewelry company. I had to take a lie detector
test as part of the application process. The test was administered in a
small, dingily lit room with linoleum floors, by a thin, cigarette-puffing
man with pocked yellow skin. The man asked me a series of warm-up
questions: my name, address, and so on, to establish my baseline level of
skin conductance. Then the questions grew more probing and the
examiner’s manner harsher. Had I been arrested? Had I ever shoplifted?
Had I used cocaine? With this last question my interrogator peered at me
intently. As it happens, I never 
had
tried cocaine. But he seemed to think

---

I had. The accusing look on his face was the equivalent of the old
policeman’s trick where they tell the suspect that they have the damning
evidence and there’s no point denying it.
I knew the man was mistaken, but I still felt myself blush. And sure
enough, the test came back showing I’d lied on the cocaine question. My
skin is so thin, apparently, that it sweats in response to imaginary
crimes!
We tend to think of coolness as a pose that you strike with a pair of
sunglasses, a nonchalant attitude, and drink in hand. But maybe we
didn’t choose these social accessories at random. Maybe we’ve adopted
dark glasses, relaxed body language, and alcohol as signifiers precisely
because they camouflage signs of a nervous system on overdrive.
Sunglasses prevent others from seeing our eyes dilate with surprise or
fear; we know from Kagan’s work that a relaxed torso is a hallmark of
low reactivity; and alcohol removes our inhibitions and lowers our
arousal levels. When you go to a football game and someone offers you a
beer, says the personality psychologist Brian Little, “they’re really saying
hi, have a glass of extroversion.”
Teenagers understand instinctively the physiology of cool. In Curtis
Sittenfeld’s novel 
Prep
, which explores the adolescent social rituals of
boarding-school life with uncanny precision, the protagonist, Lee, is
invited unexpectedly to the dorm room of Aspeth, the coolest girl in
school. The first thing she notices is how physically stimulating Aspeth’s
world is. “From outside the door, I could hear pounding music,” she
observes. “White Christmas lights, currently turned on, were taped high
up along all the walls, and on the north wall they’d hung an enormous
orange and green tapestry.… I felt overstimulated and vaguely irritated.
The room I shared with [my roommate] seemed so quiet and plain, our
lives seemed so quiet and plain. Had Aspeth been born cool, I wondered,
or had someone taught her, like an older sister or a cousin?”
Jock cultures sense the low-reactive physiology of cool, too. For the
early U.S. astronauts, having a low heart rate, which is associated with
low reactivity, was a status symbol. Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn, who
became the first American to orbit the Earth and would later run for
president, was admired by his comrades for his supercool pulse rate
during liftoff (only 110 beats per minute).

---

But physical lack of cool may be more socially valuable than we think.
That deep blush when a hard-bitten tester puts his face an inch from
yours and asks if you’ve ever used cocaine turns out to be a kind of
social glue. In a recent experiment, a team of psychologists led by Corine
Dijk asked sixty-odd participants to read accounts of people who’d done
something morally wrong, like driving away from a car crash, or
something embarrassing, like spilling coffee on someone. The