What is an introvert?

What is an introvert?

An introvert is a person who sits toward the low end of Extraversion, one of the five broad dimensions psychologists use to describe how people differ. In plain words, that dimension is how much you enjoy being around people, talking, and doing lively things, and how much energy that gives you. An introvert draws less of that charge from the outside world, wants less of the stimulation on offer, and refills in quiet.

Three things follow. Company is enjoyable and also costly, so a good evening out has a bill attached. Thinking tends to happen before speech rather than during it. And solitude is restorative rather than lonely, which is the most reliable everyday marker of the low end.

Introvert is a fair word, but it names a region of a scale rather than a kind of person. The dimension came out of decades of research on the words languages keep for describing people, not from one study, and it emerged as a continuum every time (Goldberg, 1993). When the best-known type instrument was examined against continuous trait measures, its scales behaved as dimensions rather than as either-or preferences (McCrae & Costa, 1989).

Introversion is also not the absence of something. It is a smaller appetite for social and lively stimulation, in the way that a smaller appetite for salt is not a broken palate. Someone low on the trait can be warm, funny and at ease in a room, and will still leave earlier than the person beside them.

What is an introvert often confused with?

Three other things get called introversion, and the confusion matters because the remedies differ. Shyness is discomfort in social situations, especially at the start of them. Introversion is a lower pull toward those situations in the first place. A shy person may badly want the conversation and find the doorway hard; an introvert may find the doorway easy and simply not want the conversation.

Social discomfort is feeling exposed or judged in front of other people, and it sits closer to Emotional Stability than to Extraversion. Someone highly extraverted can feel it keenly, and someone deeply introverted can feel none of it. Comfort in front of strangers and audiences is measured on its own as social boldness.

Low self-confidence is believing you will handle things badly, which is separate from preferring a quieter room. Self-confidence is a trait in its own right and it varies freely across the Extraversion scale. Quiet, capable and sure of yourself is an ordinary combination, and so is loud, busy and privately uncertain.

What are the signs of an introvert?

The clearest signs are not dramatic. They are small, repeated preferences in ordinary situations.

If most of the left column sounds like an ordinary week, introvert is a fair description. If the columns split evenly, that is not indecision but the most common result there is, and the word for it is ambivert.

What are the types of introverts?

Popular articles sort introverts into four kinds: a social one who likes small groups, a thinking one who lives inside their own head, a reserved one who is slow to warm up, and a fourth built around social discomfort. It is a readable scheme and it is not a research finding. No large study has recovered four kinds of introvert.

There is a measured way to ask the same question. Beneath the domain sit narrower traits called facets, and two people with the same Extraversion score can be unalike underneath. The NEO inventories report six facets per domain (Costa & McCrae, 1992), and the BFI-2 uses a leaner set of three, with facet scores adding prediction the domain score alone misses (Soto & John, 2017).

Wellington reports 11 traits beneath Extraversion: Cheerfulness, Friendliness, Gregariousness, Assertiveness, Activity Level, Excitement Seeking, Social Boldness, Liveliness, Sociability, Playfulness, Activity Pace. The kind of introvert you are is a pattern across those.

• Low gregariousness with ordinary assertiveness: poor at parties, entirely willing to run the meeting.
• Low sociability with high warmth: happy with three people for four hours, and no appetite for a fourth.
• Low excitement seeking with normal liveliness: energetic company, as long as nothing is loud or hurried.

What does the research say about introverts?

Most of the evidence is about the Extraversion dimension as a whole, reported as averages across many people. Read it as a tendency, never as a prediction about one life.

• Positive feeling. Extraversion is linked to positive mood and Neuroticism to negative mood, as separate systems, and personality measured earlier predicted happiness ten years later (Costa & McCrae, 1980). Across six studies the relation between extraversion and pleasant affect was moderate to strong, though diary reports of mood give lower correlations than retrospective ones (Lucas & Fujita, 2000).
• Acting extraverted. When people behave more talkative and energetic than usual they report more positive feeling while they do it, and that held within the same person over weeks of reporting, for people low on the trait as well as high (Fleeson et al., 2002). Experiments assigning people at random to act introverted or extraverted found the same lift with no rise in negative feeling (Zelenski et al., 2012). The sessions were short, so this is about occasions.
• Leadership. In a review of 222 correlations from 73 samples, Extraversion was the most consistent trait correlate of leadership, at r = .31, ahead of Conscientiousness at .28 (Judge et al., 2002). A correlation of that size shifts the odds and does not sort people, so many effective leaders sit on the quiet side of the scale.
• Age. A meta-analysis of 92 longitudinal samples split Extraversion in two: social dominance, the assertive side, rose through young adulthood between about 20 and 40, while social vitality, the sociable side, rose in adolescence then fell in later life (Roberts et al., 2006).

What the introverted end is good for

No end of the scale is better, and the research does not show the quiet end outperforming the loud one in general. What it has is a different set of defaults, and defaults compound.

• Work that needs long, unbroken attention is easier to start, because solitude is not the part that costs effort.
• Fewer relationships, each given more time, tends to produce a small number of people who know you well.
• Listening happens by default rather than by discipline, and most people are under-listened to.

The costs are just as ordinary. Quiet people are under-heard in groups that reward volume and are regularly mistaken for uninterested, and contacts lapse when nobody waters them.

How does Wellington measure this?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

The free Snapshot is 60 questions, about 7 minutes, across six dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience, Honesty-Humility. Each statement is rated on a five-point accuracy scale, your Extraversion score is the average of the statements that measure it, and that average is placed against a reference sample as a percentile. The first ten questions are answered before anything is asked of you; after question ten you sign in with an email address so answers are saved and results can be shown. There is no card.

The percentile is reported in one of three bands: Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above it. Those norms are provisional until the norming sample is complete. The bands and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. Every band has its own page, written in advance by the writing and psychology team. The Quiet band page for Extraversion is The Quiet Room, headed "Your world is loud on the inside and calm on the outside". The others are The Steady Current and The Open Door, and none of the three is the good one.

The Wellington Membership, $4.99 a month, adds the Portrait, 336 questions in 4 chapters, reaching 90 traits including every Big Five facet and all 24 VIA character strengths, so the 11 traits beneath Extraversion are scored separately. The membership adds a weekly module over 104 weeks toward all 255 traits. See the methodology.

Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not built for hiring or selection, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Questions people ask

Am I an introvert or just shy?

Ask what you want when nothing is in the way. If a free evening alone sounds like a reward rather than a consolation, that is introversion. If you want the evening with people but find walking in hard, that is shyness, and it can sit anywhere on the Extraversion scale. The two often occur together, which is why the words get swapped.

Can an introvert become an extrovert?

Not into a different person, though the trait does move. People who act more outgoing than usual report more positive feeling while they do it, including people low on the trait (Fleeson et al., 2002). Shifting the underlying score is slower and smaller. Most people who want to change here want a wider range, not a new setting.

Are introverts smarter?

There is no consistent link. Reviews of personality and cognitive ability find the relationships modest and scattered, and Extraversion does not reliably track measured intelligence in either direction. The stereotype probably comes from the quiet end looking more studious rather than being more able. See personality and intelligence.

Is being an introvert bad?

No. It is one end of an ordinary dimension, and both ends have advantages and costs. Introverts report slightly less positive feeling on average (Costa & McCrae, 1980), while the extraverted end pays in restlessness and in mistaking activity for progress. That difference is an average and it predicts nothing about one life.