Psychologists have long known that personality is a key determinant of happiness—probably second only to health, and similar in magnitude to socioeconomic status (DeNeve & Cooper 1998). The relationship between personality and happiness has been on our collective mind lately thanks to the pandemic. Even after accounting for obvious differences in circumstances (job loss, sickness, isolation and so on), some people seem to have a harder time than others with life under quarantine, and it’s interesting to think about why that is.
One theory with a lot of buy-in from the media and the meme world has it that extraverts are particularly miserable these days, while introverts are generally OK, and maybe even better than usual. It’s a plausible-sounding idea, if you think of introverts as homebodies who delight in solitude and extraverts as insatiable party animals. Unfortunately, the theory seems to be false. Wei 2020 finds that introversion predicts greater loneliness, anxiety and depression as a result of COVID-related changes in circumstances. This Forbes piece summarizes different research coming to a similar conclusion (although there seems to be no peer-reviewed publication here yet).
Since the topic is on everyone’s minds, and since common sense seems to have led the popular imagination astray, this seems like a good time to ask: what exactly is the trait of introversion/extraversion? And why might introverts be doing worse during the pandemic, rather than reveling in a months-long dream staycation, as many of us expected they would?
At one point, long ago, I thought the first question had a simple answer. Extraversion is something like: Sociability. Getting along with people and enjoying their company. Being friendly, outgoing, popular, personable. Not the most precise definition, but seemingly safe enough for everyday use.
But then I learned some surprising things. One was that a couple of people whom I’d always considered top-flight extraverts—some of the most charismatic, socially successful, center-of-attention types I knew—actually viewed themselves as deeply introverted. I found this very confusing. The solution to the puzzle, I was eventually told, lay in the fact that I’d been thinking of extraversion incorrectly. It’s not how good you are at socializing, or what sorts of social situations you seek out or enjoy, but rather “where your energy comes from”.
On this picture, some people—the true extraverts—are energized by human interactions, and drained by having to be alone. Introverts are the opposite, charged up by solitude and exhausted by socializing. There’s no necessary link between these energy dynamics and a person’s social behavior or aptitude. You might be the life of the party, while also finding the party so mortally taxing that you spend the next day watching Fruits Basket on your phone in the dark.
Since I first heard this five or ten years ago, it seems to have become the standard popular understanding of extraversion. It’s featured on a great many pop-psychology websites, and I can count on my fellow millennials to invoke it nowadays in any conversation about personality. (The idea is often credited to Jung, who characterized introversion and extraversion in terms of energy. Notably, though, the relevant thing for Jung is where you direct energy rather than how you gain it. This is obviously quite a different animal from the contemporary energy theory, and I’m not sure how one morphed into the other.)
Lots of people regard the energy theory as a powerful insight that captures an important feature of their experiences. I take them at face value when they say this—there must be some reason the idea’s so catchy, after all—but I have to admit it doesn’t resolve my confusion, for two reasons. The first is that the energy theory is hard to relate to my own experiences. The second is that actual psychologists, while they do recognize introversion/extraversion to be a real and important feature of personality, don’t understand the trait in energy-theoretic terms.
The first point. I don’t understand what “energy” (in this quasi-Jungian sense) is or what it means to predominantly gain or lose it by being around people. I don’t think I’m being a cranky philosopher here who demands a precise definition for something that’s intuitively clear. Rather, I’m not sure I can locate any features of my subjective life that those concepts even approximately map onto.
Of course I find some things invigorating, engaging, stimulating, pleasant, rewarding, or fun. And I find some other things tiring, alienating, boring, stressful, thankless, or taxing. I’m fine with the idea that the first set of things is energy-increasing in some sense, while the second set is energy-draining. But I can’t see how social happenings or solitary happenings could uniformly—or even roughly uniformly—go into just one of these two boxes.
Being around people is sometimes amazing and enlivening. At other times it’s the hell of which Sartre spoke. Some days you’re at a pool party with your best friends, and some days your weird cousin corners you with YouTube videos about ancient aliens. The same goes for being alone—there are times you’re blissfully absorbed in a rewarding project and times you just sit around feeling glum. The extent to which a social activity is energy-boosting or energy-draining seems to depend almost completely on the people involved, the context, the nature of the activity, and so on.
So I have a hard time imagining what kind of meaningful generalization could apply here. This makes me worry I’m not even using the right concept of “energy”. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen an alternative notion spelled out clearly.
As I mentioned, the other issue with the energy theory is that it doesn’t jibe very well with our best current scientific understanding of extraversion. That understanding is based on the Big Five model, which takes the basic elements of personality to be Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. (The psych-student mnemonic is OCEAN.) On this model, the Extraversion trait is comprised of the facets warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity, excitement-seeking and positive emotion. You’re extraverted to the extent that you have these qualities to a high degree, introverted to the extent that you don’t.
In a lot of ways, the Big Five model of extraversion resembles the old common-sense concept more closely than it does the energy theory. As we all used to think before the neo-Jungians came along, extraverts are basically cheery, confident, affable types that like to keep busy doing fun stuff with people.
I think this is a reassuring step toward clarity, but it’s not yet a complete answer to the original question. Psychologists know that the facets of extraversion are correlated, and that together they add up to a coherent and distinct personality factor. But why? What underlying quality do extraverts possess such that they tend to be happy, excitement-seeking and sociable all at once? A priori, those seem like three pretty different things that wouldn’t have to go together. And yet, empirically, they do.
It turns out this is an active debate in personality psychology. One popular theory is that extraversion is fundamentally about reward sensitivity. On this view, the defining feature of extraverts is that good things make them feel really, really good. You can see how this might explain the various facets of extraversion. Social status and connection are things we primates are wired to enjoy, so extraverts find them extra enjoyable and are motivated to excel at human interaction. Part of exceling at human interaction is seeming nice and showing interest in other people, hence warmth. Successfully pursuing rewards requires initiative and self-efficacy, hence assertiveness. You have to go do things to get rewards, and you have to keep finding interesting new things to do lest you suffer from diminishing returns, hence activity and excitement-seeking. This 2000 paper by Lucas et al. finds some cross-cultural evidence for the reward-sensitivity theory.
A rival view is that extraversion is fundamentally about seeking social attention. On this account, the defining feature of extraverts is that they want people to notice them. With roughly the same amount of squinting as before you can see why this makes sense. Clearly gregariousness is accounted for. People will want to be your friend (and hence pay more attention to you) if you’re kind and engaging; that’s warmth. People will think you’re cool (and hence pay yet more attention to you) if you confidently do lots of splashy, interesting things; that’s assertiveness, activity and excitement-seeking. I guess you’ll feel good most of the time because you’ve successfully attracted all this attention, so, positive emotion. This 2002 paper by Ashton et al. defends the social-attention theory against the reward-sensitivity theory; it claims to have “clearly show[n] that social attention, not reward sensitivity, represents the central feature of Extraversion”. But recent work in neuroscience seems to suggest that extraverts are indeed characteristically reward-sensitive. On the whole, psychologists don’t seem to have landed on a consensus answer to this question.
Still—to return to the second question posed at the start—we know enough about extraversion to have a pretty good idea why the pandemic might be harder on introverts. As Wei herself points out in the study mentioned above, her work doesn’t try to disentangle the distress caused by lockdowns in particular from the broader mental health effects of the pandemic. And introverts are known to experience more COVID-related worry and fear, perhaps because their lower levels of assertiveness are linked to feeling more helpless and less hopeful in the face of obstacles. So it’s possible that extraverts are more unhappy than introverts about being stuck at home, but introverts are more unhappy than extraverts to an even greater degree about the state of the world in general. (Wei mentions some possible additional factors: introverts may be more susceptible to intense negative emotions and certain mental health problems, and they have a harder time adjusting to disruptions in their lives.)
Where, by the way, does this leave the socially active and talented people among us who claim to be hardcore introverts? I’m still not sure. Are they really just self-conscious extraverts who are sensitive to stress and get overwhelmed easily—extraverts generously salted with Neuroticism, maybe? Or are they genuine introverts who, for whatever reason, are good at putting on an act that conflicts with their actual feelings and preferences? If I had to guess, I might put my money on the former, but it’s a thing I continue to find pretty mysterious.
William D’Alessandro
William D’Alessandro is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (LMU Munich). His work is on philosophy of math and science and the relationship between the two. He previously lived in western New York and Chicago, and is writing about philosophy, science and expat life at Lucky Mushroom.
