Introversion vs Extroversion

ABC. This podcast contains audio advertising. To hear it without ads, head to the ABC Listen app now. This is an ABC podcast. So I worked at this advertising creative agency and they did this annual award ceremony where they award people for, I don't know, like funny things or silly things. And I was sort of sitting in the audience, obviously not wanting attention, but sort of waiting for my award because I worked really hard at this job. I'd like to stay late, you know, I'd given like so much to it. And you know, the end of the ceremony, they finally started announcing this award and it was for like the person who gave their life over to it and stayed really late and like had no life because they worked so much and it was the midnight oil award. It was to Jessica Pan. And they thought it was this like huge compliment and I was so offended and so hurt by it because I wanted to be noticed for creativity or my ideas or things like that. You don't want to be rewarded just for like staying late at work. It's really embarrassing. And that was one of the things that sort of tipped me off the edge really. This is Dubia's award winner, Jessica Pan. And when this all went down, she was in her early 30s wondering what had happened to her journalism career and feeling deeply lonely. The midnight oil award was the final indignity. And it sparked a year-long quest to see if she could change a key aspect of her personality once she felt was responsible for so many of her troubles. You see Jessica was a lifelong introvert, actually a shintravert. So shintravert is a word I made up. It's not technical and it just stands for shy introvert. Basically, introversion is a spectrum and you know there are introverts who enjoy public speaking but they need to be alone to recharge after a party and then there are introverts who also need to be alone to recharge but who would be absolutely terrified to give a speech because they're also shy. And for the most part, Jessica was fine with her shintraversion until the loneliness crept in. I just sort of hit this rock bottom moment where I thought, "Am I using this label of introvert to say no to absolutely anything that gives me anxiety?" And what would happen if I finally let go of that and just sort of did all the things that scared me? What would happen? You were listening to All in the Mind, I'm Sana Qadar. And today we've got part one of a two-parter on introversion versus extroversion. The benefits and downsides of each, how these traits can impact our mental health and whether we can change if we want to. Next week we'll take a deeper look at the science of personality but today part one, Jessica's journey. Can an introvert learn to become more extroverted and why making friends after your 20s is so painful? Jessica's loneliness crept up on her. As her life changed in ways, it inevitably does as you get older. I think it was two different things, which is that I became a freelancer and I was working from home and you just start feeling quite lonely and you sort of watch the world go by and you don't really feel a part of it if you are the kind of person I am. And also I'd reached that age where I was in my early 30s and so many of my friends had left the city and we're having kids or had returned home or they were just, I just felt like I didn't have any close friends left where I was in this big massive city of London. And it feels quite lonely when you're in this really big bus and city and you don't actually feel like you have that many connections. And being shy does not help when you're in that kind of situation. But this is who Jessica was. This is who she'd always been. I was really shy kid, hated, my mom would throw me these big birthday parties and she never understood why I absolutely hated them and I didn't know how to explain to her. She was this massive extrovert that I didn't like all this attention. I hated giving speeches at school and presentations. I would fake sick. I really, yeah, always my whole life. Yeah, right. And so as you got older, how did this manifest in your life? What would you do or not do in social situations? I just would never go networking the idea of walking into a room full of strangers and talking to them terrified me. At work, I would never want to give a presentation or volunteer for these things. I felt like I was giving myself my own glass ceiling. Yeah, so I felt like it was something I lived with, but then sort of reached this pinnacle of, I guess, loneliness about where the sort of the book begins. That book is her first called "Sorium Light." I didn't want to come. In introverts year of living dangerously. But we need to clear one thing up first. There is nothing wrong with introversion. And introverts don't need to change. Jessica only reached the point of wanting to change when she became unhappy with her introversion. For others, introversion continues to suit them just fine. This short definition is like if two people go to a party and one leaves feeling really recharge and energize and one leaves feeling kind of exhausted, the one who is exhausted is the introvert. And so, by definition, introverts, they relish solitude, they don't like small talk, they love one-on-one conversations. In general, they avoid public speaking, although definitely there are introverts who enjoy it and love it. There seem to be more sensitive, they're really good at concentrating on tasks really well. You might remember there was also a popular TED talk from about a decade ago by writer Susan Cain that laid out the many advantages of introversion. It's called "The Power of Introverts." And introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable. According to research. I was aware of Susan Cain's book Quiet, which I quote a lot in the book. But Susan Cain was a shy introvert. She hates giving speeches and she knew that she had to put herself on stage, do that TED talk, if she wanted to put this message out to millions of people. She had to challenge herself as well. And I really wanted to just sort of see someone else do all of these scary things. And I actually literally was looking for that book and was like, "Oh my God, that book doesn't exist." That's so weird to me. And so that's kind of a small reason why I wanted to do this as well. So the very first scary experiment that Jessica threw herself into was actually one of her nightmares. Talking to strangers or trying to, anyways. To help her get started, she consulted with clinical psychologist Professor Stefan Hoffman from Boston University. So Stefan Hoffman helps people get over their anxiety. And his research found that the best way to do this is through exposure therapy. So if one of his patients had social anxiety, he would advise them to go out on the street and start singing in public or to spill coffee all over themselves in public again and again or to ask people on the train for $400. You know, your basic nightmares where you are almost guaranteed to be totally rejected. And the point of this is to realize that you've done your worst fear and people have probably judged you, but you survived. You didn't get fired, your partner didn't leave you, no one arrested you. And that is this idea to sort of build up your confidence so that you know that you can live through these super embarrassing things. So what was the super embarrassing thing you went off and did in public? So he decided that since I hate talking to strangers, it's one of my biggest fears that I should humiliate myself in front of strangers on purpose at the most embarrassing place which we deemed would be the London Underground. And so he said, "Why don't you ask people the question, excuse me, I forgot. Is there a queen of England? And if so, what is her name?" That's really embarrassing to have to ask. Yeah, I feel like even a normal, not like I'm abnormal, but even like a not shy person would bulk at that. Yeah, hands down. And I didn't want to do it, but then I just thought, "Why not? I wanted to do everything." And so yeah, I hailed down like a person in the tube and I just said, "Excuse me, I forgot. Is there a queen of England?" And if so, what's her name?" And this man told me that her name was Victoria. And I remember like my friend saying no matter what you do in this situation, when you before you ask the question, you can't predict what's going to happen. And that was so right because I never thought that would happen. I thought, "Yeah." Someone would laugh at me or yell at me or something. I never thought that they would say it was Victoria. Yeah. So that was the experiment. I had to do that to like 15 people. It was very nerve-wracking. I'm like actually starting to sweat thinking about it again. Did you have any positive encounters with that? I mean, yeah, a lot of the people, like nobody was mean to me. People sort of looked a bit strange and some women were just like, "It's Elizabeth." They were kind. I think that we overestimate how judgmental people will be and underestimate how kind people will be. So step one was a success. She'd made contact with strangers, even if it was under really weird circumstances. The next challenge was to actually connect with strangers. For this, she spoke to behavioral scientists Professor Nicholas Eppley from the Chicago Booth School of Business. Well, he sort of told me about how he told me about this concept called deep talk versus surface talk. So surface talk is like what you had for dinner and the weather and how you get to work and all these really basic things and how deep talk is more about your fears and your desires and your wishes and how a lot of people can spend almost their entire life in surface talk. and how that's just not meaningful and that's not how you make true connections with people. And I'm sure we all have moments like this or friends like this where you would just sort of get stuck talking about the most boring things. And he said that if you want to go into deep talk and you don't know how, you have to be the person to make the first move. And so he said this motto, which I absolutely loved, which is nobody waves, but everybody waves back and how you have to make the first move. And then it just totally works. Like if you do wave to someone, even if they think you're being very strange, they would wave back. If you say hi to someone, they'll say hi back. But there's this massive barrier between the first person to say that hello, to make that wave that I found so hard to cross. Professor Nicholas Eppley's research has looked extensively into the expectations and assumptions we all make about what other people are thinking about us. In a recent series of experiments published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, he and his colleagues had hundreds of strangers, engage in conversations, some deep, some shallow. In the deep conversations, people had to reveal intimate information about their thoughts, feelings, or experiences. The researchers found people consistently overestimated how awkward the deep conversations would be. And they also assumed their conversation partner wouldn't really care about the intimate information they'd be revealing, given they were just a stranger. But in fact, participants reported feeling more connected to the people they had deep conversations with than those they had shallow conversations with. They also felt happier for having had those conversations. It's these kinds of misunderstandings about what we'll make for an awkward, verse pleasant interaction that can keep us circling in shallow conversational waters. - Yes, so what did you do? How did you go about trying to have deeper conversations with people? - Well, I also took this class in London called How to Be Sociable, which sort of talked about the same concepts and throughout the class, you're paired with a different stranger and you don't know either those names or anything about yourselves, but you have to play this thing called vulnerability tennis. And the whole concept is that you, one of you says something embarrassing about yourself or shares of vulnerability. And the other person doesn't respond to that. They share their own insecurity. And he's sort of bat these insecurities back and forth and it's to show that we actually have a lot in common. It's not so scary to share these things. You won't be so badly judged by them. And it's the most freeing thing to say these things to a total stranger. So yeah, I was paired with this man who, he just seemed confident and he was in his 20s, he's late 20s and I didn't even know why he was there because he seemed like he would be sociable. But he, you wanted to make new friends, he didn't know how, he was insecure about how much money he made and that he made lefts than his wife. We sort of share these things that you would never admit to other people or even your friends or your family. And I felt like we left with this amazing connection. But then again, because we had shared these things in this sacred space, we couldn't actually go on to be friends because it was just too weird. But I did from that on, the take that lesson with me in life to sort of, when you're stuck in this wheel of just weather and what you're gonna eat and what your recipe is for food, you can just finally be like, what did you feel about when that thing happened to you? Or do you ever think this? And I think people generally really appreciate being asked these questions and finally, you know, going deeper. - Okay, nice. All right, so as part of your, you know, you're being extroverted, you then started to try to make new friends as opposed to just making contact with strangers and never seeing them again. And try to make friends as you get older, gets harder, doesn't it? Like it's just not as easy in your 30s as it is in your early 20s. - Right, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I think the studies say that we have like the most friends will ever have at 29 and then sort of drops off a cliff and other studies say, it happens at 25. And I think it's because we're not at university anymore, usually we're not at these new jobs where we're all starting new. - Yeah. - Yeah, definitely is hard. - And I think people also really struggle with the idea of trying to specifically go out and seek new friendships. You know, it makes people feel maybe a bit icky or a loserish or something like that. Did you struggle with that at all, trying to make a really concerted effort to make new friends? - I do find that people find the concept of saying out loud, I want new friends really embarrassing. And because when you say that people here, I have no friends and that's not true. Like I have lots of friends, they live all over the world, like I live in Beijing, I live in Australia, I'm from the States, I live in London now. So like a lot of my best friends are totally very far away. But you obviously want to make friends in your city, people you can grab coffee with and get to know. And I think that it is hard to convince people about this, but I also think that most people are very open to making a new friend if that's presented to them. And one of the things I learned about this is, if you like, I don't know if there's a new person at work or someone you see around or I don't know if you're, if you're like a mom at the school gates and there's like another mom there that you like, why don't you just make the first move? I think that's the biggest thing is sort of that. Nobody waves everybody waves back concept back again. So throughout the book I interviewed these mentors, I interviewed this friendship mentor and she said her biggest advice was, make the first move and make the second move. People are busy, people are hesitant about everybody's done all this research that I've done and think about these things. And you know, really put yourself out there and I think that the worst thing that happens is they say no or they don't want to. And then that's fine. And you can go on knowing that and you can move on to like a different friend who you'll like more and who'll like you back. - That's interesting. I've never heard that before. I've gotten the sense that like, make the first move is what you gotta do but the second move that's so important because that's really where it can go either direction, right? And it takes so much guts to actually do that. Like a lot of bravery. I mean, it's what I think struggle with when it comes to making friends, I'm terrified of making the first move or the second move. But if someone does it with me, I'm like, yeah, I'm here for it. It's great. Like how did you, you know, being such a shy introvert? How did you psych yourself up and like get brave to be able to do this? - That's a really good question. It was really, really hard. But I think because I'd interviewed so many people and I'd done the research, I know it works. I know that if you talk to a stranger, it's usually actually something that gives you a dopamine hit and makes you happy. If you reach out to people, you make new friends like that, you know, that obviously contributes to our happiness. And I just thought, I don't really have anything to lose because I'd also humiliated myself through Stefan Hoffman's experiment. And so I knew that, you know, after doing that, after asking people in London who the queen was, I knew that there was nothing that would ever be as embarrassing as that. And that actually helped me, you know, ask someone I kind of knew if they wanted to grab a coffee because normally, like typically they're actually really happy you asked and like really relieved you asked. 'Cause I feel like, I don't know what it's like in Australia, but I feel like here in England, people are a bit closed off. They don't want to make that move compared to say, you know, maybe a chat, like the States or something. - Yeah, in Australia, yeah, it can be, I found it difficult for a long time to make friends here. I've been here a while now, so it's been okay. But I recently had someone who made that first move to initiate like a girl day. And I was very appreciative, it was great. I was like, thank you for having the guts that I did. But anyways, getting back to your story. So in the effort to start making friends, you downloaded a friend dating app, which I didn't even know existed. Like a Tinder-like thing for friends. So what was that like? How did that go? - So I'm married, so I never done the dating app thing. But basically, Bumble has a feature for friends called BumbleBFF. And it's basically the same sort of concept. You swipe through, you see photos of people, you can see their hobbies. And yeah, you just sort of match with them and then you start chatting. And I met like tons of different women for comedy shows or a drink or coffee or a pub quiz. And I think just like with online dating, it's a little bit awkward sometimes. Sometimes you don't have the spark. But also sometimes it's fine in you and you make a friend. And I feel like it was just a great experiment actually to see what different kinds of people were out there. And yeah, I actually really love to and totally recommend doing it. - Yeah, tell me about the awkward parts though. Like you can have many dates that are duds, whether it's girl dates that were duds. - Yeah, I think there were a few of those where maybe the person I'd matched with was really stuck in Surface Talk for ages. But if you don't even know a person, Surface Talk is like 10 times as boring if you don't even know them. And that was quite hard. Or it should be said that like with friendship, you also need a spark. It's not just like in romantic relationships. Like you also need to like have some sort of thing in common or you need to enjoy another's company. And I think that that can be a little bit tricky to find. But I think much easier than with romantic relationships. - For all her app based efforts, the closest friend Jessica actually made during this time was someone in her own building. But going on the dates and doing the communication tasks all gave her the confidence to broach that conversation IRL in real life. - So in the building I live in London, there's several flats in it and nobody ever talks to each other. Surprise, surprise. - People totally avoid each other. Carly even say hi if you see each other in the hallway. And I'd come back from a run and was standing over to the building. And this woman popped out to like take her trash out. And I was like, oh, I'm not like here, I'm like, I'm Lloyd Ring, like I live here. And she was like, oh, I know you live here, like I've seen you around. And then she was about to go back into her own life. And I was just like, hey, should we like exchange numbers in case there's an emergency or like there's a fire or something? Which I feel like is not the coolest thing to say, but also very useful, in case there is an emergency. And she was like, yeah, let's do that. - That small effort, led to some texts, which led to a dinner, which led to a full-on friendship. To think, just a year earlier, this would have never happened. I would have just walked away and pretended like I didn't even see her. I would have crossed the street as soon as I saw the door open, definitely. Right, and I think that's been the biggest takeaway from this whole year is finally putting myself out there, actually making a close friend. And yeah, it's been really great, actually. I think she's one of my best friends. (upbeat music) You're listening to All in the Mind, I'm Sonak Dar. Today, an introvert's quest to become more extroverted. But let's zoom out of Jessica's story for just a moment and find out how many introverts first extroverts are there. Is one of these traits more common than the other? So basically, when we're looking at measuring human personality, the dominant model is pretty much known as the big five or the five factor model. Dr. Andrew Spark is a personality scientist at the Queensland University of Technology. And the big five he's talking about include traits like conscientiousness, extroversion, and neuroticism. We all have some variation of these traits. We just differ in terms of which ones are stronger or weaker. And generally speaking, they're pretty much normally distributed, which pretty much means that, you know, as far as extroversion is concerned, most people are somewhere in the middle and are probably better described as actually as ambivotes. If sometimes I get really, you know, I get people that really want to push me on an art. So on this question, which is fair enough. And I would say, look, we would probably find that around, say, 15% of the population, 15 to 20% of the population, probably really stand out as being truly extroverted. Now, these people are really talkative, they're energetic, they're assertive, they're love social interaction. And then equally down the other end of the continuum, you've probably got roughly an equal number of introverts who are very clearly, you know, much more shy, they're reserved, and that sort of thing. And they tend to blend more into the background by choice. - We're going to hear a lot more from Dr. Andrew Spark next week when we dive into the neuroscience and psychology of introversion versus extroversion. We'll also talk about whether there's any gender differences in these traits. In our own attempts to connect with more people, journalists and self-described shy introvert, Jessica Pan, observed a big difference between how men do it versus women. Okay, so you've talked about like, you know, putting yourself out there and making friends, and you know, if you just do that, you can make some really wonderful relationships. But you have a really interesting chapter in the book where you discuss both loneliness and conversations with men in quite a lot of depth. And you know, just sort of anecdotally, or in my own experiences, I get the sense that men have a hard time connecting like this. And I think you observed that as well. What did you discover when you tried to have deeper conversations with men? I think, I mean, you're right. Like, so studies say that women are just naturally much, much better at this, at like emotionally connecting over things. And I don't know why, because I'm not myself a psychologist. I assume it's something to do with, you know, masculinity and not wanting to be seen a certain way. And also men, I don't want to stereotype, but a lot of men. So basically, I live in England. The Premier League is a massive thing. So many men are football fans, compared to women. And they, I feel like when I would go out with my husband and his friends, they would just spend an hour talking about football. Or he'd go out with his friends. His best friends spend two or three hours out. He'd come back and be like, oh, it's so-and-so. Like, is he getting married soon? Or are they trying for kids? Or didn't he start a new job? Aren't they moving? Like, isn't his dad sick or something? And he was like, I have no idea. Wow. Like, my husband was like, I don't know. We didn't talk about any of that stuff. We literally talked about football. And I was just like, oh my god. And I think that does serve its purpose, where it allows men to go out and socialize without feeling this pressure of being examined. But I also think they're huge limitations to that, where they don't feel close. They don't have anyone to vent to, except for their partners, really. And I think it's just so much more useful to vent to someone who would really understand your perspective. And so when you did try to have deeper conversations with men, how did that go? I mean, I think with everything I did in this book, it's important to say that I didn't talk to strangers who were scary or-- I didn't talk to anyone in like a dark alley at night. I picked the right people. You want to feel comfortable. And I don't want them to feel uncomfortable. But yeah, so I picked like friends, like, people I kind of knew well to sort of try to ask more about their life instead of football. And I feel like it went pretty well. They opened up because they were sort of pleasantly surprised. Yeah, I asked one of my friends. He sort of traveled by himself for a year. And I was like, if I traveled by myself for a year, I would have been really lonely. And he was like, I was really lonely. He admitted that. Or normally, you hear about the amazing things someone did, but you don't ever hear about something like that. By the end of her year-long journey into extraversion, Jessica had learned to talk to strangers, learned to connect more deeply with others, and made a close friend. She'd also try her hand at improv and stand up comedy. But the culmination of her efforts was to host a dinner party, something that had long been at the top of her list of nightmare activities. To me, a dinner party is the epitome of so many fears it's like, okay, so you're hosting, you're bringing together different people, and you're responsible for the fun they're having, and you also have to cook for them, and you have to feed them. And if it's a bad party, it's your fault. And also, you can be judged by your home, your hosting skills, and you don't have like an exit strategy. You know, normally if you're like, sacking yourself up to go to a networking event or party, you're like, okay, but if I talk to two people, I can leave. You're in your own home, you cannot leave. Or it's very frowned upon me to leave. Definitely. But I also thought like, I wanted to be the kind of person who could put on a spread and have like different people from different parts of my life come over. I invited people from my comedy class, and people from the friend dating app, and people from improv. People I'd met along the whole year to come to my house. Yeah, I mean, there was a bit of awkwardness, but it sounds like it mostly went well. Can you sort of describe how it went? Well, I feel like you do feel responsibility as a host to paper over awkward silences, 'cause you know everything about everyone. And so if one of your friends says something to another friend and you know that friend feels very strongly about this issue or has experience with it, you wanna jump in and be like, oh, well, David actually worked there for 20 years. And so I felt like I awkwardly was doing that. And also, I'm not a great chef. The food was pretty average, I would say. But yeah, I think that it's great to just sort of see everyone else's conversations take off. And like, people then take control. And it's great to see them making their own connections in your home. Yeah, how did it feel to pull that off at the end, you know, one of your big nightmares and have it go mostly well? Well, I do wanna stress that like, because I'm still an introvert. I was like absolutely wrecked afterwards. I was so exhausted because you have to be fully on. But it was, it actually felt really satisfying. Okay, after this year of, you know, living like an extrovert, that's sort of wrapped up now. What have you taken from that experience? What skills and how have you changed since trying all of this? Well, I feel like if I started the year as a shy introvert, a shim trovert, I've gotten over my fear of talking to strangers like completely. And I would say I'm more of like a gregarious introvert, which is like, grin trovert. So during lockdown and London, our local cafe is like the only place near us that stayed open. And, you know, I'd go in there every day with a mask on. And it was like my only human interaction. But I would like have the most amazing banter with these baristas. And it was like the best feeling. And, you know, previously, I've never talked to the baristas. I'd always feel way too shy to do that. So I feel like that's completely changed. Like I don't feel scared to talk to strangers now. And it's like, I can't believe I'm saying that. And are you happier now that you've made this change? Like how do you feel about your life now as a grin trovert rather than a shim trovert? Yeah, I feel like, I think there's research that says that, you know, by the time we're 30, our personalities are pretty fully formed. But then there's other research that says like, it's not just nature and nurture. You can also change by what you do. So, you know, your personality can change as a result of action. So like, if you think about it, if you want to train and climb from on Everest, you would be completely changed by that experience. If you did a year like my year, you'd also be changed. And so I find that really freeing and comforting, knowing that you don't always have to be bound to the person you've been your entire life. That's Jessica Penn, journalist, and author of "Saurie I'm Late." I didn't want to come. Next week, we're going to get into the science of personality. Whether the brains of introverts and extroverts are different and how we develop these traits, that's in part two of our two-parter on "Interversion vs. Extroversion." This episode was produced by James Bullin. Our sound engineer was Isabella Trobiano. I'm Santa Codar. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time. You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio, and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.