Introverts and extroverts: what research shows about ambiverts, acting extraverted and shyness

“Introvert” and “extrovert” are everyday words, but personality psychology does not sort people into two kinds. It looks at how high someone scores on extraversion, one of the Big Five personality traits; the low end is what people call introversion. Researchers usually spell it “extravert”, and this guide does too. The BFI-2, a Big Five personality inventory, splits extraversion into three facets: sociability, the desire to approach and engage with others; assertiveness, the willingness to express your opinions and goals in social situations; and energy level, which covers positively aroused feelings such as enthusiasm and excitement as well as how active you are. Another model summarised in the same paper divides extraversion into two aspects, enthusiasm and assertiveness (Soto & John, 2017).

Researchers disagree about what lies at the core of extraversion. A 2000 paper reporting four studies, which included participants from 39 nations, found that what ties the facets of extraversion together is sensitivity to reward rather than sociability, and that extraversion defined this way is strongly linked to pleasant feelings; extraverts’ sociability, the authors suggested, may be a by-product of reward sensitivity (Lucas et al., 2000). A 2002 paper using data from 200 people countered that the core is a tendency to behave in ways that attract social attention (Ashton et al., 2002). Neither, however, treats simply liking to be with people as the core of extraversion. We read only the abstracts of these two studies.

The MBTI’s E (extraversion) and I (introversion) are related to this dimension. A 1989 study of 267 men and 201 women aged 19 to 93 found that the four MBTI scales measure aspects of four of the five major personality traits. It found no support, though, for the idea that the MBTI measures truly two-way preferences or qualitatively distinct types; instead it measures four relatively independent dimensions (from the abstract; McCrae & Costa, 1989). As MBTI vs Big Five explains, the MBTI reports one letter, E or I, so someone leaning slightly towards extraversion and someone leaning slightly towards introversion get different letters, while the Big Five reads both as middling scores. How E and I show up in daily life is covered in E vs I.

This guide sets out how introversion and extraversion are actually distributed, what an ambivert is, how introversion differs from shyness and social anxiety, whether extraverts are really happier, what experiments that ask people to act extraverted have shown, and how well sayings such as “introverts recharge alone” fit the research. The difference between sensitivity (HSP) and introversion has its own guide, HSP vs introvert. The mind.io Big Five test measures extraversion with six statements, such as “I seek out chances to talk with new people” and “In a group, I tend to stay quiet rather than lead the conversation”.

Extraversion scores do not split into an introvert group and an extravert group. In a 2013 paper, Adam Grant of the Wharton School wrote, citing other work, that levels of extraversion in the world population typically follow a bell curve, with most people falling somewhere in the middle. An “ambivert” is someone in the middle of the extraversion spectrum (Grant, 2013). The sales study below counted scores from 3.75 to 5.50 on a 7-point scale as ambiverted (Grant, 2013).

MBTI scores show the same pattern. A 2002 study that rescored the MBTI answers of about 12,000 people in leadership development programmes found that earlier reports of scores splitting into two peaks were an artefact of a default setting in the scoring software; with more quadrature points, the scores on all four MBTI scales were strongly centre-weighted (from the abstract; Bess & Harvey, 2002). Scores bunched in the middle mean many people sit close to the line between E and I, and those people can easily get a different letter when they retake the test. How accurate is the MBTI? covers this in detail.

One study looked at ambiverts directly, in sales. People often assume extraverts make the best salespeople, but in three meta-analyses of 35 studies of more than 3,800 salespeople, cited by Grant, the average correlation between extraversion and sales performance was only .07, not significantly different from zero. Grant sent a survey to all 807 employees of a US company running outbound call centres, measured the extraversion of the 340 who responded, and tracked their revenue over the next 3 months, accounting for hours worked and time in the job. The relationship was not a straight line but an inverted U. Employees scoring 3.75 to 5.50 on the 7-point extraversion scale brought in an average of $154.77 an hour, more than introverted ($120.10) and extraverted ($125.19) employees, and over the 3 months they generated 24% more revenue than the introverts and 32% more than the extraverts (Grant, 2013).

Still, this is a single correlational study of one company’s employees, whose average age was 19.9 and 71% of whom were men, followed for 3 months. Extraversion was measured with a short four-item scale, and Grant himself noted that short scales are less reliable than longer ones and that more comprehensive measures should be tried. Adding the curved relationship explained 2% more of the variation in revenue; Grant added that an effect of this size can still matter for hiring and career decisions, and that this kind of analysis may underestimate it (Grant, 2013). A 1998 meta-analysis found that “potency”, one sub-dimension of extraversion, was associated with supervisors’ ratings of salespeople (r = .28) and with objective sales (r = .26) (from the abstract; Vinchur et al., 1998). So “ambiverts sell best” is better read as an interesting finding that needs confirming than as an established fact.

Introverted people are often taken to be timid or shy, but research separates the two. In a 1981 study, the psychologists Cheek and Buss built separate scales for shyness, feeling inhibited and anxious in social situations, and sociability, wanting to be with others, one component of extraversion. According to a 2014 paper that describes this work, the two are not interchangeable, and shy people are not necessarily unsociable; the same paper notes that the two traits are moderately negatively correlated (Tang et al., 2014). We could not read Cheek and Buss’s original paper, so this account follows the 2014 paper.

Cheek and Buss selected people high and low in shyness and sociability and had them interact in an unfamiliar social situation. Those who were both shy and sociable, wanting to approach others while feeling inhibited, showed the most anxious behaviour, which the researchers attributed to a conflict between approaching and avoiding (Tang et al., 2014). So someone who likes people but tenses up in unfamiliar company may be shy rather than introverted.

Social anxiety disorder is another matter. A 2010 meta-analysis of 175 studies of adults found that people diagnosed with social phobia (social anxiety disorder) scored markedly lower on extraversion (d = −1.31). But every diagnostic group analysed was high on neuroticism (mean d = 1.65), and the differences were larger in patient samples than in samples from the general population (from the abstract; Kotov et al., 2010). These are comparisons of group averages; they do not mean that introverted people have social anxiety disorder.

Introversion is one direction of a personality trait everyone has; social anxiety disorder is a diagnosis made when fear of being judged, and the avoidance it brings, gets in the way of daily life. If you avoid social situations because you dread them and it is making life hard, the social anxiety guide covers the criteria and where to get help. mind.io does not offer a social anxiety test.

The link between extraversion and happiness has been reported again and again in meta-analyses (Kim et al., 2018). A 2008 meta-analysis of more than 50 studies that used the NEO personality inventory put the correlation between extraversion and positive affect at r = .44 (Steel et al., 2008). Part of that overlap is built in, though: one facet of extraversion is itself a tendency towards positive feelings (Kim et al., 2018). Life satisfaction, which has no such overlap, shows a smaller link: meta-analyses reported correlations of about r = .25 to .35, and when life satisfaction was predicted from all five traits together, extraversion’s average coefficient fell to b = .17 (Kim et al., 2018, describing Steel et al., 2008, and other meta-analyses).

These figures come mostly from North American students, and when the same person rates both their own extraversion and their own happiness, the link can be inflated (Kim et al., 2018). A 2018 paper ran five studies with student and nationally representative samples from Canada, the US, the UK, Germany and Japan, and statistically removed the shared influence of how people answer questionnaires. Extraversion uniquely predicted life satisfaction in the three North American samples (b = .217 to .232) but was weaker or nearly absent elsewhere: .153 in Japan (a 2012 national online survey of 952 people), .126 in the UK and .078 in Germany. The Japanese estimate, though, had a wide confidence interval that overlapped the North American and German estimates, and the authors said no firm conclusion could be drawn from it. The authors concluded that extraversion has a small to moderate positive effect on life satisfaction (.20), mainly in North American cultures (Kim et al., 2018).

In short, extraverts reporting more positive feelings on average is a fairly consistent finding, but the link with overall life satisfaction is smaller than often assumed and varies by culture. And it is an association, not a cause: correlational studies cannot tell whether extraversion makes people feel good, feeling good makes people act more extraverted, or something else drives both. An average also does not mean introverts struggle to be happy. That is why researchers turned to experiments that ask people to act extraverted.

In a 2002 study, participants recorded their behaviour and mood every 3 hours for 2 weeks, and each participant was happier when acting extraverted than when acting introverted. An experiment in the same paper found the same link when extraversion was manipulated (from the abstract; Fleeson et al., 2002). Such experiments typically asked people to act extraverted or introverted during a 10-minute discussion with one other person; acting extraverted raised positive affect, did not affect negative affect, and the effect did not differ significantly by personality (as summarised by Margolis & Lyubomirsky, 2020).

Two experiments published in 2012 likewise found that when introverts acted extraverted, against their disposition, positive affect rose and negative affect did not. The people whose performance on a cognitive task suffered were extraverts told to act introverted (from the abstract; Zelenski et al., 2012). So why do introverts act extraverted less often? Studies published in 2013 found that introverts tend to underestimate how much they will enjoy acting extraverted and to overestimate the negative feelings and self-consciousness it will bring (from the abstract; Zelenski et al., 2013).

Short experiments are not daily life, though. A 2019 randomised controlled trial in Melbourne, Australia, split 147 people aged 18 to 55 into two groups for a week. One was told to act, in their interactions with others, “in a bold, talkative, outgoing, active, and assertive way, as much as possible”; the other “in an unassuming, sensitive, calm, modest, and quiet way”. On average, the act-extraverted group reported more positive affect and a stronger sense of being themselves (authenticity) than the other group, with no significant difference in negative affect or tiredness. But the more introverted participants were, the smaller their gain in positive affect, and they reported more negative affect, more tiredness and less authenticity. For the most introverted, the instructions did not even increase extraverted behaviour (Jacques-Hamilton et al., 2019).

The authors said that because these results differ from earlier ones, they should be interpreted cautiously until replicated, and that the study was not large enough to test such individual differences with high power. Two weeks after the intervention, the groups no longer differed significantly on the wellbeing measures. The authors added that their goal was not to recommend that anyone act more extraverted (Jacques-Hamilton et al., 2019).

Other studies found something different. In a 2020 study, 131 students at a university in the western US spent one week acting “talkative, assertive, and spontaneous” and one week acting “deliberate, quiet, and reserved”. Positive affect, connectedness and flow rose in the extraverted week and fell in the introverted week, and the effects did not differ significantly by how extraverted people were to begin with. On a happiness scale, though, the difference between the weeks was not significant, both behaviours were introduced as beneficial for students, and there was no comparison group without instructions (Margolis & Lyubomirsky, 2020). In three studies in which people spent 15 minutes a day for 5 days on assigned behaviours, those who acted extraverted reported more positive affect in the moment than those doing introverted behaviours or a control task, with no strong evidence that the effect was larger for extraverts (from the abstract; van Allen et al., 2021).

In sum, feeling better in moments of acting extraverted has been found again and again. Whether spending a whole week acting against type is good for very introverted people is not settled: the results differ from study to study, and the authors of the 2020 study suggested that differences in methods, or simple sampling variability, could explain the gap (Margolis & Lyubomirsky, 2020).

The idea that “introverts are drained by people and recharge alone” spread widely through popular books and talks such as Susan Cain’s Quiet (2012). A 2020 paper summarised that such books and talks put forward the idea that a substantial minority of people find intensive social interaction depleting and need time alone to recover, an idea that resonated with many people even though there was little scientific evidence for it (Leikas, 2020).

In a 2017 study in which 48 people recorded their behaviour and mood five times a day for 12 days, acting extraverted went with a better mood and less fatigue at the time, but with more fatigue about 3 hours later. This link did not differ significantly by personality traits, and the number of people met in between partly explained the link with later fatigue. Conscientious behaviour, too, was followed by more fatigue about 3 hours later (from the abstract; Leikas & Ilmarinen, 2017). A 2020 follow-up with 74 University of Helsinki students also found people more tired 2 to 3 hours after behaving sociably. The paper concluded that sociable behaviour seems to bring temporary fatigue for everyone, not just introverts, while stressing that sociable behaviour generally has desirable correlates. It also noted that the studies were too small to test properly whether the link differs by personality (Leikas, 2020).

So feeling worn out after a lot of socialising may not be an introvert thing. Then again, in the week-long 2019 experiment, more introverted participants who acted extraverted did report more tiredness (Jacques-Hamilton et al., 2019), so it cannot be said that personality makes no difference at all. As for time alone, experiments found that being alone tends to calm high-arousal feelings, both excited and tense ones, and that solitude people chose for themselves could bring relaxation and less stress. These results were not reported in relation to introversion (from the abstract; Nguyen et al., 2018).

Another saying is that “introverts think more deeply”. In the Big Five, though, curiosity about ideas (intellectual curiosity) is measured not by extraversion but by a separate trait, openness (Soto & John, 2017). None of the studies this guide drew on compared introversion with depth of thinking directly.

Cain’s book is also described as arguing that Western culture is biased in favour of extraversion (Grant, 2013). In the 2018 cross-cultural study the link between extraversion and life satisfaction was clearest in North America; the split ran not between Western and non-Western countries but between North America and the rest, including the UK and Germany, and the authors read this as evidence that culture can moderate the relationship (Kim et al., 2018). The book is also cited as an example of the claim that pushing introverts to act extraverted could be harmful (Jacques-Hamilton et al., 2019); as described above, short experiments found no such cost, one week-long trial found costs for very introverted people, and another week-long study found no significant difference by personality (Margolis & Lyubomirsky, 2020). We did not read the book itself; this section follows how research papers describe it.

First, try changing the question from “am I an introvert or an extravert?” to “where am I on the extraversion spectrum?”. Most people fall somewhere in the middle (Grant, 2013), and experience-sampling studies show people moving across the whole range of each trait in daily behaviour (as summarised by Leikas & Ilmarinen, 2017, from the abstract). The Big Five test shows your extraversion as a score, and the MBTI test shows whether your preference leans towards E or I. If your extraversion score is in the middle, read the middle band on the extraversion profile as well.

If you want to try acting more extraverted, you could start small. In short experiments, extraverted behaviour lifted mood in the moment, and introverts tended to underestimate how much they would enjoy it (Zelenski et al., 2013). The 2019 authors suggested that a less intensive version, such as acting extraverted in a few interactions a day rather than “as much as possible”, might suit introverts better; that suggestion has not been tested (Jacques-Hamilton et al., 2019). Since spending a whole week acting against type may weigh on very introverted people, it is fine to stop if it does not feel right.

Because fatigue can rise a few hours after socialising (Leikas, 2020), you could keep some time free after a day packed with presentations or gatherings; this advice itself has not been tested. Even in sales, where extraverts are often assumed to have the edge, the average correlation between extraversion and results was small, and the ambivert study comes from one company (Grant, 2013). If a couple or team clashes over how much to talk or how to rest, the tips in E vs I may help.

If you avoid people out of fear rather than preference, or time alone feels like loneliness rather than rest, it may be time to look beyond personality. If fear of being judged is blocking daily life, see the social anxiety guide; if loneliness has gone on for a long time, see the loneliness guide; and if low mood and a loss of enjoyment persist, see depression symptoms.

Q. How do you tell introverts from extraverts? Are ambiverts a separate type? A. Personality research treats extraversion as a continuous score, with most people somewhere in the middle (Grant, 2013). “Ambivert” is a name for people in that middle. MBTI scores, too, bunch in the middle rather than splitting into two groups (Bess & Harvey, 2002).

Q. Are extraverts happier? A. On average, extraversion is linked to positive affect (r = .44; Steel et al., 2008). Its link with life satisfaction is small to moderate, though, and was weaker in UK, Japanese and German samples than in North American ones (Kim et al., 2018). It is an association, not proof that extraversion causes happiness.

Q. Will acting extraverted make an introvert happier? A. In short experiments, introverts too felt more positive when acting extraverted (Zelenski et al., 2012). In a week-long randomised controlled trial it helped on average, but more introverted people reported more negative feelings and tiredness (Jacques-Hamilton et al., 2019), while another week-long study found no significant difference by personality (Margolis & Lyubomirsky, 2020). The question is not settled.

Q. Does being introverted mean being shy? A. They are not the same thing. Shyness and sociability, one component of extraversion, are distinct traits, and shy people are not necessarily unsociable (Tang et al., 2014). If fear of being judged makes you avoid people, see the social anxiety guide.

Q. I get exhausted after seeing people. Is that because I am an introvert? A. Not necessarily. People were more tired a few hours after behaving sociably, with no significant difference by personality (Leikas & Ilmarinen, 2017; Leikas, 2020), although these studies were too small to test personality differences properly. If rest does not ease the exhaustion, see the burnout recovery guide too.

Q. Seeing people is so hard that I have been staying alone, and now nothing feels meaningful and I want to disappear. A. Please do not carry this alone. Reach out to a crisis line right away: call or text 988 in the US and Canada, call Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland, or find a line at findahelpline.com elsewhere. If you are in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services. If low mood goes on for a long time, see also the guide on depression symptoms, and if loneliness does, the loneliness guide.

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