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

before
they’ve hit the wrong button, but what they do
after
. When introverts hit the number nine button and find they’ve lost a
point, they slow down before moving on to the next number, as if to
reflect on what went wrong. But extroverts not only fail to slow down,
they actually speed up
.
This seems strange; why would anyone do this? Newman explains that
it makes perfect sense. If you focus on achieving your goals, as reward-
sensitive extroverts do, you don’t want anything to get in your way—

---

neither naysayers nor the number nine. You speed up in an attempt to
knock these roadblocks down.
Yet this is a crucially important misstep, because the longer you pause
to process surprising or negative feedback, the more likely you are to
learn from it. If you 
force
extroverts to pause, says Newman, they’ll do
just as well as introverts at the numbers game. But, left to their own
devices, they don’t stop. And so they don’t learn to avoid the trouble
staring them in the face. Newman says that this is exactly what might
happen to extroverts like Ted Turner when bidding for a company on
auction. “When a person bids up too high,” he told me, “that’s because
they didn’t inhibit a response they should have inhibited. They didn’t
consider information that should have been weighing on their decision.”
Introverts, in contrast, are constitutionally programmed to downplay
reward—to kill their buzz, you might say—and scan for problems. “As
soon they get excited,” says Newman, “they’ll put the brakes on and
think about peripheral issues that may be more important. Introverts
seem to be specifically wired or trained so when they catch themselves
getting excited and focused on a goal, their vigilance increases.”
Introverts also tend to compare new information with their
expectations, he says. They ask themselves, “Is this what I thought
would happen? Is it how it should be?” And when the situation falls
short of expectations, they form associations between the moment of
disappointment (losing points) and whatever was going on in their
environment at the time of the disappointment (hitting the number
nine.) These associations let them make accurate predictions about how
to react to warning signals in the future.
Introverts’ disinclination to charge ahead is not only a hedge against
risk; it also pays off on intellectual tasks. Here are some of the things we
know about the relative performance of introverts and extroverts at
complex problem-solving. Extroverts get better grades than introverts
during elementary school, but introverts outperform extroverts in high
school and college. At the university level, introversion predicts
academic performance better than cognitive ability. One study tested

---

141 college students’ knowledge of twenty different subjects, from art to
astronomy to statistics, and found that introverts knew more than the
extroverts about every single one of them. Introverts receive
disproportionate numbers of graduate degrees, National Merit
Scholarship finalist positions, and Phi Beta Kappa keys. They outperform
extroverts on the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal test, an
assessment of critical thinking widely used by businesses for hiring and
promotion. They’ve been shown to excel at something psychologists call
“insightful problem solving.”
The question is: Why?
Introverts are not smarter than extroverts. According to IQ scores, the
two types are equally intelligent. And on many kinds of tasks,