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

participants were shown photographs of the wrongdoers, who had one of
four different facial expressions: shame or embarrassment (head and
eyes down); shame/embarrassment plus a blush; neutral; or neutral with
a blush. Then they were asked to rate how sympathetic and trustworthy
the transgressors were.
It turned out that the offenders who blushed were judged a lot more
positively than those who didn’t. This was because the blush signified
concern for others. As Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of
California, Berkeley, who specializes in positive emotions, put it to the
New York Times
, “A blush comes online in two or three seconds and says,
‘I care; I know I violated the social contract.’ ”
In fact, the very thing that many high-reactives hate most about
blushing—its uncontrollability—is what makes it so socially useful.
“Because it is impossible to control the blush intentionally,” Dijk
speculates, blushing is an authentic sign of embarrassment. And
embarrassment, according to Keltner, is a moral emotion. It shows
humility, modesty, and a desire to avoid aggression and make peace. It’s
not about isolating the person who feels ashamed (which is how it
sometimes feels to easy blushers), but about bringing people together.
Keltner has tracked the roots of human embarrassment and found that
after many primates fight, they try to make up. They do this partly by
making gestures of embarrassment of the kind we see in humans—
looking away, which acknowledges wrongdoing and the intention to
stop; lowering the head, which shrinks one’s size; and pressing the lips
together, a sign of inhibition. These gestures in humans have been called
“acts of devotion,” writes Keltner. Indeed, Keltner, who is trained in
reading people’s faces, has studied photos of moral heroes like Gandhi
and the Dalai Lama and found that they feature just such controlled

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smiles and averted eyes.
In his book, 
Born to Be Good
, Keltner even says that if he had to
choose his mate by asking a single question at a speed-dating event, the
question he would choose is: “What was your last embarrassing
experience?” Then he would watch very carefully for lip-presses,
blushing, and averted eyes. “The elements of the embarrassment are
fleeting statements the individual makes about his or her respect for the
judgment of others,” he writes. “Embarrassment reveals how much the
individual cares about the rules that bind us to one another.”
In other words, you want to make sure that your spouse cares what
other people think. It’s better to mind too much than to mind too little.
No matter how great the benefits of blushing, the phenomenon of high
sensitivity raises an obvious question. How did the highly sensitive
manage to survive the harsh sorting-out process of evolution? If the bold
and aggressive generally prevail (as it sometimes seems), why were the
sensitive not selected out of the human population thousands of years
ago, like tree frogs colored orange? For you may, like the protagonist of
The Long Long Dances
, be moved more deeply than the next person by
the opening chords of a Schubert impromptu, and you may flinch more
than others at the smashing of bone and flesh, and you may have been
the sort of child who squirmed horribly when you thought you’d broken
someone’s toy, but evolution doesn’t reward such things.
Or does it?
Elaine Aron has an idea about this. She believes that high sensitivity
was not itself selected for, but rather the careful, reflective style that
tends to accompany it. “The type that is ‘sensitive’ or ‘reactive’ would
reflect a strategy of observing carefully before acting,” she writes, “thus
avoiding dangers, failures, and wasted energy, which would require a
nervous system specially designed to observe and detect subtle
differences. It is a strategy of ‘betting on a sure thing’ or ‘looking before
you leap.’ In contrast, the active strategy of the [other type] is to be first,
without complete information and with the attendant risks—the strategy
of ‘taking a long shot’ because the ‘early bird catches the worm’ and

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‘opportunity only knocks once.’ ”
In truth, many people Aron considers sensitive have some of the
twenty-seven attributes associated with the trait, but not all of them.
Maybe they’re sensitive to light and noise, but not to coffee or pain;
maybe they’re not sensitive to anything sensory, but they’re deep
thinkers with a rich inner life. Maybe they’re not even introverts—only
70 percent of sensitive people are, according to Aron, while the other 30
percent are extroverts (although this group tends to report craving more
downtime and solitude than your typical extrovert). This, speculates
Aron, is because sensitivity arose as a by-product of survival strategy,
and you need only some, not all, of the traits to pull off the strategy
effectively.
There’s a great deal of evidence for Aron’s point of view. Evolutionary
biologists once believed that every animal species evolved to fit an
ecological niche, that there was one ideal set of behaviors for that niche,
and that species members whose behavior deviated from that ideal
would die off. But it turns out that it’s not only humans that divide into
those who “watch and wait” and others who “just do it.”