According to Dr. Spark from QUT, the specific context is often very important to consider whether introversion or extroversion is warranted or even preferred n a particular situation.
“For example, it’s not a good idea to be highly extroverted in a movie cinema, or when you’re in a meeting and your boss is talking. It can also be a good idea to be more introverted if you are in a leadership role and you have highly proactive team members. Extroverted leaders are more likely to be overly dominant which can disempower followers—not something you want if those followers are actually highly proactive!” he explained to me. However, there is a flip side to this.
“Conversely, it can be advantageous to be more extroverted if you are trying to be seen as more leaderlike by others and want to get promoted into leadership roles,” Dr. Spark stated.
In Dr. Spark’s opinion, at a cultural level, there is some evidence that extroversion is more highly valued than introversion. “Possibly more so in the western world, although it is important not to overestimate these differences across cultures,” he noted.
“For example, there has been some research out of the UK which showed that mothers of infant children aged 0-12 months rank-ordered extroversion as being more important for their infants than conscientiousness or intelligence. In other words, being introverted (the other end of the extroversion continuum) was not desirable as far as these mothers were concerned.”
However, the spread of Covid-19 around the globe and the ensuing lockdowns have made things more complicated. Though introverts weren’t at such a huge advantage as many of us thought they would be.
“The original expectation by many was that the pandemic would be welcome news for introverts because of the lockdown—almost as if the lockdown was geared towards introverts. However, the reality is not so simple. As it turns out, extroverts have fared better than introverts during lockdown,” Andrew noted.
“This is probably because extroverts have a higher level of well-being anyway and were probably better at drawing on their social networks with the help of modern communication technologies. Introverts who were by themselves, probably did quite well from a well-being point of view, however for those introverts who were locked down in a busy household, we can’t be so sure!”
Dr. Spark was candid that it’s true that many introverts feel pressured to be more extroverted. “In general, this pressure will often feel most powerful when you find yourself in social situations,” the personality scientist said, alluding to parties, networking events, meetings, impromptu social circles in the workplace, and similar gatherings.
“Stress levels are also elevated if you are also high in other personality traits, particularly trait neuroticism, which governs how sensitive to negative emotion you are. Some of the research my colleagues and I have done in a group leadership context suggests that when we act introverted in social situations, we are more likely to think less of ourselves—it’s almost as if we become extra self-critical.”
Something else that Dr. Spark and his colleagues found was that those people who act introverted think worse of themselves than what others think of them. “We are harder on ourselves than others are—probably because other people are too busy acting extraverted to pay much attention to us!” he said.
Finally, Dr. Spark suggested that we can check out these two personality tests to see how extroverted or introverted we are. You can find them here (Principles You) and here (Open Psychometrics). Enjoy! And let us know in the comments what you learned about yourselves, dear Readers.
The person behind ‘The Funny Introvert’ account is Ronald Rrusti, a writer, meme enthusiast, and entrepreneur, according to his website. “I have written & created thousands of jokes and viral content,” he writes.
He told Bored Panda that he prefers to be out of the spotlight, being an introvert and all. The creator of the project is incredibly humble and prefers to give credit to others, including the people whose posts he features with their permission. He also believes that there are plenty of other Instagram pages about introversion that are better than this. I think that this humility might be part of the project’s overwhelming success online.
‘The Funny Introvert’ account boasts a whopping 2.7 million loyal followers. That’s a huge amount. And the founder of the project managed to get so many fans by sharing just over 7.1k posts.
During an earlier interview with me, Dr. Spark from QUT went into more detail about introverts and extroverts.
“It is clear that introverts think about social interaction differently to extroverts, which may result in introverts choosing not to engage in the behaviors that may assist them into leadership roles (despite being perfectly capable of engaging in such behaviors),” he told Bored Panda.
“My research on introversion and leadership focuses on how introverts and extroverts think and feel about the behaviors required of leaders in leadership situations. Leadership roles typically require one to act in ways that are generally better suited to extroverts (e.g., to be assertive, social, bold, etc.). For many decades, we have known that extroverts tend to perform better in leadership roles and are selected into leadership roles more often, however, more recent scientific work has been exploring how and why this happens,” Dr. Spark explained.
“In my own work, my colleagues and I found that one of the reasons introverts are not seen to be as ‘leaderlike’ by others is because they think that leadership situations are going to be unpleasant. The technical name for this is ‘affective forecasting.’ Affective forecasting refers to the expectation we have of our future emotions, which is to say that we make a prediction about how we will feel in a future situation," he explained
“Introverts are known to underpredict how good they will feel in future social interactions if they forecast themselves acting extroverted (because, perhaps surprisingly, acting extroverted is actually quite enjoyable, even for introverts). Given leadership situations require extroverted behavior, we expected that introverts’ propensity to forecast more negative effects would probably help to explain why they do not rise into leadership positions as much as extroverts. This is indeed what we found.”
