Introversion: the Book

[jsburbidge]

Having picked up Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking, I was, as a thoroughgoing introvert, at least expecting applicable descriptions, if not insights.

 

Indeed, there are a few points where I found myself in agreement with the text - for example, in her treatment of the current fad in schools for group activity as opposed to individual learning.[1]

 

However, I generally did not see myself reflected in the book. The author spends a lot of time talking about traits such as fear of public speaking (I have never had difficulty speaking in front of groups) or nerves when confronted by crowded parties (I don't get nervous in such contexts, just very, very bored). I like throwing dinner parties (with, I grant you, interesting people).

 

Great blocks of the book are anecdata, although she cites some research. The research looks valid as far as it goes, but has the problem of her taking a probably multiply-caused phenomenon and then focussing on one cause which explains some of the cases, and not casting her net more widely.

 

Eventually I got to the back of the book, and there she says: "Contemporary personality psychologists may have a conception of introversion and extroversion that differs from the one I use in this book. Adherents of the Big Five taxonomy often view ...  the tendency to have a cerebral nature, a rich inner life, a strong conscience, some degree of anxiety (especially shyness), and a risk-averse nature as belonging to categories quite separate from introversion." This might explain why those traits, all tangled up in her treatment, result in a portrait I don't recognize or find useful, although some are more applicable than others. (I'll cheerfully accept the "cerebral" label, and I'm broadly risk-averse and conflict-averse.)

 

In the same place she explained, sort of, her decision to misspell extravert as "extrovert" throughout the book, which was a constant irritant.

 

She wants to cast introverts as otherwise "normal" but shy, sensitive, and inward turning, probably because that's her experience, but also because it's an easier case to sell to extraverts than introverts who avoid many forms of socializing without shyness as an excuse.

 

This limits the overall usefulness of the book.

 

It's a pity, because the introversion / extraversion division is directly relevant to the work from home / from the office tug-of-war which is going to kick into high gear as the COVID lockdown homes to an end. I already see articles relating some managers' (probably extraverts) wish to get everyone back into a common location as soon as practicably possible, and other analyses indicating that work from home is generally associated with greater efficiency. It's relevant, too, to all the discussion of getting kids back to school.[2]

 

[1]This was not in place in my day, but my daughter's homework seemed to be all group work where most of the students could skip learning by depending on the one person in the group who did study.  But there are problems beyond that.

 

In about 1993, I was working for a branch of  Thompson and they had a current surge of bringing in in-house courses.  They had a new course called "Problem Solving", to which I duly signed up.

 

It turned out not to be about "problem solving" as such but about "group problem solving".  The idea was to provide experience demonstrating that shared insights would outperform individual abilities.

 

Except...

 

It started out by handing out a set of 20 rebuses for everybody to try to solve. Then people were put into small groups to pool their results, with the reasonable expectation that the groups would perform better. I solved all 20 and was held back from being in a small group accordingly.

 

After some discursive talk about group problem solving, the course ended with a simulated emergency simulation (crash landing in the Arctic: what do you do?). Again, one handed in one's individual choices, got together in small groups, and handed in the group results. These were then matched up against what experts identified as the best choices.

 

I handed in my choices. In the small group I was outvoted. In the end, the results were that I not only scored higher than my group, but I scored higher than any other group or individual.

 

So my takeaway was not what the course was, I presume, supposed to give me as a takeaway: my two conclusions were that (1) I should choose to work on my own wherever possible and (2) unless I was dealing with somebody else with clear expertise or demonstrably high intelligence I should probably assume myself probably to be correct in the case of disagreement.

 

[2]When I was in primary school I would have loved to be at home with "remote learning" for a year and away from the little barbarians in my classes, especially if I could have done the work at my own pace. It would have saved the need to read under the desk.