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

parties a year, Emily wants zero.
Greg says that Emily should make more of an effort. He accuses her of
being antisocial. “I 
am
social,” she says. “I love you, I love my family, I
love my close friends. I just don’t love dinner parties. People don’t really
relate
at those parties—they just 
socialize
. You’re lucky because I devote
all my energy to you. You spread yours around to everyone.”
But Emily soon backs off, partly because she hates fighting, but also
because she doubts herself. 
Maybe I
am 
antisocial
, she thinks. 
Maybe there
is 
something wrong with me
. Whenever she and Greg argue about this,
she’s flooded with childhood memories: how school was tougher for her
than for her emotionally hardier younger sister; how she seemed to
worry more than other people did about social issues, like how to say no
when someone asked her to get together after school and she preferred
to stay home. Emily had plenty of friends—she’s always had a talent for
friendship—but she never traveled in packs.
Emily has suggested a compromise: What if Greg gives his dinner
parties whenever she’s out of town visiting her sister? But Greg doesn’t
want to host dinners by himself. He loves Emily and wants to be with

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her, and so does everyone else, once they get to know her. So why does
Emily withdraw?
This question, for Greg, is more than mere pique. Being alone for him
is a kind of Kryptonite; it makes him feel weak. He had looked forward
to a married life of shared adventures. He’d imagined being part of a
couple at the center of things. And he’d never admitted it to himself, but
for him being married meant never having to be by himself. But now
Emily is saying that he should socialize without her. He feels as if she’s
backing out of a fundamental part of their marriage contract. And he
believes that something is indeed wrong with his wife.
Is something wrong with me?
It’s not surprising that Emily asks herself this
question, or that Greg aims this charge at her. Probably the most
common—and damaging—misunderstanding about personality type is
that introverts are antisocial and extroverts are pro-social. But as we’ve
seen, neither formulation is correct; introverts and extroverts are
differently
social. What psychologists call “the need for intimacy” is
present in introverts and extroverts alike. In fact, people who value
intimacy highly don’t tend to be, as the noted psychologist David Buss
puts it, “the loud, outgoing, life-of-the-party extrovert.” They are more
likely to be someone with a select group of close friends, who prefers
“sincere and meaningful conversations over wild parties.” They are more
likely to be someone like Emily.
Conversely, extroverts do not necessarily seek closeness from their
socializing. “Extroverts seem to need people as a forum to fill needs for
social impact, just as a general needs soldiers to fill his or her need to
lead,” the psychologist William Graziano told me. “When extroverts
show up at a party, everyone knows they are present.”
Your degree of extroversion seems to influence how many friends you
have, in other words, but not how good a friend you are. In a study of
132 college students at Humboldt University in Berlin, the psychologists
Jens Aspendorf and Susanne Wilpers set out to understand the effect of
different personality traits on students’ relationships with their peers and
families. They focused on the so-called Big Five traits: Introversion-

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Extroversion; Agreeableness; Openness to Experience; Conscientiousness;
and Emotional Stability. (Many personality psychologists believe that
human personality can be boiled down to these five characteristics.)
Aspendorf and Wilpers predicted that the extroverted students would
have an easier time striking up new friendships than the introverts, and
this was indeed the case. But if the introverts were truly antisocial and
extroverts pro-social, then you’d suppose that the students with the most
harmonious relationships would also be highest in extroversion. And this
was not the case at all. Instead, the students whose relationships were
freest of conflict had high scores for agreeableness. Agreeable people are
warm, supportive, and loving; personality psychologists have found that
if you sit them down in front of a computer screen of words, they focus
longer than others do on words like 
caring, console
, and 
help
, and a
shorter time on words like 
abduct, assault
, and 
harass
. Introverts and
extroverts are equally likely to be agreeable; there is no correlation
between extroversion and agreeableness. This explains why some
extroverts love the stimulation of socializing but don’t get along