Overvaluing Extroversion

Susan Cain in The New York Times:

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

Me thinking aloud again:

It seems to me that we do live in a culture that excessively favors extroversion, or is at least insufficiently appreciative of introversion. That's understandable. Extroverts energize social interactions, and they tend to be better in the role of social lubricant, though it's worth mentioning that a couple of introverts can be quite energized by a conversation about something that interests both. In fact, it's the intensity of introverts that can make some of them less than fully at ease with small talk in a large group. The social energy of the group can be too diffuse and superficial for introverts who tend to live more in their heads than in their immediate physical surroundings. The introvert's natural inclination is to bore down into things rather than glide across surfaces.

I know. These are broad generalizations.

I suppose extroversion and introversion have emerged as tendencies because both are forms of broad specialization that contribute to the success of human societies. But it seems especially easy for extroverts to undervalue introversion as a form of specialization, failing to appreciate that structuring an environment or pushing growth in ways that feel right to the extrovert might actually dilute and impede the special contributions of the more introverted creator. From what I've been told, this does happen in the corporate world. Engineers and tech people can feel extremely pressured to interact and grow in ways that involve awkward, unnatural stretching.

Now I'm certainly not against stretching and growing, but people are not simple learning machines. Very talented people can have minds that include built-in trade-offs that make them very good at certain activities, while rendering them very poorly suited for other activities. In other words, the talent lunch might not be free.

I can readily think of very bright people I know who do complex work that few can do, and they don't want to become managers because they feel completely ill-suited to the role of managing other people. Yet their superiors review them yearly in what becomes a game of setting up pretend growth goals. Then there is the painful review of the previous year's pretend goals, trying to appear to have made progress on the road to becoming "people persons" who are more like the extrovert who may never do the kind of work that is best done in solitude by the creative introvert.

Comments

[Dave the Carpenter]

I have been looking at the groupthink phenomenon for a few years (20?) now. It has smacked of Orwellianism at best, Communism, at worst. Groupthink spawns little in the manner of creativity, in my estimation. The entire concept of consensus, spawned in the 1980s, or thereabouts, did little towards effective problem solving. It only led to half-assed solutions that had to be revisited and re-fixed, again and again...often without any lasting resolution.

You can only chop a tree down one time. Fly over the Haiti/Dominican Republic border sometime. Maybe then you will understand. If not, well I guess you are a product of groupthinking, and if so, cannot possibly grasp what I have just written.

[retriever]

Too true....I'm the most extroverted of a family of introverts so I straddle the fence. Most of the people I currently work with consider me a bit of both. In point of fact, I find it excruciating, and distracting, working in a noisy modern open plan office. I just want to be left alone to do my work, but instead am constantly interrupted.

Education and intelligence complicate the issue. People branded anti-social misfits by a bunch of stupid party animals can be quite gregarious and animated when they find people who share their intellectual wattage and interests. Geeks learn from grade school on to keep a low profile to avoid being bullied by the dumb jocks. But they can be very sociable when around people who are as smart as they are.

To some extent, being intelligent or at least using one's brain tends to isolate one socially. Why booze is so popular? The great leveller... Most of the things we do to be sociable involve showing that we aren't a threat, that we are just a regular person.

[Mike Rebate]

The situation wasn't a group think tank but I now wonder if the thought of playing records with a laser would have dawned on me if not in the company of my college dorm buddies.

For reasons which remain a mystery to this day, I blurted out "someday they will be playing records with a laser" in the fall of 1973 while putting an LP on my BSR turntable. No, we were not physics majors, electronic geeks or nerds. The notion of playing records with lasers was a bizarre, momentary flash.

10 years later I was experimenting with developing a consumer product that utilized polyprolene netting from a craft store to fashion a body scrub. Unfortunately I never envisioned the design (those $1.00 colorful puff balls made from the same net) which began to appear in retailers in 1986 and can still be found at many stores.