According to Dr. Spark, one area of future interest in research is whether we can change how introverts think about social interaction to improve their chances of rising to leadership positions. Dr. Spark said that in some situations, introverts can be more effective leaders than extroverts.
The expert told Bored Panda that extroversion is a continuum and most people fall somewhere in the middle. They’re what we call ambiverts.
“Also, there is no official cut-off on someone’s score before they are said to be an extrovert or an introvert, however, as a very rough rule of thumb (assuming you really want to divide people up into categories), it would not be unreasonable to say that 15-20% of the population are noticeably extroverted and 15-20% of the population are noticeably introverted. The remaining 60-70% of the population are probably more difficult to pigeonhole and hence may be better thought of as ambiverts,” he explained.
“A large body of evidence shows that introverted people actually engage in quite a number of extroverted behaviors in their daily lives as the specific situation demands, despite having a preference to be quiet and reserved. Equally, extroverted people engage in quite a number of introverted behaviors in their daily lives. That said, it is interesting that extroverted people have been shown to sometimes struggle when having to act introverted,” Dr. Spark told Bored Panda.
“It is a common assumption that introverts need to recharge more after social interaction. However, the research on this issue is mixed. For example, in this study, scientists found that both introverts and extroverts experienced mental depletion after interacting with others and that this depletion occurred approximately 3 hours after the interaction,” the researcher said.
“It didn’t make any difference if the person was introverted or extroverted. Then again, this study found that introverts experience slightly more negative emotion, tiredness, and more feelings of inauthenticity when acting extroverted, despite also experiencing more positive emotion (note that positive and negative emotion are actually different processes rather than being polar opposites, so it is possible to be high on both). The jury is still out on this issue, which might come as a surprise to many!”
