So what’s John’s secret for relating to his forceful wife? He lets her
know that
her words were unacceptable, but he also tries to listen to
their meaning. “I try to tap into my empathy,” he says. “I take her tone
out of the equation. I take out the assault on my senses, and I try to get
to what she’s trying to say.”
And what Jennifer is trying to say, underneath her freight-train words,
is often quite simple: Respect me. Pay attention to me. Love me.
Greg and Emily now have valuable insights about how to talk through
their differences. But there’s one more question they need to answer:
Why exactly do they experience those Friday-night dinner parties so
differently? We know that Emily’s nervous system probably goes into
overdrive when she enters a room full of people. And we know that Greg
feels the opposite:
propelled toward people, conversations, events,
anything that gives him that dopamine-fueled, go-for-it sensation that
extroverts crave. But let’s dig a little deeper into the anatomy of cocktail-
hour chatter. The key to bridging Greg and Emily’s differences lies in the
details.
Some years ago, thirty-two pairs of introverts and extroverts, all of them
strangers to each other, chatted on the phone for a few minutes as part
of an experiment conducted by a neuroscientist named Dr.
Matthew
Lieberman, then a graduate student at Harvard. When they hung up,
they were asked to fill out detailed questionnaires, rating how they’d felt
and behaved during the conversation. How much did you like your
conversational partner? How friendly were you? How much would you
like to interact with this person again? They were also asked to put
themselves in the shoes of their conversational partners: How much did
your partner like you? How sensitive was she to you? How encouraging?
Lieberman and his team compared the answers and also listened in on
the conversations and made their own judgments about how the parties
felt about each other. They found that the
extroverts were a lot more
accurate than the introverts in assessing whether their partner liked
talking to them. These findings suggest that extroverts are better at
decoding social cues than introverts. At first, this seems unsurprising,
writes Lieberman; it echoes the popular assumption that extroverts are
better at reading social situations.
The only problem, as Lieberman
showed through a further twist to his experiment, is that this assumption
is not quite right.
Lieberman and his team asked a select group of participants to listen
to a tape of the conversations they’d just had—
before
filling out the
questionnaire. In this group, he found, there was no difference between
introverts and extroverts in their ability to read social cues. Why?
The answer is that the subjects who listened to the tape recording
were able to decode social cues
without having to do anything else at the
same time
. And introverts are pretty fine decoders, according to several
studies predating the Lieberman experiments.
One of these studies
actually found that introverts were better decoders than extroverts.
But these studies measured how well introverts
observe
social
dynamics, not how well they participate in them. Participation places a
very different set of demands on the brain than observing does. It
requires a kind of mental multitasking: the ability to process a lot of
short-term information at once without becoming distracted or overly
stressed. This is just the sort of brain functioning that extroverts tend to
be well suited for. In other words, extroverts are sociable because their
brains are good at handling competing demands on their attention—
which is just what dinner-party conversation involves.
In contrast,
introverts often feel repelled by social events that force them to attend to
many people at once.
Consider that the simplest social interaction between two people
requires performing an astonishing array of tasks: interpreting what the
other person is saying; reading body language and facial expressions;
smoothly taking
turns talking and listening; responding to what the
other person said; assessing whether you’re being understood;
determining whether you’re well received, and, if not, figuring out how
to improve or remove yourself from the situation. Think of what it takes
to juggle all this at once! And that’s just a one-on-one conversation. Now
imagine the multitasking required in a group setting like a dinner party.
So when introverts
assume the observer role, as when they write
novels, or contemplate unified field theory—or fall quiet at dinner
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