Quiet: The Power of Introverts

each year Microsoft Research hosts hundreds of influential speakers from around the world including leading scientists renowned experts in technology book authors and leading academics and makes videos of these lectures freely available good afternoon my name is Amy Draves and I'm here to introduce Susan Cain who is joining us as part of the Microsoft Research visiting speaker series susan is here today to discuss her book quiet the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking we all know introverts in our lives they are the co-workers I would prefer to listen than to speak or would choose to work independently rather than participate in a group brainstorming session the reality is that introverts are often undervalued in the current culture of American business and we lose a lot by continuing to undervalue them before becoming an author Susan Cain worked as a corporate lawyer and as a negotiations consultant and quiet is one of January's January's Amazon's best of the month and it just hit number 4 on the New York Times bestseller list in its first week of publication it is her first book please join me in welcoming her a very warm welcome thank you everyone can you all hear me excellent okay well I want to talk to you today about introversion and extraversion which I have come to believe are as profound a part of our identities as our gender and that therefore it's extremely important to know where we fall on the introvert extrovert spectrum and when I say this I'm not talking about where do you appear to fall I'm because in this extroverted culture of ours we all tend to act a lot more extroverted than we really are right so I'm talking about who are you really if you could spend your time exactly as you please your work days your weekends would you be more of an introvert or would you be more of an extrovert and we're going to try to answer this question very quickly so what I'm going to ask you to do is just to quickly break up into groups of six and we're going to come together and have you all share a very private personal and profound experience from your childhood you think illuminates who you are and then we're going to pick the most private in the most personal out of these groups and share them with the entire audience yeah right I'm just kidding we're not really going to do that but for the brief moment when you thought I was actually serious how are you feeling and what were you thinking right you were probably thinking like how do I get out of the room right now without insulting the speaker um or I don't know maybe there were some of you were there some of you who are thinking that actually sounds like a nice chance to chat okay not so much well let's just take a quick a quick show of hands how many of you would say you were introverts oh my gosh it might actually be a hundred percent let me ask it the other way any extroverts in the room okay so probably what maybe four or five percent of you okay so the real question is why you know what what is it that makes you an introvert what is it that makes you an extrovert these are terms that we kind of throw around but I don't think that we really know what we mean by them and it turns out that what's at the bottom of all of this is the amount of stimulation that you like so introverts are people who prefer lower levels of stimulation and I'm talking about social stimulation but I'm talking about other kinds of stimulation in general generally speaking there are exceptions introverts would prefer you know less noise more quiet that kind of thing whereas extroverts really do truly crave more stimulation for them to feel at their best and to feel most energized so this is why an introvert would generally socially rather have a glass of wine with a close friend as opposed to go to a party full of strangers and you'll note when I say this that then I'm giving you a social example because I think there's a really problematic misconception about what introversion is we tend to equate it to some degree with being antisocial and it's not that it's just a different way of being social you know it's seeking kind of quieter way of being social but but it's also as I said about other kinds of stimulation and this is important to understand so for example the the psychologist Russell Dean did a study where he had people solve math problems introverts and extroverts with different levels of background noise playing and what he found was that the introverts solved the problems quit more quickly more effectively when the noise was lower when the background noise was lower and the extroverts performed better when the background noise was higher and this is a really important thing to understand because what it's telling us is that we kind of all have sweet spots I like to call them you know sweet spots of how much stimulation we need to feel at our best and if we can manage to set up our lives so that we are living as much as possible within our sweet spots both socially and acoustically and everything else then we will tend to be at our most powerful now the reason I wrote this book is because for introverts it's really hard to do that it's really hard to do that because we live in a society that is organized for extroverts you know that the stimulation levels are all kind of set up to maximize the energies of extroverts in general and less so for introverts and it may be different actually at a company like Microsoft so I'd love to hear from you guys when when we get to the Q&A at the end but in general in our culture the bias against introversion it's so deep and it's so profound and we internalize it from such an early age we don't even realize that we're doing it but you know it happens young from the minute a child goes off to preschool and they're immediately presented with a group environment that they're supposed to be plunging right into and if they don't they sense that they're not meeting some kind of a social norm they know it at a very young age and teachers have been shown to believe that the majority of teachers believe that the ideal student is an extrovert even though by the way introverted kids get better grades in general same thing in many workplaces and again I would love to hear your experiences here but we are increasingly setting up our workplaces so that people have to be you know kind of interacting all day long and open plan offices and when it comes to leadership when it comes to leadership we find that introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions in favor of extroverts even though recent research by Adam grant at the Wharton School tells us that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do they deliver better outcomes and the reason is by the way that they are less if they are managing proactive employees who are creative and kind of generating their own ideas an introverted leader is much less likely to try to kind of put their own stamp on things and instead they let other people run with their ideas and let them implement them whereas extroverted leader might quite unwittingly just be sort of dominant and not letting other ideas come to the fore now I also want to talk to you about kind of on a deeper and more profound level the way in which our society would be a better place and might might literally depend that the survival and the the thriving of our society might depend on having a real balance of power between introverts and extroverts and the way I'm going to show this to you at first it's going to be it's I'm going to start in a kind of unlikely place but I want to start by taking you with me to a colony of fruit flies and to the animal kingdom in general we're going to start with fruit flies and then we're going to make our way up to humans one of the most interesting things I learned when I was researching my book is that there are animal introverts and animal extroverts in many different species throughout the animal kingdom I mean like who knew but it's true and when you look at fruit flies you find that they're what biologists call sitter fruit flies and there are over fruit flies and the sitter fruit flies are exactly what they sound like they kind of tend to you know sort of hop up and down in place and the rover fruit flies are much more exploratory and they kind of go roaming the the outer margins of fruit fly society and they do this for a reason they do this because they have different survival strategies each one does better in different kinds of conditions and I want to illustrate this by moving now a little bit up further up the chain of the animal kingdom I'm going to talk to you about pumpkinseed fish and this fascinating experiment that was done by an evolutionary biologist named David Sloan Wilson who he went to this pond of where he found lots of pumpkin seed fish and and he dropped a gigantic trap right into the middle of the pond an event which he says from the fish's perspective must have seemed you know his alien as a spaceship landing the middle of Times Square and what happened what he found was that the more introverted fish sort of hovered judiciously on the sidelines of the pond and didn't get anywhere near the trap that David Sloan Wilson had put in and the more extraverted fish the rover fish they were like what's that thing in middle of the pond I've got to go check it out and they would swimming right up to it and they were immediately trapped and so you know had that had that trap in an actual predator in that scenario it was the extroverted fish who would have perished and the introverted fish who would have survived but now here's the flipside a few days later David Sloan Wilson comes back and this time he is fishing nets and he manages to scoop up the introverted fish as well and he carries them back to his lab where the extroverted fish are already waiting for them and he tracks what happens once they're back in their lab and he finds that in that situation you know an alien in alien condition the extroverted fish adapt much more quickly and they start eating more quickly and they start roaming around and exploring and they're comfortable which is of course exactly the behavior that we see with human extroverts right you know they're just sort of immediately more comfortable in a new surrounding and so in that kind of a situation it's much better to be an extrovert and I tell you all this at great length because you will start to see that this has parallels throughout the human condition as well and so now let me talk to you about humans about sitters and Rover about about introverts and extroverts and I want to start by talking to you about children because because children are incredibly important because whether or not you have children of your own the thing about kids is that they haven't yet learned to act in ways that are far into their two natures and so the way they act actually tells us a lot about who we really are so let me ask you how many of you how many of you have kids okay a lot of you and how many of you have ever been to a kind of you know Mommy and Me your daddy and me type of class like a music class where you all sit around okay so for those of you who haven't been I'm going to show you a picture this is what this kind of a class looks like so it's basically it's a bunch of parents and babysitters sitting in a circle with the kids and their job is to be they're singing songs and playing musical instruments and what you find when you go to a class like this you find that half of the kids roughly are behaving like sitters meaning that they are cleaving to their parents laps they're not going to explore they're watching from the sidelines and then the other half are just exploring as if there's nothing in their way like that little kids you see that baby in the red jumpsuit he's right there in the middle of the room he has no idea where his mom is and it's okay with him they are the thing about these kinds of classes is I know from years of researching of interviewing parents that the parents of the sitter children tend to get really worried about their children because they feel like oh my gosh you know this Mommy and Me class is just it's symbolic of what's going to become a my child for the rest of his or her life they were going to sit on the sidelines they're not going to participate no one's going to know who they are they're not going to get the best that this world has to offer and they really worry so let's let's let's track the the development of these two kinds of children to see whether this worry is warranted now the rover children I think we already kind of know what their development is they tend to be very very bold very exploratory these are kids who will make friends very easily when they grow older it'll be easier to strike up new business deals it's kind of know the picture the children who are more on the sidelines here's the important thing to understand about them it seems as if they're just sitting there kind of passively and inertly but that's not actually what's happening these children are doing what psychologists call paying alert attention to things they're paying alert attention and so very often they will ultimately plunge into whatever the social scenario is and sometimes it takes the minutes and sometimes it's days or weeks or months but they will plunge in eventually and when they do they understand the rules of the game and they usually understand it with a kind of subtlety that is born of this kind of close attention and so the thing about these children is that they're kind of they're noticing scary things but they're also noticing more things in general and I'm just going to give you an example of how this plays out cognitively and intellectually because these children really do have a different intellectual way of interacting with the world if you give these kinds of kids this type of a game which is you know two pictures that look very similar and the job is to just spot the subtle differences between them these children will spend more time figuring out the difference between the two pictures and they will more often get the right answer and this and this this is true all the way into adulthood once these children grow up if you give them problems to solve they will spend more time at the problems and they will more often get the right answer and you know one example of this is somebody like an Einstein who famously said that it's not that I'm so smart it's just that I stick with problems longer and this really is a very effective style and so introverts as I said before they've been shown to get better grades they more often get have Phi Beta Kappa keys they do they do well intellectually in general and the other things about them and I'm sorry extroverts but introverts actually know more about they know more about many subjects than extroverts do there is one really interesting study where they tested college freshmen in 21 different subjects you know ranging from art to astronomy to physics to statistics and the introverts knew more than the extroverts about every single one of the subjects and what's important about this is that it's not that the introverts were more intelligent because as a group the introverts and extroverts are equal when it comes to IQ scores so it has nothing to do with intelligence it's rather that the very behavioral style that our culture excoriates in in Traverse is actually a boon when it comes time to sitting down and solving problems and strategizing and thinking things through it leads to a kind of quiet persistence that can that can take you very far second difference between these two kids at least two kinds of kids that I was telling you about they have very profoundly different orientations to risk I didn't know this when I started doing my research it was kind of news to me but introverts approach risk in a much more circumspect way than extroverts do so extroverts are much more likely when when they see something that they want their mode is to just kind of orient themselves to the goal and just go for it and and this is actually a neurochemical difference extroverts have stronger reward networks in their brain so when they see the thing that they desire whether it's a promotion or a business deal or whatever it happens to be there they get really excited and they start having very joyous physi emotions that they're quite delightful and I think it's because of these emotions that that extroverts enjoy the admiration that they do because it's a kind of champagne bubble quality that's quite lovely but the downside of these emotions that I don't think we pay attention to is that when you're in this kind of state of orienting to a goal you literally don't see as much warning signals that are standing in your way you just don't see them and this has been shown in the lab so introverts are much more likely to be able to see the warning signs and this is why if you know if you're a group or if you're an organization you really need to make sure that you are equally respond being structurally both types of people because you need both of these viewpoints extroverts more likely to get into car accidents more likely to place large financial bets and more likely to to participate in extreme sports and but what I want to say here is that it's not that introverts don't take risks at all it's not that at all and in fact a study of a London investment bank found that the most proficient traders that the most successful traders were introverts and Warren Buffett you know is a perfect example of this he's a self-described introvert and his MO really is to very carefully very analytically take take the measure of an entire situation warning signs at all so it's not an accident that he is famously admired for having sat out the two gigantic bubbles of the past years you know the tech bubble and the housing market crash Warren Buffett was not participating in them that's very that that's characteristic behavior okay yeah and I do want to say by the way about this I think that the issue that we have in our culture in general is we rely on eyes too much the kind of attitude that really celebrates risk-taking at all costs the seizing the day attitude and I saw this myself when I was a Wall Street lawyer I practiced Wall Street law back in the 90s and this was of course during some of the real go-go times and at the time I heard a story that was circulating on Wall Street about a group of bankers who were pitching for some new business and they wanted to distinguish themselves from the other bankers that were competing and so what they did is they came into the pitch room all of them dressed in in matching uniforms and on the matching uniforms were written the three letters F UD and fu d stood for fear uncertainty and doubt and they had a big X through the fu D and so their message to their potential clients was you come with us and you will have no fear you have no uncertainty you will have no doubt and I would argue that it's that kind of attitude and you know the lion ization of that kind of attitude that has led to some of the problems that we've seen and so we need much more of balance between the two orientations okay running out of time so I'm going to tell you about one a third thing that distinguishes these children I was just telling you about and that is creativity that's creativity studies have shown us that the most spectacularly creative people in a wide variety of fields have tended to be introverts not any not just any introverts they are introverts who also have a social component to them so there are people who are comfortable exchanging ideas and they're comfortable advancing ideas but they also have the need to kind of go off by themselves and focus on the thing they're doing and this is important because we can all learn from this these introverts they're not necessarily it's not that they have some you know intrinsic magic button that they press that makes them more creative it's rather that solitude turns out to be a crucial ingredient to creativity and that we're living in a culture right now that is telling us that the answer to creativity is to bring people together in groups and to be functioning in groups but introverts are people who will go off by themselves and do what they need to do you know and this is not to say that groups don't have that they don't have an important place in any kind of a creative or productive measure but the thing is that when you are in a group of people you literally you can't think you can't think in the same way that you would independently it turns out that we are such social creatures all of us introverts included were such social creatures that if we're with a group we instinctively start to mimic the opinions of the people in the group without even realizing that we're doing it so even something that is seemingly private and a seemingly visceral as who you're attracted to you if I show you pictures of faces and I ask you to rate how attractive they are if you're in a group of people you will start literally responding like in your brain with more attraction towards the faces of people who your fellow group members have already deemed attractive and this is not as I'm saying this is not something we can control it's not something that we're doing because we want to fit in it's just something that happens the other thing that it can be dangerous about groups is that years of social psychology experiments tell us that when you come together in a group of people invariably the person who speaks the most effectively the person who is most assertive most dominant that person's ideas end up getting listened to the most and you know I think we've all had this experience in our day-to-day lives but the thing that you may not know is that there's a whole other raft of studies that have found that there is zero correlation zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas so that person who is gaining the attention in a room may have the best ideas but they may not and so you know if you are charged with figuring out what the best brains in your organization have to say about whatever question it is and your answer is to gather people into a room and see what everybody says you're probably not going to get the best ideas so you need to come up with other ways to do it ways that honor the solitary thinking process as well together with a group one so having said all this I do want to be really clear about what I'm not saying I'm not saying that man is an island after all and that we should all just go off by ourselves and never talk to each other again that's not the point we are human beings and we love each other and we need each other and life is meaningless without love and it's meaningless without trust and without friendship and I'm also not saying that we should abolish group work all together her team work all together and this is especially true today we can't do it because the problems we need to solve are so complex that we can't solve them literally without standing on each other's shoulders and working together to some degree but what I am saying is that human nature is really it has kind of two competing poles and there's one pole that has us longing to be with each other and there's one pole that has as craving privacy and craving solitude and craving autonomy and we need to figure out ways of fueling both of these drives in order to have everybody functioning at their best and that this is true of everybody it's true of introverts in particular but it's true to some degree of us all so I want to just leave you with three thoughts and then I want to open this up to QA and hear what you have to say I'm going to leave you three kind of calls to action the first one is I hope that you will all just make more time to sit still and be quiet and think and be yourselves without feeling guilty about it the primary thing I found when I was doing my research is that people feel guilty about wanting to go off by themselves because it has been so instilled in us that this is a bad negative antisocial thing to do and it's just not second thing is we need to honor the next generation of quiet children you know that the kids who are sitting on their parents laps in the Mommy & Me class and the kids who when they're teenagers develop deep passions for spider taxonomy or for 19th century art I want to go off by themselves and pursue those passions those kids should be honored and not made to feel weird they should these kinds of talents and these kinds of orientations should be cultivated and then finally I want to kind of come back to where we started and I want to ask you to think again in private not in a group about who you really are and what makes you feel powerful and what made you feel powerful when you were a child because we all know from the lessons of myths and from the lessons of fairy tales that there are many different kinds of powers that are available to us in this world this is what myths tell us you know Luke Skywalker is granted a lightsaber with which to swashbuckle his way through the galaxies and Harry Potter gets a wizards education but there are some kids there are some quiet kids where the power that they are granted is a key to a secret garden that is full of inner private riches and that is a power too and so the trick for all children now for all of us now that we're grown-up the trick is to use whatever power we've been grand and to use it as best we can and so that is what I wish for you all whether you have been given a lightsaber or whether you have been given a key to a private garden I hope that you will use the power that you have been given and I wish you all the best with it and thank you very much and now what I would love to do we have some time so I'd love to hear your questions you can ask me anything yes do you research relative to virtual collaboration where you don't you're not actually in a room together yes this is such a good question um really interesting so there's all this research on in-person brainstorming 40 years worth of research literally that finds that in-person brainstorming is a disaster and that individuals always do better than groups but the one exception to this is when groups brainstorm electronically and and it's thought that the reason that electronic brainstorming or collaboration works is because it removes a lot of the social barriers that exist when you come together with a group of people you know there's a number of these barriers like one of them is just that if you're in a group of people in the same room while participating at the same time really only one person can think at the same time one person's talking one person's thinking everybody else is oriented to what that person is saying but when you're working kind of asynchronously in an online group that is removed and then the other thing is it turns out if you are in a group of people face-to-face and one person descends from what the group says that person it has been found by the neuroscientist Gregory Berns at Emory University he found that the amygdala which is the small organ in our brain that is associated with a fear of social rejection that that the amygdala in your brain becomes very activated at the moment that you were dissenting and he calls this the pain of Independence you know and he says this is what is wrong with some of our jury trials for example you've got people in a room and it is painful to dissent but when you're working collaboratively a lot of that problem is removed I'm sorry when you're working electronically yeah yes first of all thanks a lot for this topic it's very interesting you're welcome Jason like this oh I managed to what they made you imply one of your four kinds of reto my question is my nature of an extra would ya find myself fifteen joy to work for long time within a day or within a month oh right so you seem to be categorizing these as two separate things of itself I think this is this watering by agent what I am it's my habit and there's a mix here what it's also the base yeah thank you that's an important question um so a couple things about that for one thing you know introversion and extraversion is really a spectrum and we all fall at different parts along the spectrum but even for those of us who fall at one extreme or the other we all still have aspects of the other side in us you know this is not a black and white thing and I'm talking about it in black and white terms just to make a broad point to you but we are of course all a kind of glorious mishmash of many different traits and as I think you're getting at our traits can change a little bit can change to some extent over time depending on how we spend our day-to-day lives so for example you an introvert who is not comfortable going to cocktail parties but who goes to them day after day after day after day will probably over time get more comfortable but they'll still be an introvert and it sounds like you're having an opposite experience yes are you doing these studies around the relationship between being an introvert and having anxiety yeah also an important question and are you talking about social anxiety or just general anxiety um question uh a little bit of both but I'm just let's go with socially okay yeah um so this is interesting because culturally we tend to think of introversion and shyness as being pretty much the same thing in fact they're quite different introversion is just as I was saying that the preference for lower stimulation environments and shyness is much more about a fear of social judgment and the to do overlap but psychologists debate to what degree they overlap yes just what surprised you the most from your research in the book the other one was more like I kinda had this theory in my head for a long time as I can be social and I can appear like an extrovert in some situations but when I go home at night I really just want to be alone after they're socializing right yeah yeah I I often think about how much introverts maybe don't it isn't that they don't wanted the extroverts is that maybe they just don't have the right set of people to stimulate them because I would see like certain sets of people if you get them with their best friend yeah well something it's super social it's so like how much of it is that they're they're truly introverted people or it's just that they're they're not with the right set of people to make them to raise their stimulus level yeah these are tricky questions and you know Carly Young who was the first psychologist to popularize the terms introvert and extrovert back in the 1920s he actually talks about exactly what you're saying about how if you get an introvert with the right group of people and I think the way he puts it is he will relax into being an extrovert so then the question is well does that mean he's really an extrovert as long as he's with the right group of people or is it that that's actually characteristic of an introvert that they they kind of come out word only in more limited circumstances whereas with an extrovert they'll come out word no matter what and then as for your question about what surprised me the most I don't know if this is what surprised me but it really struck me and I have a lot of profiles in my book about introverted leaders and this was very important to me because there's such a deep-seated notion I think that there really is only one way to be a good leader you know I think we think of leaders as being very bold and very charismatic types of figures but I saw but but in my book I profiled a number of transformative leaders over time and people that grows the parks and and Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt and then some people in the business world too and one of the things that you find with these leaders is that the reason there is effective as they are is precisely because they don't like the spotlight so if you don't like the spotlight but you're really motivated by a cause are you really motivated to serve your organization well that's a that's a kind of pure motive and the people who you're asking to follow you sense its purity and they sense that you're not motivated by narcissism and that can be a real power of its own and you know Jim Collins who's the famous management researcher who wrote the book good to great he did this famous study where he identified the 11 top performing companies of a particular period of time and he tried to figure out what it was that distinguish these companies you know why these 11 why had they risen to the top and initially he didn't want to look at leadership at all because he thought that that would be too easy an answer too glib an answer but what he started to notice he and his team was that every single one of the leaders of these companies every single one of them they were all people who were described by their employees with a certain kind of constellation of traits you know I'm shy humble self effacing modest this kind of thing and they were also people who had great will and great visions for their companies and he came to call this this combination of traits level 5 leadership which which then led to this kind of funny scenario of he would go out and present this to groups of quite alpha type-a leaders and they would raise their hands and say how can I become more of a level 5 leader how can I become more shy and unassuming ok that's a wheezy Amy our introverts is there any yeah there is and although you know of course like everything with the internet it's changing all the time so historically historically in Internet times I mean the Internet has been a place where introverts have been empowered and in fact a polled and by social Byam Mashable the social media website found that most of its users were introverts as is by the way Pete Cashmore who started it but one thing that is oh and then there was another study that found that introverts said that they felt that they could express the real me online in ways that they couldn't do in person all of which makes perfect sense right but you know now it's starting to fragment more and we're starting to see that the mainstream social media sites in particular Facebook have become more havens for extroverts so introverts use them but but not quite as much or with the same glee and and you know and that's not so surprising when you think about it because so much of Facebook is about a kind of self presentation and how many friends do you have and this kind of thing and what I've observed anecdotally is that introverts tend to like more a site like a live journal where you're doing more long in-depth diary entries and sharing them with a select group of people or blogging where you know it's really about your thoughts that you're presenting in depth that kind of thing yes research about what drives people friendship and partnership choices based on their aversion yeah yeah my wife is a stream not right I know it is so worried why that might you know it seems to be that there really is a kind of mutual attraction so in marriages the statistic is about 50% that you know half the marriages are introvert/extrovert marriages and I mean that kind of marriage - I'm an introvert and my husband's and extroverts and and it happens though also even at the level of teams at work it's been found that the most effective teams in organizations tend to be a mix of introverts and extroverts because the two types are just drawn to each other you know I think we all know yin and yang when we when we see it and we all know that there are traits of ours that we need to compliment you know we have our strengths and then there are things we're not so good at so that's really what lies at the heart of many of these friendships - in in social relationships it's been found that what happens is introverts when they're around extroverts they feel like they're the extroverts bring out they're more carefree side you know and they kind of feel more up and more alive and more light when they're with an extrovert and then extroverts on the other hand appreciate introverts because the introverts allow them to talk about more serious things that they might otherwise either not think to go to or might feel uncomfortable going to um but you know I should say - this really is true also at the highest levels of leadership you know you if you look at many leaders you will see them effective leaders you'll see them trying to compliment their own strengths and I was just thinking about this yesterday I'm reading the book the Obamas by Jody Kanter all about the Obama administration and I believe Obama President Obama is an introvert and it's actually fascinating to see I don't know if it's delivery or not but how much he is always choosing partners who can complement his introverted tendencies so you know Michelle Obama is a real extrovert and she is very often the one who is urging him to connect more directly with his audiences and he chose as his first chief of staff Rahm Emanuel who is much more combative than he is because you know he's kind of bama's famously not a combative person like many introverts and there's one more oh yeah and Joe Biden as his running mate you know that's a perfect example Joe Biden is the type of politician who who loves to go out and do the glad-handing back-slapping type of thing that Washingtonian politicians do and that obama really doesn't do naturally and so that's just one example but there are many I could give you yeah the the perception that society rewards extroverts is is pretty pervasive yeah funny because if you look at pumpkinseed Visser if you look at fruit flies I mean they don't reward extraversion measurement every that's kind of ridiculous on its face because those you know those creatures don't have the complex social structure we do they don't do things send their kids to school the working groups or have obvious where there are a few leaders tend to be extroverted and they haven't had moments in history like the Industrial Revolution where people started living more closely together in big cities right of all those kinds of things what what do you think are the biggest reasons that society rewards again connect looking at a question to that you guys would be talking about society with your dog your mouth biology I'm talking about American society or is this global the more introvert redly cultures yeah that's an important question it was one of the first things that I looked at when I started my research because I was really trying to figure out is this preference for extraversion you know somehow innate to humanity or does it vary across cultures and I really found quite a difference from culture to culture and particularly I focused on Far Eastern cultures where there's actually a branch of psychology called cross-cultural psychology and psychologists study this quite a bit and you know there's more particularly in the Confucian belt cultures of the Far East there's much more reverence for for silence and for reserve and the person who doesn't speak so much is often seen as being wise and very judicious and words themselves are perceived as being potentially dangerous because your words can hurt other people words can hurt the person who uttered them if you say the wrong thing at the wrong time so they're really quite different attitudes and in fact there was one study that compared Chinese schoolchildren with Canadian schoolchildren and they found that among the Chinese school children the students who were either quiet or shy were often admired by their peers and seen by their teachers as great candidates for leadership positions and in Canada of course the exact opposite thing was true but you know depending on your perspective the thing that sad is that this is starting to change and they actually repeated this study recently and got quite different results with things in the Chinese schoolyard being much more similar to what's happening in the West because these attitudes are starting to shift you know just just the way Western added Western McDonald's is keying exported globally the same thing is true of our sense of the ideal self social interaction yeah if you're sitting in a room with 12 and 2 or introverts and 10 or extroverts how do you apply pressure to get that team not to isolate and be biased against the quiet people in the room yeah good question I believe that these changes have to come about mostly structurally if you're talking about at work you know I I don't think it's really going to work to say okay assertive people remember to pay attention to the less assertive ones so instead thinking about structures that work for example saying before a meeting and we're going to distribute the agenda of the meeting in advance so that everybody can prepare because one of the primary things introverts complain about in meetings is that the meeting is going quickly and they tend not to think as fast like that they're not thinking on their feet and so they often feel like oh I thought other thing I wanted to say but by then the meeting was over structure so the person can go into that 1530 minute meeting get the gist of the idea make ABC this is what we're going to do this is how agenda forward right the reward structure is clearly feels very clearly then it's set for the extrovert and so the question is from a personal action plan like I said I'm sitting in two of twelve how do I managed myself into a different place Oh gotcha okay right yes okay what are some things that introverts can do when they're in that setting yeah did everyone hear that question what what can introverts do when they're in a meeting and they feel like they're sort of outnumbered by extroverts who are communicating with a different style so you know the trick with all this stuff is figuring out how to use your own self in a way that that is strong so for example for it might be you prepare before the meeting even if nobody else has and you have your ideas that you want to get across and making sure to state your ideas pretty early on in the meeting is helpful because research shows that we tend to pay attention to the ideas that are advanced quickly or advanced early and then there are things like you know if the idea that you're advancing if you feel conviction about it you don't necessarily need to say it in the loudest voice for people to feel your conviction so the case is kind of testing your ideas beforehand to know how much you really believe in them and if you do just making sure to get them out there another role that introverts can play very effectively is being the person who asks the thoughtful questions that redirect the group into a direct into a place that makes sense because you know we've all been in those meetings where like you're off talking about God knows what and everyone's all excited and no one even realizes that you're off on a tangent so the person who gets you all back to where you're going you ends up getting a lot of power in the room person that organized meeting yeah that to connect with people that going to be participating go into the media much as possible people would know who you are and what kind of a feeling they have yeah yeah that's a good idea and for many introverts that's much more comfortable right instead of trying to forge bonds with ten people at once in a meeting which usually requires just playing a dominant role so that everybody knows who you are it can be much more comfortable and effective to just build these alliances and one-on-one behind the scenes before the meeting happens but also after that's another thing after the meeting you might be the one who actually takes the ten minutes to sit down and think about what did we just say here what are what are the ways that I can build and what was just said and maybe you send out a memo that summarizes things and advances the ball so it's like if you're comfortable with more with writing than with speaking use that and make the most of it Amy handle stress interesting you know I would say that introverts who tend to who tend to be on the anxious side of the spectrum and I was saying some are and some aren't they probably suffer stress a little bit more and need to pay attention to stress management techniques more than more than a non anxious extrovert would but I haven't seen a great deal of data on that seems like a lot of celebrities musicians sports figures self-described yeah before yeah this is a fascinating subset of introverts I met a lot of these people in my research and I don't know if you all heard the question but Amy's basically asking about the phenomenon of introverted performers who seem to thrive on public performance but describe themselves as introverts and how can this be so I was fascinated by these people and I interviewed them and what they told me is that they tend to experience the audience as just one one unit so they're not feeling intimidated by speaking or performing for a hundred people at once they feel like they're just having a conversation with one person and they also tend to feel that they're more comfortable in that kind of a setting then they are just chatting one-on-one because they feel like it's a situation where they can totally control what's happening and that they're kind of appearing behind a mask to some extent because you know we've all had that sensation when you go to a costume party and you're wearing you have a mask on or you've got your costume and you can often feel more liberated than you would if you were just going as yourself and this is the way actors often describe their craft I think we probably have time for one more question so I just wonder if all of the question Amy just hospice just wondering do we have a clear and universal and all people agree with the definition of the introvert and extrovert figures some like the one who can speak loudly on the large audience and it just people really a introvert I always kind of curious whether we really can have such a class America can be universal you can even like the culture wide that you measure in China for example if if the different ranking system different culture actually maybe is different standard when you're going to classify it in or extra in China right and so we have such the standard for the intramural yeah you know it's a good question you know I like to say that there are as many definitions of introversion and extraversion as there are personality psychologists they all have every psychologist has his or her own definition they all kind of argue about it the one thing they do all agree on is that whatever introversion and extraversion are they know they're important you know they all agree that is that it's pretty much the most salient aspect of human nature and that this is true across all cultures so the best so I looked at the sort of the most primary of all these definitions and the one that I thought was the most representative of all you know that most would agree on is what I told you about stimulation and I you know and I think another way to think about it is where do you get your energy from do you feel after when you've been out socializing maybe you've had a really good time but still do you feel like now you need to recharge at home or in solitude or do you feel like now you're all energized and you want more socializing that that in some ways is a real key distinction okay so I think we could probably keep going but I'm going to have to catch a plane at some point so I want to thank you so much and I'm going to be at the back to sign your books if you would be interested and he's been a wonderful audience so thank you thank you thank you you

Channel: UW Video

Views: 261,865

Rating: 4.8784952 out of 5

Keywords: UW, University of Washington, MSR, Microsoft Research

Id: 85s9wJlzkrk

Length: 50min 28sec (3028 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 18 2014