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MORE ADVANCE NOISE FOR QUIET

“An intriguing and potentially life-altering examination of the humanpsyche that is sure to benefit bothintroverts and extroverts alike.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Gentle is powerful … Solitude is so-cially productive … These importantcounterintuitive ideas are among themany reasons to take Quiet to a quietcorner and absorb its brilliant,thought-provoking message.”

—ROSABETH MOSS KANTER, profess-or at Harvard Business School, author

of Confidence and SuperCorp

“An informative, well-researchedbook on the power of quietness and the

virtues of having a rich inner life. It dis-pels the myth that you have to be ex-troverted to be happy and successful.”

—JUDITH ORLOFF, M.D., author ofEmotional Freedom

“In this engaging and beautifullywritten book, Susan Cain makes apowerful case for the wisdom of intro-spection. She also warns us ably aboutthe downside to our culture’s noisiness,including all that it risks drowning out.Above the din, Susan’s own voice re-mains a compelling pres-ence—thoughtful, generous, calm,and eloquent. Quiet deserves a verylarge readership.”—CHRISTOPHER LANE, author of Shy-

ness: How Normal Behavior Became aSickness

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“Susan Cain’s quest to understand intro-version, a beautifully wrought jour-ney from the lab bench to the motiv-ational speaker’s hall, offers convin-cing evidence for valuing substanceover style, steak over sizzle, and qualit-ies that are, in America, often derided.This book is brilliant, profound, fullof feeling and brimming withinsights.”

—SHERI FINK, M.D., author of WarHospital

“Brilliant, illuminating, empower-ing! Quiet gives not only a voice, but apath to homecoming for so manywho’ve walked through the better partof their lives thinking the way they en-gage with the world is something inneed of fixing.”

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—JONATHAN FIELDS, author of Uncer-tainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel

for Brilliance

“Once in a blue moon, a book comesalong that gives us startling new in-sights. Quiet is that book: it’s part page-turner, part cutting-edge science. Theimplications for business are especiallyvaluable: Quiet offers tips on how intro-verts can lead effectively, give winningspeeches, avoid burnout, and choosethe right roles. This charming, grace-fully written, thoroughly researchedbook is simply masterful.”

—ADAM M. GRANT, PH.D., associateprofessor of management, the Wharton

School of Business

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STILL MORE ADVANCE NOISE FORQUIET

“Shatters misconceptions … Cain con-sistently holds the reader’s interest bypresenting individual profiles … and re-porting on the latest studies. Her dili-gence, research, and passion for thisimportant topic has richly paid off.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Quiet elevates the conversation aboutintroverts in our outwardly oriented so-ciety to new heights. I think thatmany introverts will discover that,even though they didn’t know it,they have been waiting for this bookall their lives.”

—ADAM S. MCHUGH, author of Intro-verts in the Church

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“Susan Cain’s Quiet is wonderfully in-formative about the culture of the ex-travert ideal and the psychology of asensitive temperament, and she is help-fully perceptive about how introvertscan make the most of their personalitypreferences in all aspects of life. Soci-ety needs introverts, so everyone canbenefit from the insights in this im-portant book.”

—JONATHAN M. CHEEK, professor ofpsychology at Wellesley College, co-ed-itor of Shyness: Perspectives on Research

and Treatment

“A brilliant, important, and person-ally affecting book. Cain shows that,for all its virtue, America’s ExtrovertIdeal takes up way too much oxygen.Cain herself is the perfect person tomake this case—with winning graceand clarity she shows us what it

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looks like to think outside thegroup.”

—CHRISTINE KENNEALLY, author ofThe First Word

“What Susan Cain understands—andreaders of this fascinating volume willsoon appreciate—is something that psy-chology and our fast-moving and fast-talking society have been all too slowto realize: Not only is there reallynothing wrong with being quiet, re-flective, shy, and introverted, butthere are distinct advantages to be-ing this way.

—JAY BELSKY, Robert M. and NatalieReid Dorn Professor, Human and Com-

munity Development, University ofCalifornia, Davis

“Author Susan Cain exemplifies herown quiet power in this exquisitely

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written and highly readable page-turner. She brings important researchand the introvert experience.”

—JENNIFER B. KAHNWEILER, PH.D.,author of The Introverted Leader

“Several aspects of Quiet are remark-able. First, it is well informed by the re-search literature but not held captiveby it. Second, it is exceptionally wellwritten, and ‘reader friendly.’ Third,it is insightful. I am sure many peoplewonder why brash, impulsive behaviorseems to be rewarded, whereas reflect-ive, thoughtful behavior is overlooked.This book goes beyond such superficialimpressions to a more penetratinganalysis.”—WILLIAM GRAZIANO, professor, De-

partment of Psychological Sciences,Purdue University

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Copyright © 2012 by Susan Cain

All rights reserved.Published in the United States by Crown Pub-lishers, an imprint of the CrownPublishing Group, a division of Random House,Inc., New York.www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registeredtrademarks of Random House, Inc.

The BIS/BAS Scales on this page–this pagecopyright © 1994 by the American Psycholo-gical Association. Adapted with permission.From “Behavioral Inhibition, Behavioral Activa-tion, and Affective Responses to Impending Re-ward and Punishment: The BIS/BAS Scales.”Journal of Personality and Social Psychology67(2): 319–33. The use of APA informationdoes not imply endorsement by APA.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationDataCain, Susan.

Quiet : the power of introverts in a world thatcan’t stop talking / Susan Cain.—1st ed.

p. cm.1. Introverts. 2. Introversion. 3. Extroversion.

4. Interpersonal relations. I. Title.BF698.35.I59C35 2012155.2′32—dc222010053204

eISBN: 978-0-307-45220-7

Jacket design by Laura DuffyJacket photography by Joe Ginsberg/GettyImages

v3.1

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To my childhood family

A species in which everyone was GeneralPatton would not succeed, any more thanwould a race in which everyone was Vin-cent van Gogh. I prefer to think that theplanet needs athletes, philosophers, sexsymbols, painters, scientists; it needs thewarmhearted, the hardhearted, the cold-hearted, and the weakhearted. It needsthose who can devote their lives to study-ing how many droplets of water aresecreted by the salivary glands of dogs un-der which circumstances, and it needsthose who can capture the passing impres-sion of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syl-lable poem or devote twenty-five pages tothe dissection of a small boy’s feelings ashe lies in bed in the dark waiting for hismother to kiss him goodnight.… Indeedthe presence of outstanding strengths

presupposes that energy needed in otherareas has been channeled away fromthem.

—ALLEN SHAWN

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Contents

CoverTitle PageCopyrightDedicationEpigraph

Author’s NoteINTRODUCTION: The North and South of

Temperament

PART ONE: THE EXTROVERT IDEAL

1. THE RISE OF THE “MIGHTY LIKEABLEFELLOW”: How Extroversion Became the

Cultural Ideal

2. THE MYTH OF CHARISMATICLEADERSHIP: The Culture of Personality, a

Hundred Years Later

3. WHEN COLLABORATION KILLSCREATIVITY: The Rise of the New Group-

think and the Power of Working Alone

PART TWO: YOUR BIOLOGY, YOURSELF?

4. IS TEMPERAMENT DESTINY?: Nature,Nurture, and the Orchid Hypothesis

5. BEYOND TEMPERAMENT: The Role ofFree Will (and the Secret of Public Speaking

for Introverts)

6. “FRANKLIN WAS A POLITICIAN, BUTELEANOR SPOKE OUT OF CONSCIENCE”:

Why Cool Is Overrated

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7. WHY DID WALL STREET CRASH ANDWARREN BUFFETT PROSPER?: How Intro-verts and Extroverts Think (and Process Do-

pamine) Differently

PART THREE: DO ALL CULTURESHAVE AN EXTROVERT IDEAL?

8. SOFT POWER: Asian-Americans and theExtrovert Ideal

PART FOUR: HOW TO LOVE, HOWTO WORK

9. WHEN SHOULD YOU ACT MOREEXTROVERTED THAN YOU REALLY ARE?

10. THE COMMUNICATION GAP: How toTalk to Members of the Opposite Type

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11. ON COBBLERS AND GENERALS: How toCultivate Quiet Kids in a World That Can’t

Hear Them

CONCLUSION: WonderlandA Note on the Dedication

A Note on the Words Introvert and ExtrovertAcknowledgments

Notes

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Author’s Note

I have been working on this book offi-cially since 2005, and unofficially formy entire adult life. I have spoken andwritten to hundreds, perhaps thou-sands, of people about the topicscovered inside, and have read as manybooks, scholarly papers, magazinearticles, chat-room discussions, andblog posts. Some of these I mention inthe book; others informed almost everysentence I wrote. Quiet stands on manyshoulders, especially the scholars andresearchers whose work taught me somuch. In a perfect world, I would havenamed every one of my sources, ment-ors, and interviewees. But for the sakeof readability, some names appear onlyin the Notes or Acknowledgments.

For similar reasons, I did not use el-lipses or brackets in certain quotationsbut made sure that the extra or missingwords did not change the speaker’s orwriter’s meaning. If you would like toquote these written sources from theoriginal, the citations directing you tothe full quotations appear in the Notes.

I’ve changed the names and identify-ing details of some of the people whosestories I tell, and in the stories of myown work as a lawyer and consultant.To protect the privacy of the parti-cipants in Charles di Cagno’s publicspeaking workshop, who did not planto be included in a book when theysigned up for the class, the story of myfirst evening in class is a compositebased on several sessions; so is thestory of Greg and Emily, which is basedon many interviews with similarcouples. Subject to the limitations of

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memory, all other stories are recountedas they happened or were told to me. Idid not fact-check the stories peopletold me about themselves, but only in-cluded those I believed to be true.

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INTRODUCTION

The North and South ofTemperament

Montgomery, Alabama. December 1,1955. Early evening. A public bus pullsto a stop and a sensibly dressed womanin her forties gets on. She carries her-self erectly, despite having spent theday bent over an ironing board in adingy basement tailor shop at theMontgomery Fair department store. Herfeet are swollen, her shoulders ache.She sits in the first row of the Coloredsection and watches quietly as the busfills with riders. Until the driver ordersher to give her seat to a whitepassenger.

The woman utters a single word thatignites one of the most important civilrights protests of the twentieth century,one word that helps America find itsbetter self.

The word is “No.”The driver threatens to have her

arrested.“You may do that,” says Rosa Parks.A police officer arrives. He asks Parks

why she won’t move.“Why do you all push us around?”

she answers simply.“I don’t know,” he says. “But the law

is the law, and you’re under arrest.”On the afternoon of her trial and con-

viction for disorderly conduct, theMontgomery Improvement Associationholds a rally for Parks at the Holt StreetBaptist Church, in the poorest sectionof town. Five thousand gather to sup-port Parks’s lonely act of courage. They

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squeeze inside the church until its pewscan hold no more. The rest wait pa-tiently outside, listening through loud-speakers. The Reverend Martin LutherKing Jr. addresses the crowd. “Therecomes a time that people get tired ofbeing trampled over by the iron feet ofoppression,” he tells them. “Therecomes a time when people get tired ofbeing pushed out of the glittering sun-light of life’s July and left standingamidst the piercing chill of an AlpineNovember.”

He praises Parks’s bravery and hugsher. She stands silently, her mere pres-ence enough to galvanize the crowd.The association launches a city-widebus boycott that lasts 381 days. Thepeople trudge miles to work. They car-pool with strangers. They change thecourse of American history.

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I had always imagined Rosa Parks asa stately woman with a bold tempera-ment, someone who could easily standup to a busload of glowering passen-gers. But when she died in 2005 at theage of ninety-two, the flood of obituar-ies recalled her as soft-spoken, sweet,and small in stature. They said she was“timid and shy” but had “the courageof a lion.” They were full of phraseslike “radical humility” and “quiet forti-tude.” What does it mean to be quietand have fortitude? these descriptionsasked implicitly. How could you be shyand courageous?

Parks herself seemed aware of thisparadox, calling her autobiographyQuiet Strength—a title that challenges usto question our assumptions. Whyshouldn’t quiet be strong? And whatelse can quiet do that we don’t give itcredit for?

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Our lives are shaped as profoundly bypersonality as by gender or race. Andthe single most important aspect of per-sonality—the “north and south of tem-perament,” as one scientist puts it—iswhere we fall on the introvert-extrovertspectrum. Our place on this continuuminfluences our choice of friends andmates, and how we make conversation,resolve differences, and show love. Itaffects the careers we choose andwhether or not we succeed at them. Itgoverns how likely we are to exercise,commit adultery, function well withoutsleep, learn from our mistakes, placebig bets in the stock market, delay grat-ification, be a good leader, and ask“what if.”* It’s reflected in our brainpathways, neurotransmitters, and

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remote corners of our nervous systems.Today introversion and extroversionare two of the most exhaustively re-searched subjects in personality psycho-logy, arousing the curiosity of hundredsof scientists.

These researchers have made excitingdiscoveries aided by the latest techno-logy, but they’re part of a long andstoried tradition. Poets and philosoph-ers have been thinking about introvertsand extroverts since the dawn of recor-ded time. Both personality types appearin the Bible and in the writings ofGreek and Roman physicians, and someevolutionary psychologists say that thehistory of these types reaches back evenfarther than that: the animal kingdomalso boasts “introverts” and“extroverts,” as we’ll see, from fruitflies to pumpkinseed fish to rhesusmonkeys. As with other complementary

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pairings—masculinity and femininity,East and West, liberal and conservat-ive—humanity would be unrecogniz-able, and vastly diminished, withoutboth personality styles.

Take the partnership of Rosa Parksand Martin Luther King Jr.: a formid-able orator refusing to give up his seaton a segregated bus wouldn’t have hadthe same effect as a modest womanwho’d clearly prefer to keep silent butfor the exigencies of the situation. AndParks didn’t have the stuff to thrill acrowd if she’d tried to stand up and an-nounce that she had a dream. But withKing’s help, she didn’t have to.

Yet today we make room for a re-markably narrow range of personalitystyles. We’re told that to be great is tobe bold, to be happy is to be sociable.We see ourselves as a nation of extro-verts—which means that we’ve lost

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sight of who we really are. Dependingon which study you consult, one thirdto one half of Americans are intro-verts—in other words, one out of everytwo or three people you know. (Giventhat the United States is among themost extroverted of nations, the num-ber must be at least as high in otherparts of the world.) If you’re not an in-trovert yourself, you are surely raising,managing, married to, or coupled withone.

If these statistics surprise you, that’sprobably because so many people pre-tend to be extroverts. Closet introvertspass undetected on playgrounds, inhigh school locker rooms, and in thecorridors of corporate America. Somefool even themselves, until some lifeevent—a layoff, an empty nest, an in-heritance that frees them to spend timeas they like—jolts them into taking

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stock of their true natures. You haveonly to raise the subject of this bookwith your friends and acquaintances tofind that the most unlikely people con-sider themselves introverts.

It makes sense that so many intro-verts hide even from themselves. Welive with a value system that I call theExtrovert Ideal—the omnipresent beliefthat the ideal self is gregarious, alpha,and comfortable in the spotlight. Thearchetypal extrovert prefers action tocontemplation, risk-taking to heed-tak-ing, certainty to doubt. He favors quickdecisions, even at the risk of beingwrong. She works well in teams and so-cializes in groups. We like to think thatwe value individuality, but all too oftenwe admire one type of individual—thekind who’s comfortable “putting him-self out there.” Sure, we allow techno-logically gifted loners who launch

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companies in garages to have any per-sonality they please, but they are theexceptions, not the rule, and our toler-ance extends mainly to those who getfabulously wealthy or hold the promiseof doing so.

Introversion—along with its cousinssensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—isnow a second-class personality trait,somewhere between a disappointmentand a pathology. Introverts living underthe Extrovert Ideal are like women in aman’s world, discounted because of atrait that goes to the core of who theyare. Extroversion is an enormously ap-pealing personality style, but we’veturned it into an oppressive standard towhich most of us feel we must conform.

The Extrovert Ideal has been docu-mented in many studies, though this re-search has never been grouped under asingle name. Talkative people, for

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example, are rated as smarter, better-looking, more interesting, and more de-sirable as friends. Velocity of speechcounts as well as volume: we rank fasttalkers as more competent and likablethan slow ones. The same dynamics ap-ply in groups, where research showsthat the voluble are considered smarterthan the reticent—even though there’szero correlation between the gift of gaband good ideas. Even the word introvertis stigmatized—one informal study, bypsychologist Laurie Helgoe, found thatintroverts described their own physicalappearance in vivid language (“green-blue eyes,” “exotic,” “highcheekbones”), but when asked to de-scribe generic introverts they drew abland and distasteful picture(“ungainly,” “neutral colors,” “skinproblems”).

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But we make a grave mistake to em-brace the Extrovert Ideal so unthink-ingly. Some of our greatest ideas, art,and inventions—from the theory ofevolution to van Gogh’s sunflowers tothe personal computer—came fromquiet and cerebral people who knewhow to tune in to their inner worldsand the treasures to be found there.Without introverts, the world would bedevoid of:

the theory of gravitythe theory of relativityW. B. Yeats’s “The Second

Coming”Chopin’s nocturnesProust’s In Search of Lost TimePeter PanOrwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and

Animal Farm

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The Cat in the HatCharlie BrownSchindler’s List, E.T., and Close En-

counters of the Third KindGoogleHarry Potter*

As the science journalist WinifredGallagher writes: “The glory of the dis-position that stops to consider stimulirather than rushing to engage withthem is its long association with intel-lectual and artistic achievement.Neither E=mc2 nor Paradise Lost wasdashed off by a party animal.” Even inless obviously introverted occupations,like finance, politics, and activism,some of the greatest leaps forward weremade by introverts. In this book we’llsee how figures like Eleanor Roosevelt,Al Gore, Warren Buffett, Gandhi—and

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Rosa Parks—achieved what they didnot in spite of but because of theirintroversion.

Yet, as Quiet will explore, many ofthe most important institutions of con-temporary life are designed for thosewho enjoy group projects and highlevels of stimulation. As children, ourclassroom desks are increasingly ar-ranged in pods, the better to fostergroup learning, and research suggeststhat the vast majority of teachers be-lieve that the ideal student is an extro-vert. We watch TV shows whose prot-agonists are not the “children nextdoor,” like the Cindy Bradys andBeaver Cleavers of yesteryear, but rockstars and webcast hostesses with out-sized personalities, like HannahMontana and Carly Shay of iCarly. EvenSid the Science Kid, a PBS-sponsoredrole model for the preschool set, kicks

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off each school day by performingdance moves with his pals. (“Check outmy moves! I’m a rock star!”)

As adults, many of us work for organ-izations that insist we work in teams, inoffices without walls, for supervisorswho value “people skills” above all. Toadvance our careers, we’re expected topromote ourselves unabashedly. Thescientists whose research gets fundedoften have confident, perhaps overcon-fident, personalities. The artists whosework adorns the walls of contemporarymuseums strike impressive poses at gal-lery openings. The authors whose booksget published—once accepted as a re-clusive breed—are now vetted by publi-cists to make sure they’re talk-showready. (You wouldn’t be reading thisbook if I hadn’t convinced my publisherthat I was enough of a pseudo-extrovertto promote it.)

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If you’re an introvert, you also knowthat the bias against quiet can causedeep psychic pain. As a child you mighthave overheard your parents apologizefor your shyness. (“Why can’t you bemore like the Kennedy boys?” theCamelot-besotted parents of one man Iinterviewed repeatedly asked him.) Orat school you might have been proddedto come “out of your shell”—that nox-ious expression which fails to appreci-ate that some animals naturally carryshelter everywhere they go, and thatsome humans are just the same. “Allthe comments from childhood still ringin my ears, that I was lazy, stupid,slow, boring,” writes a member of an e-mail list called Introvert Retreat. “Bythe time I was old enough to figure outthat I was simply introverted, it was apart of my being, the assumption thatthere is something inherently wrong

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with me. I wish I could find that littlevestige of doubt and remove it.”

Now that you’re an adult, you mightstill feel a pang of guilt when you de-cline a dinner invitation in favor of agood book. Or maybe you like to eatalone in restaurants and could dowithout the pitying looks from fellowdiners. Or you’re told that you’re “inyour head too much,” a phrase that’soften deployed against the quiet andcerebral.

Of course, there’s another word forsuch people: thinkers.

I have seen firsthand how difficult it isfor introverts to take stock of their owntalents, and how powerful it is when fi-nally they do. For more than ten years I

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trained people of all stripes—corporatelawyers and college students, hedge-fund managers and married couples—innegotiation skills. Of course, wecovered the basics: how to prepare for anegotiation, when to make the first of-fer, and what to do when the other per-son says “take it or leave it.” But I alsohelped clients figure out their naturalpersonalities and how to make the mostof them.

My very first client was a young wo-man named Laura. She was a WallStreet lawyer, but a quiet and day-dreamy one who dreaded the spotlightand disliked aggression. She had man-aged somehow to make it through thecrucible of Harvard Law School—aplace where classes are conducted inhuge, gladiatorial amphitheaters, andwhere she once got so nervous that shethrew up on the way to class. Now that

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she was in the real world, she wasn’tsure she could represent her clients asforcefully as they expected.

For the first three years on the job,Laura was so junior that she never hadto test this premise. But one day thesenior lawyer she’d been working withwent on vacation, leaving her in chargeof an important negotiation. The clientwas a South American manufacturingcompany that was about to default on abank loan and hoped to renegotiate itsterms; a syndicate of bankers thatowned the endangered loan sat on theother side of the negotiating table.

Laura would have preferred to hideunder said table, but she was accus-tomed to fighting such impulses.Gamely but nervously, she took herspot in the lead chair, flanked by herclients: general counsel on one side andsenior financial officer on the other.

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These happened to be Laura’s favoriteclients: gracious and soft-spoken, verydifferent from the master-of-the-uni-verse types her firm usually represen-ted. In the past, Laura had taken thegeneral counsel to a Yankees game andthe financial officer shopping for ahandbag for her sister. But now thesecozy outings—just the kind of socializ-ing Laura enjoyed—seemed a worldaway. Across the table sat nine dis-gruntled investment bankers in tailoredsuits and expensive shoes, accompaniedby their lawyer, a square-jawed womanwith a hearty manner. Clearly not theself-doubting type, this womanlaunched into an impressive speech onhow Laura’s clients would be luckysimply to accept the bankers’ terms. Itwas, she said, a very magnanimousoffer.

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Everyone waited for Laura to reply,but she couldn’t think of anything tosay. So she just sat there. Blinking. Alleyes on her. Her clients shifting uneas-ily in their seats. Her thoughts runningin a familiar loop: I’m too quiet for thiskind of thing, too unassuming, too cereb-ral. She imagined the person whowould be better equipped to save theday: someone bold, smooth, ready topound the table. In middle school thisperson, unlike Laura, would have beencalled “outgoing,” the highest accoladeher seventh-grade classmates knew,higher even than “pretty,” for a girl, or“athletic,” for a guy. Laura promisedherself that she only had to make itthrough the day. Tomorrow she wouldgo look for another career.

Then she remembered what I’d toldher again and again: she was an intro-vert, and as such she had unique

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powers in negotiation—perhaps less ob-vious but no less formidable. She’dprobably prepared more than everyoneelse. She had a quiet but firm speakingstyle. She rarely spoke without think-ing. Being mild-mannered, she couldtake strong, even aggressive, positionswhile coming across as perfectly reas-onable. And she tended to ask ques-tions—lots of them—and actually listento the answers, which, no matter whatyour personality, is crucial to strongnegotiation.

So Laura finally started doing whatcame naturally.

“Let’s go back a step. What are yournumbers based on?” she asked.

“What if we structured the loan thisway, do you think it might work?”

“That way?”“Some other way?”

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At first her questions were tentative.She picked up steam as she went along,posing them more forcefully and mak-ing it clear that she’d done her home-work and wouldn’t concede the facts.But she also stayed true to her ownstyle, never raising her voice or losingher decorum. Every time the bankersmade an assertion that seemed un-budgeable, Laura tried to be construct-ive. “Are you saying that’s the only wayto go? What if we took a differentapproach?”

Eventually her simple queries shiftedthe mood in the room, just as the nego-tiation textbooks say they will. Thebankers stopped speechifying anddominance-posing, activities for whichLaura felt hopelessly ill-equipped, andthey started having an actualconversation.

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More discussion. Still no agreement.One of the bankers revved up again,throwing his papers down and stormingout of the room. Laura ignored this dis-play, mostly because she didn’t knowwhat else to do. Later on someone toldher that at that pivotal moment she’dplayed a good game of somethingcalled “negotiation jujitsu”; but sheknew that she was just doing what youlearn to do naturally as a quiet personin a loudmouth world.

Finally the two sides struck a deal.The bankers left the building, Laura’sfavorite clients headed for the airport,and Laura went home, curled up with abook, and tried to forget the day’stensions.

But the next morning, the lead law-yer for the bankers—the vigorous wo-man with the strong jaw—called to of-fer her a job. “I’ve never seen anyone

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so nice and so tough at the same time,”she said. And the day after that, thelead banker called Laura, asking if herlaw firm would represent his companyin the future. “We need someone whocan help us put deals together withoutletting ego get in the way,” he said.

By sticking to her own gentle way ofdoing things, Laura had reeled in newbusiness for her firm and a job offer forherself. Raising her voice and poundingthe table was unnecessary.

Today Laura understands that her in-troversion is an essential part of whoshe is, and she embraces her reflectivenature. The loop inside her head thataccused her of being too quiet and un-assuming plays much less often. Lauraknows that she can hold her own whenshe needs to.

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What exactly do I mean when I say thatLaura is an introvert? When I startedwriting this book, the first thing Iwanted to find out was precisely howresearchers define introversion and ex-troversion. I knew that in 1921 the in-fluential psychologist Carl Jung hadpublished a bombshell of a book, Psy-chological Types, popularizing the termsintrovert and extrovert as the centralbuilding blocks of personality. Intro-verts are drawn to the inner world ofthought and feeling, said Jung, extro-verts to the external life of people andactivities. Introverts focus on the mean-ing they make of the events swirlingaround them; extroverts plunge into theevents themselves. Introverts rechargetheir batteries by being alone;

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extroverts need to recharge when theydon’t socialize enough. If you’ve evertaken a Myers-Briggs personality test,which is based on Jung’s thinking andused by the majority of universities andFortune 100 companies, then you mayalready be familiar with these ideas.

But what do contemporary research-ers have to say? I soon discovered thatthere is no all-purpose definition of in-troversion or extroversion; these arenot unitary categories, like “curly-haired” or “sixteen-year-old,” in whicheveryone can agree on who qualifies forinclusion. For example, adherents ofthe Big Five school of personality psy-chology (which argues that human per-sonality can be boiled down to fiveprimary traits) define introversion notin terms of a rich inner life but as alack of qualities such as assertivenessand sociability. There are almost as

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many definitions of introvert and extro-vert as there are personality psycholo-gists, who spend a great deal of time ar-guing over which meaning is most ac-curate. Some think that Jung’s ideas areoutdated; others swear that he’s theonly one who got it right.

Still, today’s psychologists tend toagree on several important points: forexample, that introverts and extrovertsdiffer in the level of outside stimulationthat they need to function well. Intro-verts feel “just right” with less stimula-tion, as when they sip wine with a closefriend, solve a crossword puzzle, orread a book. Extroverts enjoy the extrabang that comes from activities likemeeting new people, skiing slipperyslopes, and cranking up the stereo.“Other people are very arousing,” saysthe personality psychologist DavidWinter, explaining why your typical

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introvert would rather spend her vaca-tion reading on the beach than partyingon a cruise ship. “They arouse threat,fear, flight, and love. A hundred peopleare very stimulating compared to ahundred books or a hundred grains ofsand.”

Many psychologists would also agreethat introverts and extroverts work dif-ferently. Extroverts tend to tackle as-signments quickly. They make fast(sometimes rash) decisions, and arecomfortable multitasking and risk-tak-ing. They enjoy “the thrill of the chase”for rewards like money and status.

Introverts often work more slowlyand deliberately. They like to focus onone task at a time and can have mightypowers of concentration. They’re relat-ively immune to the lures of wealth andfame.

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Our personalities also shape our so-cial styles. Extroverts are the peoplewho will add life to your dinner partyand laugh generously at your jokes.They tend to be assertive, dominant,and in great need of company. Extro-verts think out loud and on their feet;they prefer talking to listening, rarelyfind themselves at a loss for words, andoccasionally blurt out things they nevermeant to say. They’re comfortable withconflict, but not with solitude.

Introverts, in contrast, may havestrong social skills and enjoy partiesand business meetings, but after awhile wish they were home in their pa-jamas. They prefer to devote their so-cial energies to close friends, col-leagues, and family. They listen morethan they talk, think before they speak,and often feel as if they express them-selves better in writing than in

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conversation. They tend to dislike con-flict. Many have a horror of small talk,but enjoy deep discussions.

A few things introverts are not: Theword introvert is not a synonym for her-mit or misanthrope. Introverts can bethese things, but most are perfectlyfriendly. One of the most humanephrases in the English language—“Onlyconnect!”—was written by the dis-tinctly introverted E. M. Forster in anovel exploring the question of how toachieve “human love at its height.”

Nor are introverts necessarily shy.Shyness is the fear of social disapprovalor humiliation, while introversion is apreference for environments that arenot overstimulating. Shyness is inher-ently painful; introversion is not. Onereason that people confuse the two con-cepts is that they sometimes overlap(though psychologists debate to what

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degree). Some psychologists map thetwo tendencies on vertical and hori-zontal axes, with the introvert-extrovertspectrum on the horizontal axis, andthe anxious-stable spectrum on the ver-tical. With this model, you end up withfour quadrants of personality types:calm extroverts, anxious (or impulsive)extroverts, calm introverts, and anxiousintroverts. In other words, you can be ashy extrovert, like Barbra Streisand,who has a larger-than-life personalityand paralyzing stage fright; or a non-shy introvert, like Bill Gates, who by allaccounts keeps to himself but is un-fazed by the opinions of others.

You can also, of course, be both shyand an introvert: T. S. Eliot was a fam-ously private soul who wrote in “TheWaste Land” that he could “show youfear in a handful of dust.” Many shypeople turn inward, partly as a refuge

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from the socializing that causes themsuch anxiety. And many introverts areshy, partly as a result of receiving themessage that there’s something wrongwith their preference for reflection, andpartly because their physiologies, aswe’ll see, compel them to withdrawfrom high-stimulation environments.

But for all their differences, shynessand introversion have in commonsomething profound. The mental stateof a shy extrovert sitting quietly in abusiness meeting may be very differentfrom that of a calm introvert—the shyperson is afraid to speak up, while theintrovert is simply overstimulated—butto the outside world, the two appear tobe the same. This can give both typesinsight into how our reverence for al-pha status blinds us to things that aregood and smart and wise. For very dif-ferent reasons, shy and introverted

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people might choose to spend theirdays in behind-the-scenes pursuits likeinventing, or researching, or holdingthe hands of the gravely ill—or in lead-ership positions they execute with quietcompetence. These are not alpha roles,but the people who play them are rolemodels all the same.

If you’re still not sure where you fall onthe introvert-extrovert spectrum, youcan assess yourself here. Answer eachquestion “true” or “false,” choosing theanswer that applies to you more oftenthan not.*

1. _______ I prefer one-on-one conversa-tions to group activities.

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2. _______ I often prefer to express my-self in writing.

3. _______ I enjoy solitude.4. _______ I seem to care less than my

peers about wealth, fame,and status.

5. _______ I dislike small talk, but I en-joy talking in depth abouttopics that matter to me.

6. _______ People tell me that I’m agood listener.

7. _______ I’m not a big risk-taker.8. _______ I enjoy work that allows me

to “dive in” with fewinterruptions.

9. _______ I like to celebrate birthdayson a small scale, with onlyone or two close friends orfamily members.

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10. _______ People describe me as “soft-spoken” or “mellow.”

11. _______ I prefer not to show or dis-cuss my work with othersuntil it’s finished.

12. _______ I dislike conflict.13. _______ I do my best work on my

own.14. _______ I tend to think before I speak.15. _______ I feel drained after being out

and about, even if I’ve en-joyed myself.

16. _______ I often let calls go through tovoice mail.

17. _______ If I had to choose, I’d prefer aweekend with absolutelynothing to do to one withtoo many things scheduled.

18. _______ I don’t enjoy multitasking.19. _______ I can concentrate easily.

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20. _______ In classroom situations, Iprefer lectures to seminars.

The more often you answered “true,”the more introverted you probably are.If you found yourself with a roughlyequal number of “true” and “false” an-swers, then you may be an ambi-vert—yes, there really is such a word.

But even if you answered everysingle question as an introvert or extro-vert, that doesn’t mean that your beha-vior is predictable across all circum-stances. We can’t say that every intro-vert is a bookworm or every extrovertwears lampshades at parties any morethan we can say that every woman is anatural consensus-builder and everyman loves contact sports. As Jung feli-citously put it, “There is no such thingas a pure extrovert or a pure introvert.

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Such a man would be in the lunaticasylum.”

This is partly because we are all glor-iously complex individuals, but also be-cause there are so many different kindsof introverts and extroverts. Introver-sion and extroversion interact with ourother personality traits and personalhistories, producing wildly differentkinds of people. So if you’re an artisticAmerican guy whose father wishedyou’d try out for the football team likeyour rough-and-tumble brothers, you’llbe a very different kind of introvertfrom, say, a Finnish businesswomanwhose parents were lighthouse keepers.(Finland is a famously introverted na-tion. Finnish joke: How can you tell if aFinn likes you? He’s staring at yourshoes instead of his own.)

Many introverts are also “highlysensitive,” which sounds poetic, but is

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actually a technical term in psychology.If you are a sensitive sort, then you’remore apt than the average person tofeel pleasantly overwhelmed by Beeth-oven’s “Moonlight Sonata” or a well-turned phrase or an act of extraordin-ary kindness. You may be quicker thanothers to feel sickened by violence andugliness, and you likely have a verystrong conscience. When you were achild you were probably called “shy,”and to this day feel nervous whenyou’re being evaluated, for examplewhen giving a speech or on a first date.Later we’ll examine why this seeminglyunrelated collection of attributes tendsto belong to the same person and whythis person is often introverted. (No oneknows exactly how many introverts arehighly sensitive, but we know that 70percent of sensitives are introverts, and

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the other 30 percent tend to reportneeding a lot of “down time.”)

All of this complexity means that noteverything you read in Quiet will applyto you, even if you consider yourself atrue-blue introvert. For one thing, we’llspend some time talking about shynessand sensitivity, while you might haveneither of these traits. That’s OK. Takewhat applies to you, and use the rest toimprove your relationships with others.

Having said all this, in Quiet we’ll trynot to get too hung up on definitions.Strictly defining terms is vital for re-searchers whose studies depend on pin-pointing exactly where introversionstops and other traits, like shyness,start. But in Quiet we’ll concernourselves more with the fruit of that re-search. Today’s psychologists, joined byneuroscientists with their brain-scan-ning machines, have unearthed

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illuminating insights that are changingthe way we see the world—andourselves. They are answering ques-tions such as: Why are some peopletalkative while others measure theirwords? Why do some people burrow in-to their work and others organize officebirthday parties? Why are some peoplecomfortable wielding authority whileothers prefer neither to lead nor to beled? Can introverts be leaders? Is ourcultural preference for extroversion inthe natural order of things, or is it so-cially determined? From an evolution-ary perspective, introversion must havesurvived as a personality trait for areason—so what might the reason be?If you’re an introvert, should you de-vote your energies to activities thatcome naturally, or should you stretchyourself, as Laura did that day at thenegotiation table?

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The answers might surprise you.If there is only one insight you take

away from this book, though, I hope it’sa newfound sense of entitlement to beyourself. I can vouch personally for thelife-transforming effects of this outlook.Remember that first client I told youabout, the one I called Laura in order toprotect her identity?

That was a story about me. I was myown first client.* Answer key: exercise: extroverts; commitadultery: extroverts; function well withoutsleep: introverts; learn from our mistakes: intro-verts; place big bets: extroverts; delay gratifica-tion: introverts; be a good leader: in some casesintroverts, in other cases extroverts, dependingon the type of leadership called for; ask “whatif”: introverts.* Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, W. B. Yeats,Frédéric Chopin, Marcel Proust, J. M. Barrie,

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George Orwell, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss),Charles Schulz, Steven Spielberg, Larry Page, J.K. Rowling.* This is an informal quiz, not a scientificallyvalidated personality test. The questions wereformulated based on characteristics of introver-sion often accepted by contemporaryresearchers.

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PartOneTHE EXTROVERT IDEAL

1THE RISE OF THE “MIGHTY

LIKEABLE FELLOW”

How Extroversion Became the CulturalIdeal

Strangers’ eyes, keen and critical.Can you meet them

proudly—confidently—without fear?—PRINT ADVERTISEMENT FOR

WOODBURY’S SOAP, 1922

The date: 1902. The place: HarmonyChurch, Missouri, a tiny, dot-on-the-map town located on a floodplain ahundred miles from Kansas City. Ouryoung protagonist: a good-natured but

insecure high school student namedDale.

Skinny, unathletic, and fretful, Daleis the son of a morally upright but per-petually bankrupt pig farmer. He re-spects his parents but dreads followingin their poverty-stricken footsteps. Daleworries about other things, too: thun-der and lightning, going to hell, andbeing tongue-tied at crucial moments.He even fears his wedding day: What ifhe can’t think of anything to say to hisfuture bride?

One day a Chautauqua speakercomes to town. The Chautauqua move-ment, born in 1873 and based in up-state New York, sends gifted speakersacross the country to lecture on literat-ure, science, and religion. Rural Amer-icans prize these presenters for thewhiff of glamour they bring from theoutside world—and their power to

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mesmerize an audience. This particularspeaker captivates the young Dale withhis own rags-to-riches tale: once he’dbeen a lowly farm boy with a bleak fu-ture, but he developed a charismaticspeaking style and took the stage atChautauqua. Dale hangs on his everyword.

A few years later, Dale is again im-pressed by the value of public speaking.His family moves to a farm three milesoutside of Warrensburg, Missouri, so hecan attend college there without payingroom and board. Dale observes that thestudents who win campus speakingcontests are seen as leaders, and he re-solves to be one of them. He signs upfor every contest and rushes home atnight to practice. Again and again heloses; Dale is dogged, but not much ofan orator. Eventually, though, his ef-forts begin to pay off. He transforms

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himself into a speaking champion andcampus hero. Other students turn tohim for speech lessons; he trains themand they start winning, too.

By the time Dale leaves college in1908, his parents are still poor, but cor-porate America is booming. Henry Fordis selling Model Ts like griddle cakes,using the slogan “for business and forpleasure.” J.C. Penney, Woolworth, andSears Roebuck have become householdnames. Electricity lights up the homesof the middle class; indoor plumbingspares them midnight trips to theouthouse.

The new economy calls for a newkind of man—a salesman, a social oper-ator, someone with a ready smile, amasterful handshake, and the ability toget along with colleagues while simul-taneously outshining them. Dale joinsthe swelling ranks of salesmen, heading

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out on the road with few possessionsbut his silver tongue.

Dale’s last name is Carnegie(Carnagey, actually; he changes thespelling later, likely to evoke Andrew,the great industrialist). After a fewgrueling years selling beef for Armourand Company, he sets up shop as apublic-speaking teacher. Carnegie holdshis first class at a YMCA night schoolon 125th Street in New York City. Heasks for the usual two-dollars-per-ses-sion salary for night school teachers.The Y’s director, doubting that a public-speaking class will generate much in-terest, refuses to pay that kind ofmoney.

But the class is an overnight sensa-tion, and Carnegie goes on to found theDale Carnegie Institute, dedicated tohelping businessmen root out the veryinsecurities that had held him back as a

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young man. In 1913 he publishes hisfirst book, Public Speaking and Influen-cing Men in Business. “In the days whenpianos and bathrooms were luxuries,”Carnegie writes, “men regarded abilityin speaking as a peculiar gift, neededonly by the lawyer, clergyman, orstatesman. Today we have come torealize that it is the indispensableweapon of those who would forgeahead in the keen competition ofbusiness.”

Carnegie’s metamorphosis from farm-boy to salesman to public-speaking iconis also the story of the rise of the Extro-vert Ideal. Carnegie’s journey reflecteda cultural evolution that reached a tip-ping point around the turn of the

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twentieth century, changing foreverwho we are and whom we admire, howwe act at job interviews and what welook for in an employee, how we courtour mates and raise our children. Amer-ica had shifted from what the influen-tial cultural historian Warren Susmancalled a Culture of Character to a Cul-ture of Personality—and opened up aPandora’s Box of personal anxietiesfrom which we would never quiterecover.

In the Culture of Character, the idealself was serious, disciplined, and honor-able. What counted was not so muchthe impression one made in public ashow one behaved in private. The wordpersonality didn’t exist in English untilthe eighteenth century, and the idea of“having a good personality” was notwidespread until the twentieth.

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But when they embraced the Cultureof Personality, Americans started to fo-cus on how others perceived them.They became captivated by people whowere bold and entertaining. “The socialrole demanded of all in the new Cultureof Personality was that of a performer,”Susman famously wrote. “Every Amer-ican was to become a performing self.”

The rise of industrial America was amajor force behind this cultural evolu-tion. The nation quickly developedfrom an agricultural society of littlehouses on the prairie to an urbanized,“the business of America is business”powerhouse. In the country’s earlydays, most Americans lived like DaleCarnegie’s family, on farms or in smalltowns, interacting with people they’dknown since childhood. But when thetwentieth century arrived, a perfectstorm of big business, urbanization, and

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mass immigration blew the populationinto the cities. In 1790, only 3 percentof Americans lived in cities; in 1840,only 8 percent did; by 1920, more thana third of the country were urbanites.“We cannot all live in cities,” wrote thenews editor Horace Greeley in 1867,“yet nearly all seem determined to doso.”

Americans found themselves workingno longer with neighbors but withstrangers. “Citizens” morphed into “em-ployees,” facing the question of how tomake a good impression on people towhom they had no civic or family ties.“The reasons why one man gained apromotion or one woman suffered a so-cial snub,” writes the historian RolandMarchand, “had become less explicableon grounds of long-standing favoritismor old family feuds. In the increasinglyanonymous business and social

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relationships of the age, one might sus-pect that anything—including a firstimpression—had made the crucial dif-ference.” Americans responded to thesepressures by trying to become salesmenwho could sell not only their company’slatest gizmo but also themselves.

One of the most powerful lensesthrough which to view the transforma-tion from Character to Personality isthe self-help tradition in which DaleCarnegie played such a prominent role.Self-help books have always loomedlarge in the American psyche. Many ofthe earliest conduct guides were reli-gious parables, like The Pilgrim’s Pro-gress, published in 1678, which warnedreaders to behave with restraint if theywanted to make it into heaven. The ad-vice manuals of the nineteenth centurywere less religious but still preachedthe value of a noble character. They

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featured case studies of historical her-oes like Abraham Lincoln, revered notonly as a gifted communicator but alsoas a modest man who did not, as RalphWaldo Emerson put it, “offend by su-periority.” They also celebrated regularpeople who lived highly moral lives. Apopular 1899 manual called Character:The Grandest Thing in the World featureda timid shop girl who gave away hermeager earnings to a freezing beggar,then rushed off before anyone could seewhat she’d done. Her virtue, the readerunderstood, derived not only from hergenerosity but also from her wish to re-main anonymous.

But by 1920, popular self-help guideshad changed their focus from inner vir-tue to outer charm—“to know what tosay and how to say it,” as one manualput it. “To create a personality ispower,” advised another. “Try in every

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way to have a ready command of themanners which make people think ‘he’sa mighty likeable fellow,’ ” said a third.“That is the beginning of a reputationfor personality.” Success magazine andThe Saturday Evening Post introduceddepartments instructing readers on theart of conversation. The same author,Orison Swett Marden, who wrote Char-acter: The Grandest Thing in the World in1899, produced another popular title in1921. It was called MasterfulPersonality.

Many of these guides were writtenfor businessmen, but women were alsourged to work on a mysterious qualitycalled “fascination.” Coming of age inthe 1920s was such a competitive busi-ness compared to what their grand-mothers had experienced, warned onebeauty guide, that they had to be vis-ibly charismatic: “People who pass us

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on the street can’t know that we’reclever and charming unless we look it.”

Such advice—ostensibly meant to im-prove people’s lives—must have madeeven reasonably confident people un-easy. Susman counted the words thatappeared most frequently in thepersonality-driven advice manuals ofthe early twentieth century and com-pared them to the character guides ofthe nineteenth century. The earlierguides emphasized attributes that any-one could work on improving, de-scribed by words like

CitizenshipDutyWorkGolden deedsHonorReputationMorals

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MannersIntegrity

But the new guides celebrated qualit-ies that were—no matter how easy DaleCarnegie made it sound—trickier to ac-quire. Either you embodied these qual-ities or you didn’t:

MagneticFascinatingStunningAttractiveGlowingDominantForcefulEnergetic

It was no coincidence that in the1920s and the 1930s, Americans be-came obsessed with movie stars. Who

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better than a matinee idol to modelpersonal magnetism?

Americans also received advice on self-presentation—whether they liked it ornot—from the advertising industry.While early print ads were straightfor-ward product announcements (“EATON’SHIGHLAND LINEN: THE FRESHEST AND CLEANESTWRITING PAPER”), the new personality-driven ads cast consumers as per-formers with stage fright from whichonly the advertiser’s product might res-cue them. These ads focused obsess-ively on the hostile glare of the publicspotlight. “ALL AROUND YOU PEOPLE AREJUDGING YOU SILENTLY,” warned a 1922 adfor Woodbury’s soap. “CRITICAL EYES ARE

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SIZING YOU UP RIGHT NOW,” advised theWilliams Shaving Cream company.

Madison Avenue spoke directly to theanxieties of male salesmen and middlemanagers. In one ad for Dr. West’stoothbrushes, a prosperous-looking fel-low sat behind a desk, his arm cockedconfidently behind his hip, askingwhether you’ve “EVER TRIED SELLINGYOURSELF TO YOU? A FAVORABLE FIRSTIMPRESSION IS THE GREATEST SINGLE FACTOR INBUSINESS OR SOCIAL SUCCESS.” The WilliamsShaving Cream ad featured a slick-haired, mustachioed man urging read-ers to “LET YOUR FACE REFLECT CONFIDENCE,NOT WORRY! IT’S THE ‘LOOK’ OF YOU BY WHICHYOU ARE JUDGED MOST OFTEN.”

Other ads reminded women that theirsuccess in the dating game dependednot only on looks but also on personal-ity. In 1921 a Woodbury’s soap ad

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showed a crestfallen young woman,home alone after a disappointing even-ing out. She had “longed to be success-ful, gay, triumphant,” the text sympath-ized. But without the help of the rightsoap, the woman was a social failure.

Ten years later, Lux laundry deter-gent ran a print ad featuring a plaintiveletter written to Dorothy Dix, the DearAbby of her day. “Dear Miss Dix,” readthe letter, “How can I make myselfmore popular? I am fairly pretty andnot a dumbbell, but I am so timid andself-conscious with people. I’m alwayssure they’re not going to like me.…—Joan G.”

Miss Dix’s answer came back clearand firm. If only Joan would use Luxdetergent on her lingerie, curtains, andsofa cushions, she would soon gain a“deep, sure, inner conviction of beingcharming.”

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This portrayal of courtship as a high-stakes performance reflected the boldnew mores of the Culture of Personal-ity. Under the restrictive (in some casesrepressive) social codes of the Cultureof Character, both genders displayedsome reserve when it came to the mat-ing dance. Women who were too loudor made inappropriate eye contact withstrangers were considered brazen.Upper-class women had more license tospeak than did their lower-class coun-terparts, and indeed were judged partlyon their talent for witty repartee, buteven they were advised to displayblushes and downcast eyes. They werewarned by conduct manuals that “thecoldest reserve” was “more admirablein a woman a man wishe[d] to makehis wife than the least approach to un-due familiarity.” Men could adopt aquiet demeanor that implied self-

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possession and a power that didn’t needto flaunt itself. Though shyness per sewas unacceptable, reserve was a markof good breeding.

But with the advent of the Culture ofPersonality, the value of formalitybegan to crumble, for women and menalike. Instead of paying ceremonialcalls on women and making serious de-clarations of intention, men were nowexpected to launch verbally sophistic-ated courtships in which they threwwomen “a line” of elaborate flirtatious-ness. Men who were too quiet aroundwomen risked being thought gay; as apopular 1926 sex guide observed, “ho-mosexuals are invariably timid, shy, re-tiring.” Women, too, were expected towalk a fine line between propriety andboldness. If they responded too shyly toromantic overtures, they were some-times called “frigid.”

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The field of psychology also began tograpple with the pressure to projectconfidence. In the 1920s an influentialpsychologist named Gordon Allport cre-ated a diagnostic test of “Ascendance-Submission” to measure social domin-ance. “Our current civilization,” ob-served Allport, who was himself shyand reserved, “seems to place a premi-um upon the aggressive person, the ‘go-getter.’ ” In 1921, Carl Jung noted thenewly precarious status of introversion.Jung himself saw introverts as “educat-ors and promoters of culture” whoshowed the value of “the interior lifewhich is so painfully wanting in ourcivilization.” But he acknowledged thattheir “reserve and apparently ground-less embarrassment naturally arouse allthe current prejudices against thistype.”

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But nowhere was the need to appearself-assured more apparent than in anew concept in psychology called theinferiority complex. The IC, as it be-came known in the popular press, wasdeveloped in the 1920s by a Viennesepsychologist named Alfred Adler to de-scribe feelings of inadequacy and theirconsequences. “Do you feel insecure?”inquired the cover of Adler’s best-selling book, Understanding HumanNature. “Are you fainthearted? Are yousubmissive?” Adler explained that allinfants and small children feel inferior,living as they do in a world of adultsand older siblings. In the normal pro-cess of growing up they learn to directthese feelings into pursuing their goals.But if things go awry as they mature,they might be saddled with the dreadedIC—a grave liability in an increasinglycompetitive society.

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The idea of wrapping their socialanxieties in the neat package of a psy-chological complex appealed to manyAmericans. The Inferiority Complex be-came an all-purpose explanation forproblems in many areas of life, rangingfrom love to parenting to career. In1924, Collier’s ran a story about a wo-man who was afraid to marry the manshe loved for fear that he had an IC andwould never amount to anything.Another popular magazine ran an art-icle called “Your Child and That Fash-ionable Complex,” explaining to momswhat could cause an IC in kids and howto prevent or cure one. Everyone had anIC, it seemed; to some it was, paradox-ically enough, a mark of distinction.Lincoln, Napoleon, Teddy Roosevelt,Edison, and Shakespeare—all hadsuffered from ICs, according to a 1939Collier’s article. “So,” concluded the

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magazine, “if you have a big, husky, in-growing inferiority complex you’reabout as lucky as you could hope to be,provided you have the backbone alongwith it.”

Despite the hopeful tone of thispiece, child guidance experts of the1920s set about helping children to de-velop winning personalities. Until then,these professionals had worried mainlyabout sexually precocious girls and de-linquent boys, but now psychologists,social workers, and doctors focused onthe everyday child with the “maladjus-ted personality”—particularly shy chil-dren. Shyness could lead to dire out-comes, they warned, from alcoholism tosuicide, while an outgoing personalitywould bring social and financial suc-cess. The experts advised parents to so-cialize their children well and schoolsto change their emphasis from book-

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learning to “assisting and guiding thedeveloping personality.” Educators tookup this mantle enthusiastically. By1950 the slogan of the Mid-CenturyWhite House Conference on Childrenand Youth was “A healthy personalityfor every child.”

Well-meaning parents of the midcen-tury agreed that quiet was unacceptableand gregariousness ideal for both girlsand boys. Some discouraged their chil-dren from solitary and serious hobbies,like classical music, that could makethem unpopular. They sent their kids toschool at increasingly young ages,where the main assignment was learn-ing to socialize. Introverted childrenwere often singled out as problem cases(a situation familiar to anyone with anintroverted child today).

William Whyte’s The OrganizationMan, a 1956 best-seller, describes how

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parents and teachers conspired to over-haul the personalities of quiet children.“Johnny wasn’t doing so well atschool,” Whyte recalls a mother tellinghim. “The teacher explained to me thathe was doing fine on his lessons butthat his social adjustment was not asgood as it might be. He would pick justone or two friends to play with, andsometimes he was happy to remain byhimself.” Parents welcomed such inter-ventions, said Whyte. “Save for a fewodd parents, most are grateful that theschools work so hard to offset tenden-cies to introversion and other suburbanabnormalities.”

Parents caught up in this value sys-tem were not unkind, or even obtuse;they were only preparing their kids forthe “real world.” When these childrengrew older and applied to college andlater for their first jobs, they faced the

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same standards of gregariousness.University admissions officers lookednot for the most exceptional candidates,but for the most extroverted. Harvard’sprovost Paul Buck declared in the late1940s that Harvard should reject the“sensitive, neurotic” type and the“intellectually over-stimulated” in favorof boys of the “healthy extrovert kind.”In 1950, Yale’s president, Alfred Whit-ney Griswold, declared that the idealYalie was not a “beetle-browed, highlyspecialized intellectual, but a well-rounded man.” Another dean toldWhyte that “in screening applicationsfrom secondary schools he felt it wasonly common sense to take into ac-count not only what the collegewanted, but what, four years later, cor-porations’ recruiters would want. ‘Theylike a pretty gregarious, active type,’ hesaid. ‘So we find that the best man is

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the one who’s had an 80 or 85 averagein school and plenty of extracurricularactivity. We see little use for the “bril-liant” introvert.’ ”

This college dean grasped very wellthat the model employee of the midcen-tury—even one whose job rarely in-volved dealing with the public, like aresearch scientist in a corporatelab—was not a deep thinker but ahearty extrovert with a salesman’s per-sonality. “Customarily, whenever theword brilliant is used,” explains Whyte,“it either precedes the word ‘but’ (e.g.,‘We are all for brilliance, but …’) or iscoupled with such words as erratic, ec-centric, introvert, screwball, etc.”“These fellows will be having contactwith other people in the organization,”said one 1950s executive about thehapless scientists in his employ, “and ithelps if they make a good impression.”

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The scientist’s job was not only to dothe research but also to help sell it, andthat required a hail-fellow-well-met de-meanor. At IBM, a corporation that em-bodied the ideal of the company man,the sales force gathered each morningto belt out the company anthem, “EverOnward,” and to harmonize on the“Selling IBM” song, set to the tune of“Singin’ in the Rain.” “Selling IBM,” itbegan, “we’re selling IBM. What a glori-ous feeling, the world is our friend.”The ditty built to a stirring close:“We’re always in trim, we work with avim. We’re selling, just selling, IBM.”

Then they went off to pay their salescalls, proving that the admissionspeople at Harvard and Yale were prob-ably right: only a certain type of fellowcould possibly have been interested inkicking off his mornings this way.

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The rest of the organization menwould have to manage as best theycould. And if the history of pharma-ceutical consumption is any indication,many buckled under such pressures. In1955 a drug company named Carter-Wallace released the anti-anxiety drugMiltown, reframing anxiety as the nat-ural product of a society that was bothdog-eat-dog and relentlessly social.Miltown was marketed to men and im-mediately became the fastest-sellingpharmaceutical in American history, ac-cording to the social historian AndreaTone. By 1956 one of every twentyAmericans had tried it; by 1960 a thirdof all prescriptions from U.S. doctorswere for Miltown or a similar drugcalled Equanil. “ANXIETY AND TENSION ARETHE COMMONPLACE OF THE AGE,” read theEquanil ad. The 1960s tranquilizer Ser-entil followed with an ad campaign

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even more direct in its appeal to im-prove social performance. “FOR THEANXIETY THAT COMES FROM NOT FITTING IN,”it empathized.

Of course, the Extrovert Ideal is not amodern invention. Extroversion is inour DNA—literally, according to somepsychologists. The trait has been foundto be less prevalent in Asia and Africathan in Europe and America, whosepopulations descend largely from themigrants of the world. It makes sense,say these researchers, that world travel-ers were more extroverted than thosewho stayed home—and that theypassed on their traits to their childrenand their children’s children. “As

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personality traits are genetically trans-mitted,” writes the psychologist Ken-neth Olson, “each succeeding wave ofemigrants to a new continent wouldgive rise over time to a population ofmore engaged individuals than residein the emigrants’ continent of origin.”

We can also trace our admiration ofextroverts to the Greeks, for whomoratory was an exalted skill, and to theRomans, for whom the worst possiblepunishment was banishment from thecity, with its teeming social life. Simil-arly, we revere our founding fathersprecisely because they were loud-mouths on the subject of freedom: Giveme liberty or give me death! Even theChristianity of early American religiousrevivals, dating back to the First GreatAwakening of the eighteenth century,depended on the showmanship of min-isters who were considered successful if

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they caused crowds of normally re-served people to weep and shout andgenerally lose their decorum. “Nothinggives me more pain and distress than tosee a minister standing almost motion-less, coldly plodding on as a mathem-atician would calculate the distance ofthe Moon from the Earth,” complaineda religious newspaper in 1837.

As this disdain suggests, early Amer-icans revered action and were suspi-cious of intellect, associating the life ofthe mind with the languid, ineffectualEuropean aristocracy they had left be-hind. The 1828 presidential campaignpitted a former Harvard professor, JohnQuincy Adams, against Andrew Jack-son, a forceful military hero. A Jacksoncampaign slogan tellingly distinguishedthe two: “John Quincy Adams who canwrite / And Andrew Jackson who canfight.”

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The victor of that campaign? Thefighter beat the writer, as the culturalhistorian Neal Gabler puts it. (JohnQuincy Adams, incidentally, is con-sidered by political psychologists to beone of the few introverts in presidentialhistory.)

But the rise of the Culture of Person-ality intensified such biases, and ap-plied them not only to political and re-ligious leaders, but also to regularpeople. And though soap manufacturersmay have profited from the new em-phasis on charm and charisma, noteveryone was pleased with this devel-opment. “Respect for individual humanpersonality has with us reached its low-est point,” observed one intellectual in1921, “and it is delightfully ironicalthat no nation is so constantly talkingabout personality as we are. We actu-ally have schools for ‘self-expression’

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and ‘self-development,’ although weseem usually to mean the expressionand development of the personality of asuccessful real estate agent.”

Another critic bemoaned the slavishattention Americans were starting topay to entertainers: “It is remarkablehow much attention the stage andthings pertaining to it are receivingnowadays from the magazines,” hegrumbled. Only twenty years earli-er—during the Culture of Character,that is—such topics would have beenconsidered indecorous; now they hadbecome “such a large part of the life ofsociety that it has become a topic ofconversation among all classes.”

Even T. S. Eliot’s famous 1915 poemThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—inwhich he laments the need to “preparea face to meet the faces that youmeet”—seems a cri de coeur about the

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new demands of self-presentation.While poets of the previous century hadwandered lonely as a cloud through thecountryside (Wordsworth, in 1802) orrepaired in solitude to Walden Pond(Thoreau, in 1845), Eliot’s Prufrockmostly worries about being looked atby “eyes that fix you in a formulatedphrase” and pin you, wriggling, to awall.

Fast-forward nearly a hundred years,and Prufrock’s protest is enshrined inhigh school syllabi, where it’s dutifullymemorized, then quickly forgotten, byteens increasingly skilled at shapingtheir own online and offline personae.These students inhabit a world in whichstatus, income, and self-esteem depend

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more than ever on the ability to meetthe demands of the Culture of Personal-ity. The pressure to entertain, to sellourselves, and never to be visiblyanxious keeps ratcheting up. The num-ber of Americans who considered them-selves shy increased from 40 percent inthe 1970s to 50 percent in the 1990s,probably because we measuredourselves against ever higher standardsof fearless self-presentation. “Socialanxiety disorder”—which essentiallymeans pathological shyness—is nowthought to afflict nearly one in five ofus. The most recent version of the Dia-gnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV),the psychiatrist’s bible of mental dis-orders, considers the fear of publicspeaking to be a pathology—not an an-noyance, not a disadvantage, but a dis-ease—if it interferes with the sufferer’sjob performance. “It’s not enough,” one

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senior manager at Eastman Kodak toldthe author Daniel Goleman, “to be ableto sit at your computer excited about afantastic regression analysis if you’resqueamish about presenting those res-ults to an executive group.” (Appar-ently it’s OK to be squeamish about do-ing a regression analysis if you’re ex-cited about giving speeches.)

But perhaps the best way to take themeasure of the twenty-first-century Cul-ture of Personality is to return to theself-help arena. Today, a full centuryafter Dale Carnegie launched that firstpublic-speaking workshop at theYMCA, his best-selling book How to WinFriends and Influence People is a stapleof airport bookshelves and businessbest-seller lists. The Dale Carnegie Insti-tute still offers updated versions ofCarnegie’s original classes, and the abil-ity to communicate fluidly remains a

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core feature of the curriculum. Toast-masters, the nonprofit organization es-tablished in 1924 whose members meetweekly to practice public speaking andwhose founder declared that “all talk-ing is selling and all selling involvestalking,” is still thriving, with morethan 12,500 chapters in 113 countries.

The promotional video on Toastmas-ters’ website features a skit in whichtwo colleagues, Eduardo and Sheila, sitin the audience at the “Sixth AnnualGlobal Business Conference” as anervous speaker stumbles through a pi-tiful presentation.

“I’m so glad I’m not him,” whispersEduardo.

“You’re joking, right?” replies Sheilawith a satisfied smile. “Don’t you re-member last month’s sales presentationto those new clients? I thought youwere going to faint.”

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“I wasn’t that bad, was I?”“Oh, you were that bad. Really bad.

Worse, even.”Eduardo looks suitably ashamed,

while the rather insensitive Sheilaseems oblivious.

“But,” says Sheila, “you can fix it.You can do better.… Have you everheard of Toastmasters?”

Sheila, a young and attractive bru-nette, hauls Eduardo to a Toastmastersmeeting. There she volunteers to per-form an exercise called “Truth or Lie,”in which she’s supposed to tell thegroup of fifteen-odd participants a storyabout her life, after which they decidewhether or not to believe her.

“I bet I can fool everyone,” she whis-pers to Eduardo sotto voce as shemarches to the podium. She spins anelaborate tale about her years as an op-era singer, concluding with her

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poignant decision to give it all up tospend more time with her family. Whenshe’s finished, the toastmaster of theevening asks the group whether theybelieve Sheila’s story. All hands in theroom go up. The toastmaster turns toSheila and asks whether it was true.

“I can’t even carry a tune!” shebeams triumphantly.

Sheila comes across as disingenuous,but also oddly sympathetic. Like theanxious readers of the 1920s personal-ity guides, she’s only trying to getahead at the office. “There’s so muchcompetition in my work environment,”she confides to the camera, “that itmakes it more important than ever tokeep my skills sharp.”

But what do “sharp skills” look like?Should we become so proficient at self-presentation that we can dissemblewithout anyone suspecting? Must we

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learn to stage-manage our voices, ges-tures, and body language until we cantell—sell—any story we want? Theseseem venal aspirations, a marker ofhow far we’ve come—and not in a goodway—since the days of Dale Carnegie’schildhood.

Dale’s parents had high moral stand-ards; they wanted their son to pursue acareer in religion or education, notsales. It seems unlikely that they wouldhave approved of a self-improvementtechnique called “Truth or Lie.” Or, forthat matter, of Carnegie’s best-sellingadvice on how to get people to admireyou and do your bidding. How to WinFriends and Influence People is full ofchapter titles like “Making People Gladto Do What You Want” and “How toMake People Like You Instantly.”

All of which raises the question, howdid we go from Character to Personality

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without realizing that we had sacrificedsomething meaningful along the way?

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2THE MYTH OF CHARISMATIC

LEADERSHIP

The Culture of Personality, a HundredYears Later

Society is itself an education in the extro-vert values, and rarely has there been asociety that has preached them so hard.

No man is an island, but how JohnDonne would writhe to hear how often,and for what reasons, the thought is so

tiresomely repeated.—WILLIAM WHYTE

Salesmanship as a Virtue: Live withTony Robbins

“Are you excited?” cries a young wo-man named Stacy as I hand her my re-gistration forms. Her honeyed voicerises into one big exclamation point. Inod and smile as brightly as I can.Across the lobby of the Atlanta Conven-tion Center, I hear people shrieking.

“What’s that noise?” I ask.“They’re getting everyone pumped up

to go inside!” Stacy enthuses. “That’spart of the whole UPW experience.”She hands me a purple spiral binderand a laminated nametag to weararound my neck. UNLEASH THEPOWER WITHIN, proclaims the binderin big block letters. Welcome to TonyRobbins’s entry-level seminar.

I’ve paid $895 in exchange, accord-ing to the promotional materials, for

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learning how to be more energetic, gainmomentum in my life, and conquer myfears. But the truth is that I’m not hereto unleash the power within me(though I’m always happy to pick up afew pointers); I’m here because thisseminar is the first stop on my journeyto understand the Extrovert Ideal.

I’ve seen Tony Robbins’s infomer-cials—he claims that there’s always oneairing at any given moment—and hestrikes me as one of the more extrover-ted people on earth. But he’s not justany extrovert. He’s the king of self-help,with a client roster that has includedPresident Clinton, Tiger Woods, NelsonMandela, Margaret Thatcher, PrincessDiana, Mikhail Gorbachev, MotherTeresa, Serena Williams, DonnaKaran—and 50 million other people.And the self-help industry, into whichhundreds of thousands of Americans

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pour their hearts, souls, and some $11billion a year, by definition reveals ourconception of the ideal self, the one weaspire to become if only we follow theseven principles of this and the threelaws of that. I want to know what thisideal self looks like.

Stacy asks if I’ve brought my mealswith me. It seems a strange question:Who carries supper with them fromNew York City to Atlanta? She explainsthat I’ll want to refuel at my seat; forthe next four days, Friday throughMonday, we’ll be working fifteen hoursa day, 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., withonly one short afternoon break. Tonywill be onstage the entire time and Iwon’t want to miss a moment.

I look around the lobby. Other peopleseem to have come prepared—they’restrolling toward the hall, cheerfully lug-ging grocery bags stuffed with

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PowerBars, bananas, and corn chips. Ipick up a couple of bruised apples fromthe snack bar and make my way to theauditorium. Greeters wearing UPW T-shirts and ecstatic smiles line the en-trance, springing up and down, fistspumping. You can’t get inside withoutslapping them five. I know, because Itry.

Inside the vast hall, a phalanx of dan-cers is warming up the crowd to theBilly Idol song “Mony Mony,” amplifiedby a world-class sound system, magni-fied on giant Megatron screens flankingthe stage. They move in sync likebackup dancers in a Britney Spearsvideo, but are dressed like middle man-agers. The lead performer is a fortyso-mething balding fellow wearing a whitebutton-down shirt, conservative tie,rolled-up sleeves, and a great-to-meet-you smile. The message seems to be

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that we can all learn to be this exuber-ant when we get to work everymorning.

Indeed, the dance moves are simpleenough for us to imitate at our seats:jump and clap twice; clap to the left;clap to the right. When the songchanges to “Gimme Some Lovin’,”many in the audience climb atop theirmetal folding chairs, where they contin-ue to whoop and clap. I stand some-what peevishly with arms crossed untilI decide that there’s nothing to be donebut join in and hop up and down alongwith my seatmates.

Eventually the moment we’ve allbeen waiting for arrives: Tony Robbinsbounds onstage. Already gigantic at sixfeet seven inches, he looks a hundredfeet tall on the Megatron screen. He’smovie-star handsome, with a head ofthick brown hair, a Pepsodent smile,

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and impossibly defined cheekbones.EXPERIENCE TONY ROBBINS LIVE! theseminar advertisement had promised,and now here he is, dancing with theeuphoric crowd.

It’s about fifty degrees in the hall, butTony is wearing a short-sleeved poloshirt and shorts. Many in the audiencehave brought blankets with them, hav-ing somehow known that the auditori-um would be kept refrigerator-cold,presumably to accommodate Tony’shigh-octane metabolism. It would takeanother Ice Age to cool this man off.He’s leaping and beaming and man-aging, somehow, to make eye contactwith all 3,800 of us. The greeters jumprapturously in the aisles. Tony openshis arms wide, embracing us all. If Je-sus returned to Earth and made his firststop at the Atlanta Convention Center,

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it would be hard to imagine a more ju-bilant reception.

This is true even in the back rowwhere I’m sitting with others who spentonly $895 for “general admission,” asopposed to $2,500 for a “DiamondPremiere Membership,” which gets youa seat up front, as close to Tony as pos-sible. When I bought my ticket over thephone, the account rep advised me thatthe people in the front rows—where“you’re looking directly at Tony forsure” instead of relying on the Megat-ron—are generally “more successful inlife.” “Those are the people who havemore energy,” she advised. “Those arethe people who are screaming.” I haveno way of judging how successful thepeople next to me are, but they cer-tainly seem thrilled to be here. At thesight of Tony, exquisitely stage-lit to set

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off his expressive face, they cry out andpour into the aisles rock-concert style.

Soon enough, I join them. I’ve alwaysloved to dance, and I have to admitthat gyrating en masse to Top 40 clas-sics is an excellent way to pass thetime. Unleashed power comes fromhigh energy, according to Tony, and Ican see his point. No wonder peopletravel from far and wide to see him inperson (there’s a lovely young womanfrom Ukraine sitting—no, leap-ing—next to me with a delightedsmile). I really must start doing aer-obics again when I get back to NewYork, I decide.

When the music finally stops, Tony ad-dresses us in a raspy voice, half

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Muppet, half bedroom-sexy, introdu-cing his theory of “Practical Psycho-logy.” The gist of it is that knowledge isuseless until it’s coupled with action.He has a seductive, fast-talking deliverythat Willy Loman would have sighedover. Demonstrating practical psycho-logy in action, Tony instructs us to finda partner and to greet each other as ifwe feel inferior and scared of social re-jection. I team up with a constructionworker from downtown Atlanta, andwe extend tentative handshakes, look-ing bashfully at the ground as the song“I Want You to Want Me” plays in thebackground.

Then Tony calls out a series of art-fully phrased questions:

“Was your breath full or shallow?”“SHALLOW!” yells the audience in

unison.

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“Did you hesitate or go straight to-ward them?”

“HESITATE!”“Was there tension in your body or

were you relaxed?”“TENSION!”Tony asks us to repeat the exercise,

but this time to greet our partners as ifthe impression we make in the firstthree to five seconds determines wheth-er they’ll do business with us. If theydon’t, “everyone you care about willdie like pigs in hell.”

I’m startled by Tony’s emphasis onbusiness success—this is a seminarabout personal power, not sales. Then Iremember that Tony is not only a lifecoach but also a businessman ex-traordinaire; he started his career insales and today serves as chairman ofseven privately held companies. Busi-nessWeek once estimated his income at

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$80 million a year. Now he seems to betrying, with all the force of his mightypersonality, to impart his salesman’stouch. He wants us not only to feelgreat but to radiate waves of energy,not just to be liked, but to be well liked;he wants us to know how to sellourselves. I’ve already been advised bythe Anthony Robbins Companies, via apersonalized forty-five-page report gen-erated by an online personality test thatI took in preparation for this weekend,that “Susan” should work on her tend-ency to tell, not sell, her ideas. (The re-port was written in the third person, asif it was to be reviewed by some ima-ginary manager evaluating my peopleskills.)

The audience divides into pairsagain, enthusiastically introducingthemselves and pumping their partners’

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hands. When we’re finished, the ques-tions repeat.

“Did that feel better, yes or no?”“YES!”“Did you use your body differently,

yes or no?”“YES!”“Did you use more muscles in your

face, yes or no?”“YES!”“Did you move straight toward them,

yes or no?”“YES!”This exercise seems designed to show

how our physiological state influencesour behavior and emotions, but it alsosuggests that salesmanship governseven the most neutral interactions. Itimplies that every encounter is a high-stakes game in which we win or losethe other person’s favor. It urges us tomeet social fear in as extroverted a

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manner as possible. We must be vibrantand confident, we must not seem hesit-ant, we must smile so that our inter-locutors will smile upon us. Takingthese steps will make us feel good—andthe better we feel, the better we cansell ourselves.

Tony seems the perfect person todemonstrate such skills. He strikes meas having a “hyperthymic” tempera-ment—a kind of extroversion-on-ster-oids characterized, in the words of onepsychiatrist, by “exuberant, upbeat,overenergetic, and overconfidentlifelong traits” that have been recog-nized as an asset in business, especiallysales. People with these traits oftenmake wonderful company, as Tonydoes onstage.

But what if you admire the hyper-thymic among us, but also like yourcalm and thoughtful self? What if you

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love knowledge for its own sake, notnecessarily as a blueprint to action?What if you wish there were more, notfewer, reflective types in the world?

Tony seems to have anticipated suchquestions. “But I’m not an extrovert,you say!” he told us at the start of theseminar. “So? You don’t have to be anextrovert to feel alive!”

True enough. But it seems, accordingto Tony, that you’d better act like one ifyou don’t want to flub the sales call andwatch your family die like pigs in hell.

The evening culminates with the Fire-walk, one of the flagship moments ofthe UPW seminar, in which we’re chal-lenged to walk across a ten-foot bed ofcoals without burning our feet. Many

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people attend UPW because they’veheard about the Firewalk and want totry it themselves. The idea is to propelyourself into such a fearless state ofmind that you can withstand even1,200-degree heat.

Leading up to that moment, wespend hours practicing Tony’s tech-niques—exercises, dance moves, visual-izations. I notice that people in theaudience are starting to mimic Tony’severy movement and facial expression,including his signature gesture ofpumping his arm as if he were pitchinga baseball. The evening crescendoes un-til finally, just before midnight, wemarch to the parking lot in a torchlitprocession, nearly four thousandstrong, chanting YES! YES! YES! to thethump of a tribal beat. This seems toelectrify my fellow UPWers, but to methis drum-accompanied chant—YES!

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Ba-da-da-da, YES! Dum-dum-dum-DUM, YES! Ba-da-da-da—sounds likethe sort of thing a Roman generalwould stage to announce his arrival inthe city he’s about to sack. The greeterswho manned the gates to the auditori-um earlier in the day with high fivesand bright smiles have morphed intogatekeepers of the Firewalk, arms beck-oning toward the bridge of flames.

As best I can tell, a successful Fire-walk depends not so much on yourstate of mind as on how thick the solesof your feet happen to be, so I watchfrom a safe distance. But I seem to bethe only one hanging back. Most of theUPWers make it across, whooping asthey go.

“I did it!” they cry when they get tothe other side of the firepit. “I did it!”

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They’ve entered a Tony Robbins stateof mind. But what exactly does thisconsist of?

It is, first and foremost, a superiormind—the antidote to Alfred Adler’s in-feriority complex. Tony uses the wordpower rather than superior (we’re toosophisticated nowadays to frame ourquests for self-improvement in terms ofnaked social positioning, the way wedid at the dawn of the Culture of Per-sonality), but everything about him isan exercise in superiority, from the wayhe occasionally addresses the audienceas “girls and boys,” to the stories hetells about his big houses and powerfulfriends, to the way hetowers—literally—over the crowd. Hissuperhuman physical size is an import-ant part of his brand; the title of hisbest-selling book, Awaken the GiantWithin, says it all.

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His intellect is impressive, too.Though he believes university educa-tions are overrated (because they don’tteach you about your emotions andyour body, he says) and has been slowto write his next book (because no onereads anymore, according to Tony),he’s managed to assimilate the work ofacademic psychologists and package itinto one hell of a show, with genuineinsights the audience can make theirown.

Part of Tony’s genius lies in the un-stated promise that he’ll let the audi-ence share his own journey from inferi-ority to superiority. He wasn’t alwaysso grand, he tells us. As a kid, he was ashrimp. Before he got in shape, he wasoverweight. And before he lived in acastle in Del Mar, California, he rentedan apartment so small that he kept hisdishes in the bathtub. The implication

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is that we can all get over whatever’skeeping us down, that even introvertscan learn to walk on coals while beltingout a lusty YES.

The second part of the Tony state ofmind is good-heartedness. He wouldn’tinspire so many people if he didn’tmake them feel that he truly caredabout unleashing the power withineach of them. When Tony’s onstage,you get the sense that he’s singing, dan-cing, and emoting with every ounce ofhis energy and heart. There are mo-ments, when the crowd is on its feet,singing and dancing in unison, that youcan’t help but love him, the way manypeople loved Barack Obama with a kindof shocked delight when they firstheard him talk about transcending redand blue. At one point, Tony talksabout the different needs peoplehave—for love, certainty, variety, and

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so on. He is motivated by love, he tellsus, and we believe him.

But there’s also this: throughout theseminar, he constantly tries to “upsell”us. He and his sales team use the UPWevent, whose attendees have alreadypaid a goodly sum, to market multi-dayseminars with even more alluringnames and stiffer price tags: Date withDestiny, about $5,000; MasteryUniversity, about $10,000; and thePlatinum Partnership, which, for a cool$45,000 a year, buys you and elevenother Platinum Partners the right to goon exotic vacations with Tony.

During the afternoon break, Tonylingers onstage with his blond andsweetly beautiful wife, Sage, gazing in-to her eyes, caressing her hair, murmur-ing into her ear. I’m happily married,but right now Ken is in New York andI’m here in Atlanta, and even I feel

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lonely as I watch this spectacle. Whatwould it be like if I were single or un-happily partnered? It would “arouse aneager want” in me, just as Dale Carne-gie advised salesmen to do with theirprospects so many years ago. And sureenough, when the break is over, alengthy video comes on the mega-screen, pitching Tony’s relationship-building seminar.

In another brilliantly conceived seg-ment, Tony devotes part of the seminarto explaining the financial and emo-tional benefits of surrounding oneselfwith the right “peer group”—afterwhich a staffer begins a sales pitch forthe $45,000 Platinum program. Thosewho purchase one of the twelve spotswill join the “ultimate peer group,” weare told—the “cream of the crop,” the“elite of the elite of the elite.”

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I can’t help but wonder why none ofthe other UPWers seem to mind, oreven to notice, these upselling tech-niques. By now many of them haveshopping bags at their feet, full of stuffthey bought out in the lobby—DVDs,books, even eight-by-ten glossies ofTony himself, ready for framing.

But the thing about Tony—and whatdraws people to buy his products—isthat like any good salesman, he believesin what he’s pitching. He apparentlysees no contradiction between wantingthe best for people and wanting to livein a mansion. He persuades us that he’susing his sales skills not only for per-sonal gain but also to help as many ofus as he can reach. Indeed, one verythoughtful introvert I know, a success-ful salesman who gives sales trainingseminars of his own, swears that TonyRobbins not only improved his business

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but also made him a better person.When he started attending events likeUPW, he says, he focused on who hewanted to become, and now, when hedelivers his own seminars, he is thatperson. “Tony gives me energy,” hesays, “and now I can create energy forother people when I’m onstage.”

At the onset of the Culture of Personal-ity, we were urged to develop an extro-verted personality for frankly selfishreasons—as a way of outshining thecrowd in a newly anonymous and com-petitive society. But nowadays we tendto think that becoming more extrover-ted not only makes us more successful,but also makes us better people. We see

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salesmanship as a way of sharing one’sgifts with the world.

This is why Tony’s zeal to sell to andbe adulated by thousands of people atonce is seen not as narcissism or huck-sterism, but as leadership of the highestorder. If Abraham Lincoln was the em-bodiment of virtue during the Cultureof Character, then Tony Robbins is hiscounterpart during the Culture of Per-sonality. Indeed, when Tony mentionsthat he once thought of running forpresident of the United States, the audi-ence erupts in loud cheers.

But does it always make sense toequate leadership with hyper-extrover-sion? To find out, I visited HarvardBusiness School, an institution thatprides itself on its ability to identifyand train some of the most prominentbusiness and political leaders of ourtime.

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The Myth of Charismatic Leadership:Harvard Business School and Beyond

The first thing I notice about the Har-vard Business School campus is the waypeople walk. No one ambles, strolls, orlingers. They stride, full of forward mo-mentum. It’s crisp and autumnal theweek I visit, and the students’ bodiesseem to vibrate with September electri-city as they advance across campus.When they cross each other’s pathsthey don’t merely nod—they exchangeanimated greetings, inquiring aboutthis one’s summer with J. P. Morgan orthat one’s trek in the Himalayas.

They behave the same way inside thesocial hothouse of the Spangler Center,the sumptuously decorated student cen-ter. Spangler has floor-to-ceiling silkcurtains in sea-foam green, rich leathersofas, giant Samsung high-definition

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TVs silently broadcasting campus news,and soaring ceilings festooned withhigh-wattage chandeliers. The tablesand sofas are clustered mostly on theperimeter of the room, forming abrightly lit center catwalk down whichthe students breezily parade, seeminglyunaware that all eyes are on them. I ad-mire their nonchalance.

The students are even better turnedout than their surroundings, if such athing is possible. No one is more thanfive pounds overweight or has bad skinor wears odd accessories. The womenare a cross between Head Cheerleaderand Most Likely to Succeed. They wearfitted jeans, filmy blouses, and high-heeled peekaboo-toed shoes that makea pleasing clickety–clack on Spangler’spolished wood floors. Some parade likefashion models, except that they’re so-cial and beaming instead of aloof and

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impassive. The men are clean-cut andathletic; they look like people who ex-pect to be in charge, but in a friendly,Eagle Scout sort of way. I have the feel-ing that if you asked one of them fordriving directions, he’d greet you witha can-do smile and throw himself intothe task of helping you to your destina-tion—whether or not he knew the way.

I sit down next to a couple of stu-dents who are in the middle of plan-ning a road trip—HBS students areforever coordinating pub crawls andparties, or describing an extreme-traveljunket they’ve just come back from.When they ask what brings me to cam-pus, I say that I’m conducting inter-views for a book about introversion andextroversion. I don’t tell them that afriend of mine, himself an HBS grad,once called the place the “Spiritual

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Capital of Extroversion.” But it turnsout that I don’t have to tell them.

“Good luck finding an introvertaround here,” says one.

“This school is predicated on extro-version,” adds the other. “Your gradesand social status depend on it. It’s justthe norm here. Everyone around you isspeaking up and being social and goingout.”

“Isn’t there anyone on the quieterside?” I ask.

They look at me curiously.“I couldn’t tell you,” says the first

student dismissively.

Harvard Business School is not, by anymeasure, an ordinary place. Founded in1908, just when Dale Carnegie hit the

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road as a traveling salesman and onlythree years before he taught his firstclass in public speaking, the school seesitself as “educating leaders who make adifference in the world.” President Ge-orge W. Bush is a graduate, as are animpressive collection of World Bankpresidents, U.S. Treasury secretaries,New York City mayors, CEOs of com-panies like General Electric, GoldmanSachs, Procter & Gamble, and, more no-toriously, Jeffrey Skilling, the villain ofthe Enron scandal. Between 2004 and2006, 20 percent of the top three exec-utives at the Fortune 500 companieswere HBS grads.

HBS grads likely have influencedyour life in ways you’re not aware of.They have decided who should go towar and when; they have resolved thefate of Detroit’s auto industry; they playleading roles in just about every crisis

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to shake Wall Street, Main Street, andPennsylvania Avenue. If you work incorporate America, there’s a goodchance that Harvard Business Schoolgrads have shaped your everyday life,too, weighing in on how much privacyyou need in your workspace, how manyteam-building sessions you need to at-tend per year, and whether creativity isbest achieved through brainstorming orsolitude. Given the scope of their influ-ence, it’s worth taking a look at whoenrolls here—and what they value bythe time they graduate.

The student who wishes me luck infinding an introvert at HBS no doubtbelieves that there are none to befound. But clearly he doesn’t know hisfirst-year classmate Don Chen. I firstmeet Don in Spangler, where he’sseated only a few couches away fromthe road-trip planners. He comes across

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as a typical HBS student, tall, with gra-cious manners, prominent cheekbones,a winsome smile, and a fashionablychoppy, surfer-dude haircut. He’d liketo find a job in private equity when hegraduates. But talk to Don for a whileand you’ll notice that his voice is softerthan those of his classmates, his headever so slightly cocked, his grin a littletentative. Don is “a bitter introvert,” ashe cheerfully puts it—bitter because themore time he spends at HBS, the moreconvinced he becomes that he’d betterchange his ways.

Don likes having a lot of time to him-self, but that’s not much of an option atHBS. His day begins early in the morn-ing, when he meets for an hour and ahalf with his “Learning Team”—a pre-assigned study group in which particip-ation is mandatory (students at HBSpractically go to the bathroom in

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teams). He spends the rest of the morn-ing in class, where ninety students sittogether in a wood-paneled, U-shapedamphitheater with stadium seating. Theprofessor usually kicks off by directinga student to describe the case study ofthe day, which is based on a real-lifebusiness scenario—say, a CEO who’sconsidering changing her company’ssalary structure. The figure at the heartof the case study, in this case the CEO,is referred to as the “protagonist.” Ifyou were the protagonist, the professorasks—and soon you will be, is the im-plication—what would you do?

The essence of the HBS education isthat leaders have to act confidently andmake decisions in the face of incom-plete information. The teaching methodplays with an age-old question: If youdon’t have all the facts—and often youwon’t—should you wait to act until

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you’ve collected as much data as pos-sible? Or, by hesitating, do you risk los-ing others’ trust and your own mo-mentum? The answer isn’t obvious. Ifyou speak firmly on the basis of bad in-formation, you can lead your people in-to disaster. But if you exude uncer-tainty, then morale suffers, funderswon’t invest, and your organization cancollapse.

The HBS teaching method implicitlycomes down on the side of certainty.The CEO may not know the best wayforward, but she has to act anyway.The HBS students, in turn, are expectedto opine. Ideally, the student who wasjust cold-called has already discussedthe case study with his Learning Team,so he’s ready to hold forth on the prot-agonist’s best moves. After he finishes,the professor encourages other studentsto offer their own views. Half of the

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students’ grade, and a much larger per-centage of their social status, is basedon whether they throw themselves intothis fray. If a student talks often andforcefully, then he’s a player; if hedoesn’t, he’s on the margins.

Many of the students adapt easily tothis system. But not Don. He hastrouble elbowing his way into class dis-cussions; in some classes he barelyspeaks at all. He prefers to contributeonly when he believes he hassomething insightful to add, or honest-to-God disagrees with someone. Thissounds reasonable, but Don feels as ifhe should be more comfortable talkingjust so he can fill up his share of avail-able airtime.

Don’s HBS friends, who tend to bethoughtful, reflective types like him,spend a lot of time talking about talk-ing in class. How much class

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participation is too much? How little istoo little? When does publicly disagree-ing with a classmate constitute healthydebate, and when does it seem compet-itive and judgmental? One of Don’sfriends is worried because her professorsent around an e-mail saying that any-one with real-world experience on theday’s case study should let him know inadvance. She’s sure that the professor’sannouncement was an effort to limitstupid remarks like the one she made inclass last week. Another worries thathe’s not loud enough. “I just have a nat-urally soft voice,” he says, “so when myvoice sounds normal to others, I feellike I’m shouting. I have to work on it.”

The school also tries hard to turnquiet students into talkers. The profess-ors have their own “Learning Teams,”in which they egg each other on withtechniques to draw out reticent

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students. When students fail to speakup in class, it’s seen not only as theirown deficit but also as their professor’s.“If someone doesn’t speak by the end ofthe semester, it’s problematic,” Profess-or Michel Anteby told me. “It means Ididn’t do a good job.”

The school even hosts live informa-tional sessions and web pages on howto be a good class participator. Don’sfriends earnestly reel off the tips theyremember best.

“Speak with conviction. Even if youbelieve something only fifty-five per-cent, say it as if you believe it a hun-dred percent.”

“If you’re preparing alone for class,then you’re doing it wrong. Nothing atHBS is intended to be done alone.”

“Don’t think about the perfect an-swer. It’s better to get out there and say

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something than to never get your voicein.”

The school newspaper, The Harbus,also dispenses advice, featuring articleswith titles like “How to Think andSpeak Well—On the Spot!,” “Develop-ing Your Stage Presence,” and “Arrog-ant or Simply Confident?”

These imperatives extend beyond theclassroom. After class, most people eatlunch at the Spangler dining hall,which one grad describes as “more likehigh school than high school.” Andevery day, Don wrestles with himself.Should he go back to his apartment andrecharge over a quiet lunch, as he longsto do, or join his classmates? Even if heforces himself to go to Spangler, it’s notas if the social pressure will end there.As the day wears on, there will be moresuch dilemmas. Attend the late-after-noon happy hours? Head out for a late,

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rowdy evening? Students at HBS go outin big groups several nights a week,says Don. Participation isn’t mandatory,but it feels as if it is to those who don’tthrive on group activities.

“Socializing here is an extremesport,” one of Don’s friends tells me.“People go out all the time. If you don’tgo out one night, the next day peoplewill ask, ‘Where were you?’ I go out atnight like it’s my job.” Don has noticedthat the people who organize socialevents—happy hours, dinners, drinkingfests—are at the top of the social hier-archy. “The professors tell us that ourclassmates are the people who will goto our weddings,” says Don. “If youleave HBS without having built an ex-tensive social network, it’s like youfailed your HBS experience.”

By the time Don falls into bed atnight, he’s exhausted. And sometimes

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he wonders why, exactly, he shouldhave to work so hard at being outgoing.Don is Chinese-American, and recentlyhe worked a summer job in China. Hewas struck by how different the socialnorms were, and how much more com-fortable he felt. In China there wasmore emphasis on listening, on askingquestions rather than holding forth, onputting others’ needs first. In the UnitedStates, he feels, conversation is abouthow effective you are at turning yourexperiences into stories, whereas aChinese person might be concernedwith taking up too much of the otherperson’s time with inconsequentialinformation.

“That summer, I said to myself, ‘NowI know why these are my people,’ ” hesays.

But that was China, this is Cam-bridge, Massachusetts. And if one

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judges HBS by how well it prepares stu-dents for the “real world,” it seems tobe doing an excellent job. After all, DonChen will graduate into a business cul-ture in which verbal fluency and soci-ability are the two most important pre-dictors of success, according to a Stan-ford Business School study. It’s a worldin which a middle manager at GE oncetold me that “people here don’t evenwant to meet with you if you don’thave a PowerPoint and a ‘pitch’ forthem. Even if you’re just making a re-commendation to your colleague, youcan’t sit down in someone’s office andtell them what you think. You have tomake a presentation, with pros andcons and a ‘takeaway box.’ ”

Unless they’re self-employed or ableto telecommute, many adults work inoffices where they must take care toglide down the corridors greeting their

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colleagues warmly and confidently.“The business world,” says a 2006 art-icle from the Wharton Program forWorking Professionals, “is filled withoffice environments similar to one de-scribed by an Atlanta area corporatetrainer: ‘Here everyone knows that it’simportant to be an extrovert andtroublesome to be an introvert. Sopeople work real hard at looking likeextroverts, whether that’s comfortableor not. It’s like making sure you drinkthe same single-malt scotch the CEOdrinks and that you work out at theright health club.’ ”

Even businesses that employ manyartists, designers, and other imaginativetypes often display a preference for ex-troversion. “We want to attract creativepeople,” the director of human re-sources at a major media company toldme. When I asked what she meant by

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“creative,” she answered without miss-ing a beat. “You have to be outgoing,fun, and jazzed up to work here.”

Contemporary ads aimed at busi-nesspeople would give the WilliamsLuxury Shaving Cream ads of yes-teryear a run for their money. One lineof TV commercials that ran on CNBC,the cable business channel, featured anoffice worker losing out on a plumassignment.

BOSS TO TED AND ALICE. Ted, I’msending Alice to the sales confer-ence because she thinks faster onher feet than you.

TED. (speechless) …BOSS. So, Alice, we’ll send you on

Thursday—TED. She does not!

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Other ads explicitly sell theirproducts as extroversion-enhancers. In2000, Amtrak encouraged travelers to“DEPART FROM YOUR INHIBITIONS.” Nike be-came a prominent brand partly on thestrength of its “Just Do It” campaign.And in 1999 and 2000, a series of adsfor the psychotropic drug Paxil prom-ised to cure the extreme shyness knownas “social anxiety disorder” by offeringCinderella stories of personality trans-formation. One Paxil ad showed a well-dressed executive shaking hands over abusiness deal. “I can taste success,”read the caption. Another showed whathappens without the drug: a business-man alone in his office, his foreheadresting dejectedly on a clenched fist. “Ishould have joined in more often,” itread.

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Yet even at Harvard Business Schoolthere are signs that something might bewrong with a leadership style that val-ues quick and assertive answers overquiet, slow decision-making.

Every autumn the incoming class par-ticipates in an elaborate role-playinggame called the Subarctic Survival Situ-ation. “It is approximately 2:30 p.m.,October 5,” the students are told, “andyou have just crash-landed in a floatplane on the east shore of Laura Lake inthe subarctic region of the northernQuebec-Newfoundland border.” Thestudents are divided into small groupsand asked to imagine that their grouphas salvaged fifteen items from theplane—a compass, sleeping bag, axe,and so on. Then they’re told to rank

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them in order of importance to thegroup’s survival. First the students rankthe items individually; then they do soas a team. Next they score those rank-ings against an expert’s to see how wellthey did. Finally they watch a video-tape of their team’s discussions to seewhat went right—or wrong.

The point of the exercise is to teachgroup synergy. Successful synergymeans a higher ranking for the teamthan for its individual members. Thegroup fails when any of its membershas a better ranking than the overallteam. And failure is exactly what canhappen when students prize assertive-ness too highly.

One of Don’s classmates was in agroup lucky to include a young manwith extensive experience in the north-ern backwoods. He had a lot of goodideas about how to rank the fifteen

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salvaged items. But his group didn’tlisten, because he expressed his viewstoo quietly.

“Our action plan hinged on what themost vocal people suggested,” recallsthe classmate. “When the less vocalpeople put out ideas, those ideas werediscarded. The ideas that were rejectedwould have kept us alive and out oftrouble, but they were dismissed be-cause of the conviction with which themore vocal people suggested theirideas. Afterwards they played us backthe videotape, and it was soembarrassing.”

The Subarctic Survival Situation maysound like a harmless game played in-side the ivory tower, but if you think ofmeetings you’ve attended, you canprobably recall a time—plenty oftimes—when the opinion of the mostdynamic or talkative person prevailed

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to the detriment of all. Perhaps it was alow-stakes situation—your PTA, say,deciding whether to meet on Mondayor Tuesday nights. But maybe it wasimportant: an emergency meeting ofEnron’s top brass, considering whetheror not to disclose questionable account-ing practices. (See chapter 7 for moreon Enron.) Or a jury deliberatingwhether or not to send a single motherto jail.

I discussed the Subarctic SurvivalSituation with HBS professor QuinnMills, an expert on leadership styles.Mills is a courteous man dressed, on theday we met, in a pinstriped suit andyellow polka-dot tie. He has a sonorousvoice, and uses it skillfully. The HBSmethod “presumes that leaders shouldbe vocal,” he told me flat out, “and inmy view that’s part of reality.”

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But Mills also pointed to the commonphenomenon known as the “winner’scurse,” in which two companies bidcompetitively to acquire a third, untilthe price climbs so high that it becomesless an economic activity than a war ofegos. The winning bidders will bedamned if they’ll let their opponentsget the prize, so they buy the targetcompany at an inflated price. “It tendsto be the assertive people who carry theday in these kinds of things,” says Mills.“You see this all the time. People ask,‘How did this happen, how did we payso much?’ Usually it’s said that theywere carried away by the situation, butthat’s not right. Usually they’re carriedaway by people who are assertive anddomineering. The risk with our stu-dents is that they’re very good at get-ting their way. But that doesn’t meanthey’re going the right way.”

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If we assume that quiet and loudpeople have roughly the same numberof good (and bad) ideas, then weshould worry if the louder and moreforceful people always carry the day.This would mean that an awful lot ofbad ideas prevail while good ones getsquashed. Yet studies in group dynam-ics suggest that this is exactly whathappens. We perceive talkers as smarterthan quiet types—even though grade-point averages and SAT and intelli-gence test scores reveal this perceptionto be inaccurate. In one experiment inwhich two strangers met over thephone, those who spoke more wereconsidered more intelligent, betterlooking, and more likable. We also seetalkers as leaders. The more a persontalks, the more other group membersdirect their attention to him, whichmeans that he becomes increasingly

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powerful as a meeting goes on. It alsohelps to speak fast; we rate quick talk-ers as more capable and appealing thanslow talkers.

All of this would be fine if more talk-ing were correlated with greater in-sight, but research suggests that there’sno such link. In one study, groups ofcollege students were asked to solvemath problems together and then torate one another’s intelligence andjudgment. The students who spoke firstand most often were consistently giventhe highest ratings, even though theirsuggestions (and math SAT scores)were no better than those of the lesstalkative students. These same studentswere given similarly high ratings fortheir creativity and analytical powersduring a separate exercise to develop abusiness strategy for a start-upcompany.

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A well-known study out of UC Berke-ley by organizational behavior profess-or Philip Tetlock found that televisionpundits—that is, people who earn theirlivings by holding forth confidently onthe basis of limited information—makeworse predictions about political andeconomic trends than they would byrandom chance. And the very worstprognosticators tend to be the mostfamous and the most confident—thevery ones who would be considerednatural leaders in an HBS classroom.

The U.S. Army has a name for a sim-ilar phenomenon: “the Bus to Abilene.”“Any army officer can tell you whatthat means,” Colonel (Ret.) Stephen J.Gerras, a professor of behavioral sci-ences at the U.S. Army War College,told Yale Alumni Magazine in 2008. “It’sabout a family sitting on a porch inTexas on a hot summer day, and

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somebody says, ‘I’m bored. Why don’twe go to Abilene?’ When they get toAbilene, somebody says, ‘You know, Ididn’t really want to go.’ And the nextperson says, ‘I didn’t want to go—Ithought you wanted to go,’ and so on.Whenever you’re in an army group andsomebody says, ‘I think we’re all get-ting on the bus to Abilene here,’ that isa red flag. You can stop a conversationwith it. It is a very powerful artifact ofour culture.”

The “Bus to Abilene” anecdote re-veals our tendency to follow those whoinitiate action—any action. We are sim-ilarly inclined to empower dynamicspeakers. One highly successful venturecapitalist who is regularly pitched byyoung entrepreneurs told me how frus-trated he is by his colleagues’ failure todistinguish between good presentationskills and true leadership ability. “I

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worry that there are people who areput in positions of authority becausethey’re good talkers, but they don’thave good ideas,” he said. “It’s so easyto confuse schmoozing ability with tal-ent. Someone seems like a goodpresenter, easy to get along with, andthose traits are rewarded. Well, why isthat? They’re valuable traits, but weput too much of a premium on present-ing and not enough on substance andcritical thinking.”

In his book Iconoclast, the neuroe-conomist Gregory Berns explores whathappens when companies rely too heav-ily on presentation skills to weed outgood ideas from nonstarters. He de-scribes a software company called Rite-Solutions that successfully asks employ-ees to share ideas through an online“idea market,” as a way of focusing onsubstance rather than style. Joe Marino,

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president of Rite-Solutions, and Jim La-voie, CEO of the company, created thissystem as a reaction to problems they’dexperienced elsewhere. “In my old com-pany,” Lavoie told Berns, “if you had agreat idea, we would tell you, ‘OK,we’ll make an appointment for you toaddress the murder board’ ”—a groupof people charged with vetting newideas. Marino described what happenednext:

Some technical guy comes in with agood idea. Of course questions areasked of that person that they don’tknow. Like, “How big’s the market?What’s your marketing approach?What’s your business plan for this?What’s the product going to cost?”It’s embarrassing. Most people can’tanswer those kinds of questions. Thepeople who made it through these

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boards were not the people with thebest ideas. They were the bestpresenters.

Contrary to the Harvard BusinessSchool model of vocal leadership, theranks of effective CEOs turn out to befilled with introverts, including CharlesSchwab; Bill Gates; Brenda Barnes, CEOof Sara Lee; and James Copeland,former CEO of Deloitte ToucheTohmatsu. “Among the most effectiveleaders I have encountered and workedwith in half a century,” the manage-ment guru Peter Drucker has written,“some locked themselves into their of-fice and others were ultra-gregarious.Some were quick and impulsive, whileothers studied the situation and tookforever to come to a decision.… Theone and only personality trait the ef-fective ones I have encountered did

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have in common was something theydid not have: they had little or no ‘cha-risma’ and little use either for the termor what it signifies.” Supporting Druck-er’s claim, Brigham Young Universitymanagement professor Bradley Aglestudied the CEOs of 128 major compan-ies and found that those consideredcharismatic by their top executives hadbigger salaries but not better corporateperformance.

We tend to overestimate how outgo-ing leaders need to be. “Most leading ina corporation is done in small meetingsand it’s done at a distance, throughwritten and video communications,”Professor Mills told me. “It’s not donein front of big groups. You have to beable to do some of that; you can’t be aleader of a corporation and walk into aroom full of analysts and turn whitewith fear and leave. But you don’t have

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to do a whole lot of it. I’ve known a lotof leaders of corporations who arehighly introspective and who reallyhave to make themselves work to dothe public stuff.”

Mills points to Lou Gerstner, the le-gendary chairman of IBM. “He went toschool here,” he says. “I don’t knowhow he’d characterize himself. He hasto give big speeches, and he does, andhe looks calm. But my sense is that he’sdramatically more comfortable in smallgroups. Many of these guys are, actu-ally. Not all of them. But an awful lot ofthem.”

Indeed, according to a famous studyby the influential management theoristJim Collins, many of the best-perform-ing companies of the late twentiethcentury were run by what he calls“Level 5 Leaders.” These exceptionalCEOs were known not for their flash or

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charisma but for extreme humilitycoupled with intense professional will.In his influential book Good to Great,Collins tells the story of Darwin Smith,who in his twenty years as head ofKimberly-Clark turned it into the lead-ing paper company in the world andgenerated stock returns more than fourtimes higher than the market average.

Smith was a shy and mild-manneredman who wore J.C. Penney suits andnerdy black-rimmed glasses, and spenthis vacations puttering around his Wis-consin farm by himself. Asked by aWall Street Journal reporter to describehis management style, Smith staredback for an uncomfortably long timeand answered with a single word: “Ec-centric.” But his soft demeanor con-cealed a fierce resolve. Soon after beingappointed CEO, Smith made a dramaticdecision to sell the mills that produced

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the company’s core business of coatedpaper and invest instead in theconsumer-paper-products industry,which he believed had better econom-ics and a brighter future. Everyone saidthis was a huge mistake, and WallStreet downgraded Kimberly-Clark’sstock. But Smith, unmoved by thecrowd, did what he thought was right.As a result, the company grew strongerand soon outpaced its rivals. Askedlater about his strategy, Smith repliedthat he never stopped trying to becomequalified for the job.

Collins hadn’t set out to make a pointabout quiet leadership. When he startedhis research, all he wanted to know waswhat characteristics made a companyoutperform its competition. He selectedeleven standout companies to researchin depth. Initially he ignored the ques-tion of leadership altogether, because

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he wanted to avoid simplistic answers.But when he analyzed what thehighest-performing companies had incommon, the nature of their CEOsjumped out at him. Every single one ofthem was led by an unassuming man likeDarwin Smith. Those who worked withthese leaders tended to describe themwith the following words: quiet,humble, modest, reserved, shy,gracious, mild-mannered, self-effacing,understated.

The lesson, says Collins, is clear. Wedon’t need giant personalities to trans-form companies. We need leaders whobuild not their own egos but the institu-tions they run.

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So what do introverted leaders do dif-ferently from—and sometimes betterthan—extroverts?

One answer comes from the work ofWharton management professor AdamGrant, who has spent considerable timeconsulting with Fortune 500 executivesand military leaders—from Google tothe U.S. Army and Navy. When we firstspoke, Grant was teaching at the RossSchool of Business at the University ofMichigan, where he’d become con-vinced that the existing research, whichshowed a correlation between extrover-sion and leadership, didn’t tell thewhole story.

Grant told me about a wing com-mander in the U.S. Air Force—one rankbelow general, in command of thou-sands of people, charged with protect-ing a high-security missile base—whowas one of the most classically

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introverted people, as well as one of thefinest leaders, Grant had ever met. Thisman lost focus when he interacted toomuch with people, so he carved outtime for thinking and recharging. Hespoke quietly, without much variationin his vocal inflections or facial expres-sions. He was more interested in listen-ing and gathering information than inasserting his opinion or dominating aconversation.

He was also widely admired; whenhe spoke, everyone listened. This wasnot necessarily remarkable—if you’re atthe top of the military hierarchy,people are supposed to listen to you.But in the case of this commander, saysGrant, people respected not just hisformal authority, but also the way heled: by supporting his employees’ ef-forts to take the initiative. He gave sub-ordinates input into key decisions,

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implementing the ideas that madesense, while making it clear that he hadthe final authority. He wasn’t con-cerned with getting credit or even withbeing in charge; he simply assignedwork to those who could perform itbest. This meant delegating some of hismost interesting, meaningful, and im-portant tasks—work that other leaderswould have kept for themselves.

Why did the research not reflect thetalents of people like the wing com-mander? Grant thought he knew whatthe problem was. First, when he lookedclosely at the existing studies on per-sonality and leadership, he found thatthe correlation between extroversionand leadership was modest. Second,these studies were often based onpeople’s perceptions of who made agood leader, as opposed to actual

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results. And personal opinions are oftena simple reflection of cultural bias.

But most intriguing to Grant was thatthe existing research didn’t differentiateamong the various kinds of situations aleader might face. It might be that cer-tain organizations or contexts were bet-ter suited to introverted leadershipstyles, he thought, and others to extro-verted approaches, but the studiesdidn’t make such distinctions.

Grant had a theory about whichkinds of circumstances would call forintroverted leadership. His hypothesiswas that extroverted leaders enhancegroup performance when employeesare passive, but that introverted leadersare more effective with proactive em-ployees. To test his idea, he and twocolleagues, professors Francesca Ginoof Harvard Business School and DavidHofman of the Kenan-Flagler Business

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School at the University of North Caro-lina, carried out a pair of studies oftheir own.

In the first study, Grant and his col-leagues analyzed data from one of thefive biggest pizza chains in the UnitedStates. They discovered that the weeklyprofits of the stores managed by extro-verts were 16 percent higher than theprofits of those led by introverts—butonly when the employees were passivetypes who tended to do their jobwithout exercising initiative. Introvertedleaders had the exact opposite results.When they worked with employeeswho actively tried to improve workprocedures, their stores outperformedthose led by extroverts by more than 14percent.

In the second study, Grant’s team di-vided 163 college students into compet-ing teams charged with folding as many

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T-shirts as possible in ten minutes. Un-beknownst to the participants, eachteam included two actors. In someteams, the two actors acted passively,following the leader’s instructions. Inother teams, one of the actors said, “Iwonder if there’s a more efficient wayto do this.” The other actor replied thathe had a friend from Japan who had afaster way to fold shirts. “It might takea minute or two to teach you,” the act-or told the leader, “but do we want totry it?”

The results were striking. The intro-verted leaders were 20 percent morelikely to follow the suggestion—andtheir teams had 24 percent better res-ults than the teams of the extrovertedleaders. When the followers were notproactive, though—when they simplydid as the leader instructed withoutsuggesting their own shirt-folding

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methods—the teams led by extrovertsoutperformed those led by the intro-verts by 22 percent.

Why did these leaders’ effectivenessturn on whether their employees werepassive or proactive? Grant says itmakes sense that introverts areuniquely good at leading initiative-takers. Because of their inclination tolisten to others and lack of interest indominating social situations, introvertsare more likely to hear and implementsuggestions. Having benefited from thetalents of their followers, they are thenlikely to motivate them to be evenmore proactive. Introverted leaders cre-ate a virtuous circle of proactivity, inother words. In the T-shirt-foldingstudy, the team members reported per-ceiving the introverted leaders as moreopen and receptive to their ideas,

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which motivated them to work harderand to fold more shirts.

Extroverts, on the other hand, can beso intent on putting their own stamp onevents that they risk losing others’ goodideas along the way and allowing work-ers to lapse into passivity. “Often theleaders end up doing a lot of the talk-ing,” says Francesca Gino, “and notlistening to any of the ideas that thefollowers are trying to provide.” Butwith their natural ability to inspire, ex-troverted leaders are better at gettingresults from more passive workers.

This line of research is still in its in-fancy. But under the auspices ofGrant—an especially proactive fellowhimself—it may grow quickly. (One ofhis colleagues has described Grant asthe kind of person who “can makethings happen twenty-eight minutes be-fore they’re scheduled to begin.”) Grant

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is especially excited about the implica-tions of these findings because proact-ive employees who take advantage ofopportunities in a fast-moving, 24/7business environment, without waitingfor a leader to tell them what to do, areincreasingly vital to organizational suc-cess. To understand how to maximizethese employees’ contributions is animportant tool for all leaders. It’s alsoimportant for companies to groomlisteners as well as talkers for leader-ship roles.

The popular press, says Grant, is fullof suggestions that introverted leaderspractice their public speaking skills andsmile more. But Grant’s research sug-gests that in at least one important re-gard—encouraging employees to takeinitiative—introverted leaders woulddo well to go on doing what they donaturally. Extroverted leaders, on the

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other hand, “may wish to adopt a morereserved, quiet style,” Grant writes.They may want to learn to sit down sothat others might stand up.

Which is just what a woman namedRosa Parks did naturally.

For years before the day in December1955 when Rosa Parks refused to giveup her seat on a Montgomery bus, sheworked behind the scenes for theNAACP, even receiving training in non-violent resistance. Many things had in-spired her political commitment. Thetime the Ku Klux Klan marched in frontof her childhood house. The time herbrother, a private in the U.S. Armywho’d saved the lives of white soldiers,came home from World War II only to

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be spat upon. The time a blackeighteen-year-old delivery boy wasframed for rape and sent to the electricchair. Parks organized NAACP records,kept track of membership payments,read to little kids in her neighborhood.She was diligent and honorable, but noone thought of her as a leader. Parks, itseemed, was more of a foot soldier.

Not many people know that twelveyears before her showdown with theMontgomery bus driver, she’d had an-other encounter with the same man,possibly on the very same bus. It was aNovember afternoon in 1943, and Parkshad entered through the front door ofthe bus because the back was toocrowded. The driver, a well-known big-ot named James Blake, told her to usethe rear and started to push her off thebus. Parks asked him not to touch her.She would leave on her own, she said

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quietly. “Get off my bus,” Blakesputtered in response.

Parks complied, but not before delib-erately dropping her purse on her wayout and sitting on a “white” seat as shepicked it up. “Intuitively, she had en-gaged in an act of passive resistance, aprecept named by Leo Tolstoy and em-braced by Mahatma Gandhi,” writes thehistorian Douglas Brinkley in a wonder-ful biography of Parks. It was morethan a decade before King popularizedthe idea of nonviolence and long beforeParks’s own training in civil disobedi-ence, but, Brinkley writes, “such prin-ciples were a perfect match for her ownpersonality.”

Parks was so disgusted by Blake thatshe refused to ride his bus for the nexttwelve years. On the day she finallydid, the day that turned her into the“Mother of the Civil Rights Movement,”

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she got back on that bus, according toBrinkley, only out of sheerabsentmindedness.

Parks’s actions that day were braveand singular, but it was in the legal fal-lout that her quiet strength truly shone.Local civil rights leaders sought her outas a test case to challenge the city’s buslaws, pressing her to file a lawsuit. Thiswas no small decision. Parks had asickly mother who depended on her; tosue would mean losing her job and herhusband’s. It would mean running thevery real risk of being lynched from“the tallest telephone pole in town,” asher husband and mother put it. “Rosa,the white folks will kill you,” pleadedher husband. “It was one thing to be ar-rested for an isolated bus incident,”writes Brinkley; “it was quite another,as historian Taylor Branch would put it,

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to ‘reenter that forbidden zone bychoice.’ ”

But because of her nature, Parks wasthe perfect plaintiff. Not only becauseshe was a devout Christian, not onlybecause she was an upstanding citizen,but also because she was gentle.“They’ve messed with the wrong onenow!” the boycotters would declare asthey traipsed miles to work and school.The phrase became a rallying cry. Itspower lay in how paradoxical it was.Usually such a phrase implies thatyou’ve messed with a local heavy, withsome bullying giant. But it was Parks’squiet strength that made her unassail-able. “The slogan served as a reminderthat the woman who had inspired theboycott was the sort of soft-spokenmartyr God would not abandon,” writesBrinkley.

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Parks took her time coming to a de-cision, but ultimately agreed to sue. Shealso lent her presence at a rally held onthe evening of her trial, the night whena young Martin Luther King Jr., thehead of the brand-new Montgomery Im-provement Association, roused all ofMontgomery’s black community to boy-cott the buses. “Since it had to hap-pen,” King told the crowd, “I’m happyit happened to a person like Rosa Parks,for nobody can doubt the boundlessoutreach of her integrity. Nobody candoubt the height of her character. Mrs.Parks is unassuming, and yet there isintegrity and character there.”

Later that year Parks agreed to go ona fund-raising speaking tour with Kingand other civil rights leaders. Shesuffered insomnia, ulcers, and home-sickness along the way. She met heridol, Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote of

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their encounter in her newspapercolumn: “She is a very quiet, gentleperson and it is difficult to imaginehow she ever could take such a positiveand independent stand.” When the boy-cott finally ended, over a year later, thebuses integrated by decree of the Su-preme Court, Parks was overlooked bythe press. The New York Times ran twofront-page stories that celebrated Kingbut didn’t mention her. Other papersphotographed the boycott leaders sit-ting in front of buses, but Parks was notinvited to sit for these pictures. Shedidn’t mind. On the day the buses wereintegrated, she preferred to stay homeand take care of her mother.

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Parks’s story is a vivid reminder thatwe have been graced with limelight-avoiding leaders throughout history.Moses, for example, was not, accordingto some interpretations of his story, thebrash, talkative type who would organ-ize road trips and hold forth in aclassroom at Harvard Business School.On the contrary, by today’s standardshe was dreadfully timid. He spoke witha stutter and considered himself inartic-ulate. The book of Numbers describeshim as “very meek, above all the menwhich were upon the face of the earth.”

When God first appeared to him inthe form of a burning bush, Moses wasemployed as a shepherd by his father-in-law; he wasn’t even ambitiousenough to own his own sheep. Andwhen God revealed to Moses his role asliberator of the Jews, did Moses leap atthe opportunity? Send someone else to

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do it, he said. “Who am I, that I shouldgo to Pharaoh?” he pleaded. “I havenever been eloquent. I am slow ofspeech and tongue.”

It was only when God paired him upwith his extroverted brother Aaron thatMoses agreed to take on the assign-ment. Moses would be the speech-writer, the behind-the-scenes guy, theCyrano de Bergerac; Aaron would bethe public face of the operation. “It willbe as if he were your mouth,” said God,“and as if you were God to him.”

Complemented by Aaron, Moses ledthe Jews from Egypt, provided for themin the desert for the next forty years,and brought the Ten Commandmentsdown from Mount Sinai. And he did allthis using strengths that are classicallyassociated with introversion: climbing amountain in search of wisdom and

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writing down carefully, on two stonetablets, everything he learned there.

We tend to write Moses’ true person-ality out of the Exodus story. (Cecil B.DeMille’s classic, The Ten Command-ments, portrays him as a swashbucklingfigure who does all the talking, with nohelp from Aaron.) We don’t ask whyGod chose as his prophet a stuttererwith a public speaking phobia. But weshould. The book of Exodus is short onexplication, but its stories suggest thatintroversion plays yin to the yang of ex-troversion; that the medium is not al-ways the message; and that people fol-lowed Moses because his words werethoughtful, not because he spoke themwell.

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If Parks spoke through her actions, andif Moses spoke through his brotherAaron, today another type of introver-ted leader speaks using the Internet.

In his book The Tipping Point, Mal-colm Gladwell explores the influence of“Connectors”—people who have a “spe-cial gift for bringing the world togeth-er” and “an instinctive and natural giftfor making social connections.” He de-scribes a “classic Connector” named Ro-ger Horchow, a charming and success-ful businessman and backer of Broad-way hits such as Les Misérables, who“collects people the same way otherscollect stamps.” “If you sat next to Ro-ger Horchow on a plane ride across theAtlantic,” writes Gladwell, “he wouldstart talking as the plane taxied to therunway, you would be laughing by thetime the seatbelt sign was turned off,

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and when you landed at the other endyou’d wonder where the time went.”

We generally think of Connectors injust the way that Gladwell describesHorchow: chatty, outgoing, spellbind-ing even. But consider for a moment amodest, cerebral man named CraigNewmark. Short, balding, and bespec-tacled, Newmark was a systems engin-eer for seventeen years at IBM. Beforethat, he had consuming interests in di-nosaurs, chess, and physics. If you satnext to him on a plane, he’d probablykeep his nose buried in a book.

Yet Newmark also happens to be thefounder and majority owner ofCraigslist, the eponymous websitethat—well—connects people with eachother. As of May 28, 2011, Craigslistwas the seventh-largest English lan-guage website in the world. Its users inover 700 cities in seventy countries find

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jobs, dates, and even kidney donors onNewmark’s site. They join singinggroups. They read one another’s haikus.They confess their affairs. Newmark de-scribes the site not as a business but asa public commons.

“Connecting people to fix the worldover time is the deepest spiritual valueyou can have,” Newmark has said.After Hurricane Katrina, Craigslisthelped stranded families find newhomes. During the New York City trans-it strike of 2005, Craigslist was the go-to place for ride-share listings. “Yet an-other crisis, and Craigslist commandsthe community,” wrote one bloggerabout Craigslist’s role in the strike.“How come Craig organically can touchlives on so many personal levels—andCraig’s users can touch each other’slives on so many levels?”

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Here’s one answer: social media hasmade new forms of leadership possiblefor scores of people who don’t fit theHarvard Business School mold.

On August 10, 2008, Guy Kawasaki,the best-selling author, speaker, serialentrepreneur, and Silicon Valley le-gend, tweeted, “You may find this hardto believe, but I am an introvert. I havea ‘role’ to play, but I fundamentally ama loner.” Kawasaki’s tweet set the worldof social media buzzing. “At the time,”wrote one blogger, “Guy’s avatar fea-tured him wearing a pink boa from alarge party he threw at his house. GuyKawasaki an introvert? Does notcompute.”

On August 15, 2008, Pete Cashmore,the founder of Mashable, the onlineguide to social media, weighed in.“Wouldn’t it be a great irony,” heasked, “if the leading proponents of the

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‘it’s about people’ mantra weren’t soenamored with meeting large groups ofpeople in real life? Perhaps social me-dia affords us the control we lack inreal life socializing: the screen as a bar-rier between us and the world.” ThenCashmore outed himself. “Throw mefirmly in the ‘introverts’ camp withGuy,” he posted.

Studies have shown that, indeed, in-troverts are more likely than extrovertsto express intimate facts about them-selves online that their family andfriends would be surprised to read, tosay that they can express the “real me”online, and to spend more time in cer-tain kinds of online discussions. Theywelcome the chance to communicatedigitally. The same person who wouldnever raise his hand in a lecture hall oftwo hundred people might blog to twothousand, or two million, without

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thinking twice. The same person whofinds it difficult to introduce himself tostrangers might establish a presence on-line and then extend these relationshipsinto the real world.

What would have happened if theSubarctic Survival Situation had beenconducted online, with the benefit ofall the voices in the room—the RosaParkses and the Craig Newmarks andthe Darwin Smiths? What if it had beena group of proactive castaways led byan introvert with a gift for calmly en-couraging them to contribute? What ifthere had been an introvert and an ex-trovert sharing the helm, like RosaParks and Martin Luther King Jr.?

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Might they have reached the rightresult?

It’s impossible to say. No one hasever run these studies, as far as Iknow—which is a shame. It’s under-standable that the HBS model of leader-ship places such a high premium onconfidence and quick decision-making.If assertive people tend to get theirway, then it’s a useful skill for leaderswhose work depends on influencingothers. Decisiveness inspires confid-ence, while wavering (or even appear-ing to waver) can threaten morale.

But one can take these truths too far;in some circumstances quiet, modeststyles of leadership may be equally ormore effective. As I left the HBS cam-pus, I stopped by a display of notableWall Street Journal cartoons in theBaker Library lobby. One showed a

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haggard executive looking at a chart ofsteeply falling profits.

“It’s all because of Fradkin,” the ex-ecutive tells his colleague. “He has ter-rible business sense but great leader-ship skills, and everyone is followinghim down the road to ruin.”

Does God Love Introverts? AnEvangelical’s Dilemma

If Harvard Business School is an EastCoast enclave for the global elite, mynext stop was an institution that’s muchthe opposite. It sits on a sprawling,120-acre campus in the former desertand current exurb of Lake Forest, Cali-fornia. Unlike Harvard Business School,it admits anyone who wants to join.Families stroll the palm-tree-linedplazas and walkways in good-natured

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clumps. Children frolic in man-madestreams and waterfalls. Staff wave ami-ably as they cruise by in golf carts.Wear whatever you want: sneakers andflip-flops are perfectly fine. This cam-pus is presided over not by nattily at-tired professors wielding words likeprotagonist and case method, but by abenign Santa Claus–like figure in aHawaiian shirt and sandy-hairedgoatee.

With an average weekly attendanceof 22,000 and counting, SaddlebackChurch is one of the largest and mostinfluential evangelical churches in thenation. Its leader is Rick Warren, au-thor of The Purpose Driven Life, one ofthe best-selling books of all time, andthe man who delivered the invocationat President Obama’s inauguration.Saddleback doesn’t cater to world-fam-ous leaders the way HBS does, but it

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plays no less mighty a role in society.Evangelical leaders have the ear ofpresidents; dominate thousands ofhours of TV time; and run multimillion-dollar businesses, with the most prom-inent boasting their own productioncompanies, recording studios, and dis-tribution deals with media giants likeTime Warner.

Saddleback also has one more thingin common with Harvard BusinessSchool: its debt to—and propagationof—the Culture of Personality.

It’s a Sunday morning in August2006, and I’m standing at the center ofa dense hub of sidewalks on Saddle-back’s campus. I consult a signpost, thekind you see at Walt Disney World,with cheerful arrows pointing everywhich way: Worship Center, PlazaRoom, Terrace Café, Beach Café. Anearby poster features a beaming young

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man in bright red polo shirt and sneak-ers: “Looking for a new direction? Givetraffic ministry a try!”

I’m searching for the open-air book-store, where I’ll be meeting AdamMcHugh, a local evangelical pastorwith whom I’ve been corresponding.McHugh is an avowed introvert, andwe’ve been having a cross-country con-versation about what it feels like to bea quiet and cerebral type in the evan-gelical movement—especially as a lead-er. Like HBS, evangelical churches of-ten make extroversion a prerequisite forleadership, sometimes explicitly. “Thepriest must be … an extrovert who en-thusiastically engages members andnewcomers, a team player,” reads an adfor a position as associate rector of a1,400-member parish. A senior priest atanother church confesses online that hehas advised parishes recruiting a new

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rector to ask what his or her Myers-Briggs score is. “If the first letter isn’tan ‘E’ [for extrovert],” he tells them,“think twice … I’m sure our Lord was[an extrovert].”

McHugh doesn’t fit this description.He discovered his introversion as a ju-nior at Claremont McKenna College,when he realized he was getting upearly in the morning just to savor timealone with a steaming cup of coffee. Heenjoyed parties, but found himself leav-ing early. “Other people would getlouder and louder, and I would getquieter and quieter,” he told me. Hetook a Myers-Briggs personality testand found out that there was a word,introvert, that described the type of per-son who likes to spend time as he did.

At first McHugh felt good aboutcarving out more time for himself. Butthen he got active in evangelicalism

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and began to feel guilty about all thatsolitude. He even believed that God dis-approved of his choices and, by exten-sion, of him.

“The evangelical culture ties togetherfaithfulness with extroversion,”McHugh explained. “The emphasis ison community, on participating inmore and more programs and events,on meeting more and more people. It’sa constant tension for many introvertsthat they’re not living that out. And ina religious world, there’s more at stakewhen you feel that tension. It doesn’tfeel like ‘I’m not doing as well as I’dlike.’ It feels like ‘God isn’t pleased withme.’ ”

From outside the evangelical com-munity, this seems an astonishing con-fession. Since when is solitude one ofthe Seven Deadly Sins? But to a fellowevangelical, McHugh’s sense of spiritual

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failure would make perfect sense. Con-temporary evangelicalism says thatevery person you fail to meet and pros-elytize is another soul you might havesaved. It also emphasizes building com-munity among confirmed believers,with many churches encouraging (oreven requiring) their members to joinextracurricular groups organizedaround every conceivable sub-ject—cooking, real-estate investing,skateboarding. So every social eventMcHugh left early, every morning hespent alone, every group he failed tojoin, meant wasted chances to connectwith others.

But, ironically, if there was one thingMcHugh knew, it was that he wasn’talone. He looked around and saw a vastnumber of people in the evangelicalcommunity who felt just as conflictedas he did. He became ordained as a

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Presbyterian minister and worked witha team of student leaders at ClaremontCollege, many of whom were intro-verts. The team became a kind of labor-atory for experimenting with introver-ted forms of leadership and ministry.They focused on one-on-one and smallgroup interactions rather than on largegroups, and McHugh helped the stu-dents find rhythms in their lives that al-lowed them to claim the solitude theyneeded and enjoyed, and to have socialenergy left over for leading others. Heurged them to find the courage to speakup and take risks in meeting newpeople.

A few years later, when social mediaexploded and evangelical bloggers star-ted posting about their experiences,written evidence of the schism betweenintroverts and extroverts within theevangelical church finally emerged.

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One blogger wrote about his “cry fromthe heart wondering how to fit in as anintrovert in a church that prides itselfon extroverted evangelism. There areprobably quite a few [of you] out therewho are put on guilt trips each time[you] get a personal evangelism push atchurch. There’s a place in God’s king-dom for sensitive, reflective types. It’snot easy to claim, but it’s there.”Another wrote about his simple desire“to serve the Lord but not serve on aparish committee. In a universalchurch, there should be room for theun-gregarious.”

McHugh added his own voice to thischorus, first with a blog calling forgreater emphasis on religious practicesof solitude and contemplation, andlater with a book called Introverts in theChurch: Finding Our Place in an Extrover-ted Culture. He argues that evangelism

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means listening as well as talking, thatevangelical churches should incorpor-ate silence and mystery into religiousworship, and that they should makeroom for introverted leaders who mightbe able to demonstrate a quieter pathto God. After all, hasn’t prayer alwaysbeen about contemplation as well ascommunity? Religious leaders from Je-sus to Buddha, as well as the lesser-known saints, monks, shamans, andprophets, have always gone off alone toexperience the revelations they latershared with the rest of us.

When finally I find my way to thebookstore, McHugh is waiting with aserene expression on his face. He’s inhis early thirties, tall and broad-

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shouldered, dressed in jeans, a blackpolo shirt, and black flip-flops. With hisshort brown hair, reddish goatee, andsideburns, McHugh looks like a typicalGen Xer, but he speaks in the soothing,considered tones of a college professor.McHugh doesn’t preach or worship atSaddleback, but we’ve chosen to meethere because it’s such an importantsymbol of evangelical culture.

Since services are just about to start,there’s little time to chat. Saddlebackoffers six different “worship venues,”each housed in its own building or tentand set to its own beat: WorshipCenter, Traditional, OverDrive Rock,Gospel, Family, and something calledOhana Island Style Worship. We headto the main Worship Center, wherePastor Warren is about to preach. Withits sky-high ceiling crisscrossed withklieg lights, the auditorium looks like a

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rock concert venue, save for the unob-trusive wooden cross hanging on theside of the room.

A man named Skip is warming up thecongregation with a song. The lyricsare broadcast on five Jumbotronscreens, interspersed with photos ofshimmering lakes and Caribbeansunsets. Miked-up tech guys sit on athronelike dais at the center of theroom, training their video cameras onthe audience. The cameras linger on ateenage girl—long, silky blond hair,electric smile, and shining blueeyes—who’s singing her heart out. Ican’t help but think of Tony Robbins’s“Unleash the Power Within” seminar.Did Tony base his program on megach-urches like Saddleback, I wonder, or isit the other way around?

“Good morning, everybody!” beamsSkip, then urges us to greet those

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seated near us. Most people oblige withwide smiles and glad hands, includingMcHugh, but there’s a hint of strain be-neath his smile.

Pastor Warren takes the stage. He’swearing a short-sleeved polo shirt andhis famous goatee. Today’s sermon willbe based on the book of Jeremiah, hetells us. “It would be foolish to start abusiness without a business plan,” War-ren says, “but most people have no lifeplan. If you’re a business leader, youneed to read the book of Jeremiah overand over, because he was a geniusCEO.” There are no Bibles at our seats,only pencils and note cards, with thekey points from the sermon preprinted,and blanks to fill in as Warren goesalong.

Like Tony Robbins, Pastor Warrenseems truly well-meaning; he’s createdthis vast Saddleback ecosystem out of

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nothing, and he’s done good worksaround the world. But at the same timeI can see how hard it must be, insidethis world of Luau worship and Jum-botron prayer, for Saddleback’s intro-verts to feel good about themselves. Asthe service wears on, I feel the samesense of alienation that McHugh has de-scribed. Events like this don’t give methe sense of oneness others seem to en-joy; it’s always been private occasionsthat make me feel connected to the joysand sorrows of the world, often in theform of communion with writers andmusicians I’ll never meet in person.Proust called these moments of unitybetween writer and reader “that fruitfulmiracle of a communication in themidst of solitude.” His use of religiouslanguage was surely no accident.

McHugh, as if reading my mind,turns to me when the service is over.

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“Everything in the service involvedcommunication,” he says with gentleexasperation. “Greeting people, thelengthy sermon, the singing. There wasno emphasis on quiet, liturgy, ritual,things that give you space forcontemplation.”

McHugh’s discomfort is all the morepoignant because he genuinely admiresSaddleback and all that it stands for.“Saddleback is doing amazing thingsaround the world and in its own com-munity,” he says. “It’s a friendly, hos-pitable place that genuinely seeks toconnect with newcomers. That’s an im-pressive mission given how colossal thechurch is, and how easy it would be forpeople to remain completely disconnec-ted from others. Greeters, the informalatmosphere, meeting people aroundyou—these are all motivated by gooddesires.”

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Yet McHugh finds practices like themandatory smile-and-good-morning atthe start of the service to be pain-ful—and though he personally is will-ing to endure it, even sees the value init, he worries about how many other in-troverts will not.

“It sets up an extroverted atmospherethat can be difficult for introverts likeme,” he explains. “Sometimes I feel likeI’m going through the motions. Theoutward enthusiasm and passion thatseems to be part and parcel of Saddle-back’s culture doesn’t feel natural. Notthat introverts can’t be eager and en-thusiastic, but we’re not as overtly ex-pressive as extroverts. At a place likeSaddleback, you can start questioningyour own experience of God. Is it reallyas strong as that of other people wholook the part of the devout believer?”

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Evangelicalism has taken the Extro-vert Ideal to its logical extreme,McHugh is telling us. If you don’t loveJesus out loud, then it must not be reallove. It’s not enough to forge your ownspiritual connection to the divine; itmust be displayed publicly. Is it any won-der that introverts like Pastor McHughstart to question their own hearts?

It’s brave of McHugh, whose spiritualand professional calling depends on hisconnection to God, to confess his self-doubt. He does so because he wants tospare others the inner conflict he hasstruggled with, and because he lovesevangelicalism and wants it to grow bylearning from the introverts in itsmidst.

But he knows that meaningful changewill come slowly to a religious culturethat sees extroversion not only as a per-sonality trait but also as an indicator of

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virtue. Righteous behavior is not somuch the good we do behind closeddoors when no one is there to praise us;it is what we “put out into the world.”Just as Tony Robbins’s aggressive up-selling is OK with his fans becausespreading helpful ideas is part of beinga good person, and just as HBS expectsits students to be talkers because this isseen as a prerequisite of leadership, sohave many evangelicals come to associ-ate godliness with sociability.

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3WHEN COLLABORATION KILLS

CREATIVITY

The Rise of the New Groupthink and thePower of Working Alone

I am a horse for a single harness, not cutout for tandem or teamwork … for well Iknow that in order to attain any definitegoal, it is imperative that one person do

the thinking and the commanding.—ALBERT EINSTEIN

March 5, 1975. A cold and drizzlyevening in Menlo Park, California.Thirty unprepossessing-looking engin-eers gather in the garage of an unem-ployed colleague named Gordon

French. They call themselves theHomebrew Computer Club, and this istheir first meeting. Their mission: tomake computers accessible to regularpeople—no small task at a time whenmost computers are temperamentalSUV-sized machines that only universit-ies and corporations can afford.

The garage is drafty, but the engin-eers leave the doors open to the dampnight air so people can wander inside.In walks an uncertain young man oftwenty-four, a calculator designer forHewlett-Packard. Serious and bespec-tacled, he has shoulder-length hair anda brown beard. He takes a chair andlistens quietly as the others marvel overa new build-it-yourself computer calledthe Altair 8800, which recently madethe cover of Popular Electronics. TheAltair isn’t a true personal computer;it’s hard to use, and appeals only to the

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type of person who shows up at a gar-age on a rainy Wednesday night to talkabout microchips. But it’s an importantfirst step.

The young man, whose name isStephen Wozniak, is thrilled to hear ofthe Altair. He’s been obsessed withelectronics since the age of three. Whenhe was eleven he came across amagazine article about the first com-puter, the ENIAC, or Electronic Numer-ical Integrator and Computer, and eversince, his dream has been to build amachine so small and easy to use thatyou could keep it at home. And now,inside this garage, here is news thatThe Dream—he thinks of it with capitalletters—might one day materialize.

As he’ll later recall in his memoir,iWoz, where most of this story appears,Wozniak is also excited to be surroun-ded by kindred spirits. To the

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Homebrew crowd, computers are a toolfor social justice, and he feels the sameway. Not that he talks to anyone at thisfirst meeting—he’s way too shy forthat. But that night he goes home andsketches his first design for a personalcomputer, with a keyboard and ascreen just like the kind we use today.Three months later he builds a proto-type of that machine. And ten monthsafter that, he and Steve Jobs cofoundApple Computer.

Today Steve Wozniak is a revered fig-ure in Silicon Valley—there’s a street inSan Jose, California, named Woz’sWay—and is sometimes called the nerdsoul of Apple. He has learned over timeto open up and speak publicly, even ap-pearing as a contestant on Dancing withthe Stars, where he displayed an en-dearing mixture of stiffness and goodcheer. I once saw Wozniak speak at a

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bookstore in New York City. Astanding-room-only crowd showed upbearing their 1970s Apple operatingmanuals, in honor of all that he haddone for them.

But the credit is not Wozniak’s alone; italso belongs to Homebrew. Wozniakidentifies that first meeting as the be-ginning of the computer revolution andone of the most important nights of hislife. So if you wanted to replicate theconditions that made Woz so product-ive, you might point to Homebrew,with its collection of like-minded souls.You might decide that Wozniak’sachievement was a shining example ofthe collaborative approach to creativ-ity. You might conclude that people

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who hope to be innovative should workin highly social workplaces.

And you might be wrong.Consider what Wozniak did right

after the meeting in Menlo Park. Did hehuddle with fellow club members towork on computer design? No. (Al-though he did keep attending the meet-ings, every other Wednesday.) Did heseek out a big, open office space full ofcheerful pandemonium in which ideaswould cross-pollinate? No. When youread his account of his work process onthat first PC, the most striking thing isthat he was always by himself.

Wozniak did most of the work insidehis cubicle at Hewlett-Packard. He’d ar-rive around 6:30 a.m. and, alone in theearly morning, read engineeringmagazines, study chip manuals, andprepare designs in his head. After work,he’d go home, make a quick spaghetti

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or TV dinner, then drive back to the of-fice and work late into the night. Hedescribes this period of quiet midnightsand solitary sunrises as “the biggesthigh ever.” His efforts paid off on thenight of June 29, 1975, at around10:00 p.m., when Woz finished build-ing a prototype of his machine. He hit afew keys on the keyboard—and lettersappeared on the screen in front of him.It was the sort of breakthrough momentthat most of us can only dream of. Andhe was alone when it happened.

Intentionally so. In his memoir, heoffers this advice to kids who aspire togreat creativity:

Most inventors and engineers I’vemet are like me—they’re shy andthey live in their heads. They’re al-most like artists. In fact, the verybest of them are artists. And artists

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work best alone where they can con-trol an invention’s design without alot of other people designing it formarketing or some other committee.I don’t believe anything really re-volutionary has been invented bycommittee. If you’re that rare engin-eer who’s an inventor and also anartist, I’m going to give you someadvice that might be hard to take.That advice is: Work alone. You’regoing to be best able to design revolu-tionary products and features if you’reworking on your own. Not on a com-mittee. Not on a team.

From 1956 to 1962, an era best re-membered for its ethos of stultifyingconformity, the Institute of Personality

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Assessment and Research at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, con-ducted a series of studies on the natureof creativity. The researchers sought toidentify the most spectacularly creativepeople and then figure out what madethem different from everybody else.They assembled a list of architects,mathematicians, scientists, engineers,and writers who had made major con-tributions to their fields, and invitedthem to Berkeley for a weekend of per-sonality tests, problem-solving experi-ments, and probing questions.

Then the researchers did somethingsimilar with members of the same pro-fessions whose contributions were de-cidedly less groundbreaking.

One of the most interesting findings,echoed by later studies, was that themore creative people tended to be so-cially poised introverts. They were

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interpersonally skilled but “not of anespecially sociable or participative tem-perament.” They described themselvesas independent and individualistic. Asteens, many had been shy and solitary.

These findings don’t mean that intro-verts are always more creative than ex-troverts, but they do suggest that in agroup of people who have been ex-tremely creative throughout their life-times, you’re likely to find a lot of in-troverts. Why should this be true? Doquiet personalities come with some in-effable quality that fuels creativity?Perhaps, as we’ll see in chapter 6.

But there’s a less obvious yet surpris-ingly powerful explanation for intro-verts’ creative advantage—an explana-tion that everyone can learn from: intro-verts prefer to work independently, andsolitude can be a catalyst to innovation.As the influential psychologist Hans

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Eysenck once observed, introversion“concentrates the mind on the tasks inhand, and prevents the dissipation ofenergy on social and sexual matters un-related to work.” In other words, ifyou’re in the backyard sitting under atree while everyone else is clinkingglasses on the patio, you’re more likelyto have an apple fall on your head.(Newton was one of the world’s greatintroverts. William Wordsworth de-scribed him as “A mind forever / Voy-aging through strange seas of Thoughtalone.”)

If this is true—if solitude is an import-ant key to creativity—then we might allwant to develop a taste for it. We’dwant to teach our kids to work

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independently. We’d want to give em-ployees plenty of privacy andautonomy. Yet increasingly we do justthe opposite.

We like to believe that we live in agrand age of creative individualism. Welook back at the midcentury era inwhich the Berkeley researchers conduc-ted their creativity studies, and feel su-perior. Unlike the starched-shirted con-formists of the 1950s, we hang postersof Einstein on our walls, his tonguestuck out iconoclastically. We consumeindie music and films, and generate ourown online content. We “think differ-ent” (even if we got the idea fromApple Computer’s famous adcampaign).

But the way we organize many of ourmost important institutions—ourschools and our workplaces—tells avery different story. It’s the story of a

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contemporary phenomenon that I callthe New Groupthink—a phenomenonthat has the potential to stifle pro-ductivity at work and to depriveschoolchildren of the skills they’ll needto achieve excellence in an increasinglycompetitive world.

The New Groupthink elevates team-work above all else. It insists that cre-ativity and intellectual achievementcome from a gregarious place. It hasmany powerful advocates.“Innovation—the heart of the know-ledge economy—is fundamentally so-cial,” writes the prominent journalistMalcolm Gladwell. “None of us is assmart as all of us,” declares the organiz-ational consultant Warren Bennis, in hisbook Organizing Genius, whose openingchapter heralds the rise of the “GreatGroup” and “The End of the GreatMan.” “Many jobs that we regard as the

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province of a single mind actually re-quire a crowd,” muses Clay Shirky inhis influential book Here Comes Every-body. Even “Michelangelo had assist-ants paint part of the Sistine Chapelceiling.” (Never mind that the assistantswere likely interchangeable, whileMichelangelo was not.)

The New Groupthink is embraced bymany corporations, which increasinglyorganize workforces into teams, a prac-tice that gained popularity in the early1990s. By 2000 an estimated half of allU.S. organizations used teams, andtoday virtually all of them do, accord-ing to the management professor Fred-erick Morgeson. A recent survey foundthat 91 percent of high-level managersbelieve that teams are the key to suc-cess. The consultant Stephen Harvilltold me that of the thirty major organ-izations he worked with in 2010,

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including J.C. Penney, Wells Fargo, DellComputers, and Prudential, he couldn’tthink of a single one that didn’t useteams.

Some of these teams are virtual,working together from remote loca-tions, but others demand a tremendousamount of face-to-face interaction, inthe form of team-building exercises andretreats, shared online calendars thatannounce employees’ availability formeetings, and physical workplaces thatafford little privacy. Today’s employeesinhabit open office plans, in which noone has a room of his or her own, theonly walls are the ones holding up thebuilding, and senior executives operatefrom the center of the boundary-lessfloor along with everyone else. In fact,over 70 percent of today’s employeeswork in an open plan; companies usingthem include Procter & Gamble, Ernst

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& Young, GlaxoSmithKline, Alcoa, andH.J. Heinz.

The amount of space per employeeshrank from 500 square feet in the1970s to 200 square feet in 2010, ac-cording to Peter Miscovich, a managingdirector at the real estate brokeragefirm Jones Lang LaSalle. “There hasbeen a shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’ work,”Steelcase CEO James Hackett told FastCompany magazine in 2005. “Employ-ees used to work alone in ‘I’ settings.Today, working in teams and groups ishighly valued. We are designingproducts to facilitate that.” Rival officemanufacturer Herman Miller, Inc., hasnot only introduced new furniture de-signed to accommodate “the move to-ward collaboration and teaming in theworkplace” but also moved its own topexecutives from private offices to anopen space. In 2006, the Ross School of

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Business at the University of Michigandemolished a classroom building inpart because it wasn’t set up for maxim-um group interaction.

The New Groupthink is also practicedin our schools, via an increasingly pop-ular method of instruction called “co-operative” or “small group” learning. Inmany elementary schools, the tradition-al rows of seats facing the teacher havebeen replaced with “pods” of four ormore desks pushed together to facilitatecountless group learning activities.Even subjects like math and creativewriting, which would seem to dependon solo flights of thought, are oftentaught as group projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited, a big sign an-nounced the “Rules for Group Work,”including, YOU CAN’T ASK A TEACHER FORHELP UNLESS EVERYONE IN YOUR GROUP HASTHE SAME QUESTION.

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According to a 2002 nationwide sur-vey of more than 1,200 fourth- andeighth-grade teachers, 55 percent offourth-grade teachers prefer cooperat-ive learning, compared to only 26 per-cent who favor teacher-directedformats. Only 35 percent of fourth-grade and 29 percent of eighth-gradeteachers spend more than half theirclassroom time on traditional instruc-tion, while 42 percent of fourth-gradeand 41 percent of eighth-grade teachersspend at least a quarter of class time ongroup work. Among younger teachers,small-group learning is even more pop-ular, suggesting that the trend will con-tinue for some time to come.

The cooperative approach has politic-ally progressive roots—the theory isthat students take ownership of theireducation when they learn from oneanother—but according to elementary

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school teachers I interviewed at publicand private schools in New York,Michigan, and Georgia, it also trainskids to express themselves in the teamculture of corporate America. “Thisstyle of teaching reflects the businesscommunity,” one fifth-grade teacher ina Manhattan public school told me,“where people’s respect for others isbased on their verbal abilities, not theiroriginality or insight. You have to besomeone who speaks well and calls at-tention to yourself. It’s an elitism basedon something other than merit.”“Today the world of business works ingroups, so now the kids do it inschool,” a third-grade teacher in Dec-atur, Georgia, explained. “Cooperativelearning enables skills in working asteams—skills that are in dire demand inthe workplace,” writes the educationalconsultant Bruce Williams.

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Williams also identifies leadershiptraining as a primary benefit of cooper-ative learning. Indeed, the teachers Imet seemed to pay close attention totheir students’ managerial skills. In onepublic school I visited in downtown At-lanta, a third-grade teacher pointed outa quiet student who likes to “do hisown thing.” “But we put him in chargeof safety patrol one morning, so he gotthe chance to be a leader, too,” she as-sured me.

This teacher was kind and well-inten-tioned, but I wonder whether studentslike the young safety officer would bebetter off if we appreciated that noteveryone aspires to be a leader in theconventional sense of the word—thatsome people wish to fit harmoniouslyinto the group, and others to be inde-pendent of it. Often the most highlycreative people are in the latter

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category. As Janet Farrall and LeonieKronborg write in Leadership Develop-ment for the Gifted and Talented:

While extroverts tend to attain lead-ership in public domains, introvertstend to attain leadership in theoret-ical and aesthetic fields. Outstand-ing introverted leaders, such asCharles Darwin, Marie Curie, PatrickWhite and Arthur Boyd, who havecreated either new fields of thoughtor rearranged existing knowledge,have spent long periods of theirlives in solitude. Hence leadershipdoes not only apply in social situ-ations, but also occurs in more solit-ary situations such as developingnew techniques in the arts, creatingnew philosophies, writing profoundbooks and making scientificbreakthroughs.

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The New Groupthink did not arise atone precise moment. Cooperative learn-ing, corporate teamwork, and open of-fice plans emerged at different timesand for different reasons. But themighty force that pulled these trendstogether was the rise of the World WideWeb, which lent both cool and gravitasto the idea of collaboration. On the In-ternet, wondrous creations were pro-duced via shared brainpower: Linux,the open-source operating system;Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia;MoveOn.org, the grassroots politicalmovement. These collective produc-tions, exponentially greater than thesum of their parts, were so awe-inspir-ing that we came to revere the hivemind, the wisdom of crowds, the mir-acle of crowdsourcing. Collaboration be-came a sacred concept—the key multi-plier for success.

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But then we took things a step fur-ther than the facts called for. We cameto value transparency and to knockdown walls—not only online but also inperson. We failed to realize that whatmakes sense for the asynchronous, rel-atively anonymous interactions of theInternet might not work as well insidethe face-to-face, politically charged,acoustically noisy confines of an open-plan office. Instead of distinguishingbetween online and in-person interac-tion, we used the lessons of one to in-form our thinking about the other.

That’s why, when people talk aboutaspects of the New Groupthink such asopen office plans, they tend to invokethe Internet. “Employees are puttingtheir whole lives up on Facebook andTwitter and everywhere else anyway.There’s no reason they should hide be-hind a cubicle wall,” Dan Lafontaine,

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CFO of the social marketing firm Mr.Youth, told NPR. Another managementconsultant told me something similar:“An office wall is exactly what itsounds like—a barrier. The fresher yourmethodologies of thinking, the less youwant boundaries. The companies whouse open office plans are new compan-ies, just like the World Wide Web,which is still a teenager.”

The Internet’s role in promoting face-to-face group work is especially ironicbecause the early Web was a mediumthat enabled bands of often introvertedindividualists—people much like thesolitude-craving thought leaders Farralland Kronborg describe—to come to-gether to subvert and transcend theusual ways of problem-solving. A signi-ficant majority of the earliest computerenthusiasts were introverts, accordingto a study of 1,229 computer

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professionals working in the U.S., theU.K., and Australia between 1982 and1984. “It’s a truism in tech that opensource attracts introverts,” says DaveW. Smith, a consultant and software de-veloper in Silicon Valley, referring tothe practice of producing software byopening the source code to the onlinepublic and allowing anyone to copy,improve upon, and distribute it. Manyof these people were motivated by a de-sire to contribute to the broader good,and to see their achievements recog-nized by a community they valued.

But the earliest open-source creatorsdidn’t share office space—often theydidn’t even live in the same country.Their collaborations took place largelyin the ether. This is not an insignificantdetail. If you had gathered the samepeople who created Linux, installedthem in a giant conference room for a

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year, and asked them to devise a newoperating system, it’s doubtful that any-thing so revolutionary would have oc-curred—for reasons we’ll explore in therest of this chapter.

When the research psychologist AndersEricsson was fifteen, he took up chess.He was pretty good at it, he thought,trouncing all his classmates duringlunchtime matches. Until one day a boywho’d been one of the worst players inthe class started to win every match.

Ericsson wondered what hadhappened. “I really thought about this alot,” he recalls in an interview withDaniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code.“Why could that boy, whom I hadbeaten so easily, now beat me just as

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easily? I knew he was studying, goingto a chess club, but what hadhappened, really, underneath?”

This is the question that drives Eric-sson’s career: How do extraordinaryachievers get to be so great at whatthey do? Ericsson has searched for an-swers in fields as diverse as chess, ten-nis, and classical piano.

In a now-famous experiment, he andhis colleagues compared three groupsof expert violinists at the elite MusicAcademy in West Berlin. The research-ers asked the professors to divide thestudents into three groups: the “best vi-olinists,” who had the potential for ca-reers as international soloists; the“good violinists”; and a third grouptraining to be violin teachers ratherthan performers. Then they interviewedthe musicians and asked them to keepdetailed diaries of their time.

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They found a striking differenceamong the groups. All three groupsspent the same amount of time—overfifty hours a week—participating inmusic-related activities. All three hadsimilar classroom requirements makingdemands on their time. But the twobest groups spent most of their music-related time practicing in solitude: 24.3hours a week, or 3.5 hours a day, forthe best group, compared with only 9.3hours a week, or 1.3 hours a day, forthe worst group. The best violinistsrated “practice alone” as the most im-portant of all their music-related activ-ities. Elite musicians—even those whoperform in groups—describe practicesessions with their chamber group as“leisure” compared with solo practice,where the real work gets done.

Ericsson and his cohorts found simil-ar effects of solitude when they studied

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other kinds of expert performers. “Seri-ous study alone” is the strongest pre-dictor of skill for tournament-ratedchess players, for example; grandmas-ters typically spend a whopping fivethousand hours—almost five times asmany hours as intermediate-level play-ers—studying the game by themselvesduring their first ten years of learningto play. College students who tend tostudy alone learn more over time thanthose who work in groups. Even eliteathletes in team sports often spend un-usual amounts of time in solitarypractice.

What’s so magical about solitude? Inmany fields, Ericsson told me, it’s onlywhen you’re alone that you can engagein Deliberate Practice, which he hasidentified as the key to exceptionalachievement. When you practice delib-erately, you identify the tasks or

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knowledge that are just out of yourreach, strive to upgrade your perform-ance, monitor your progress, and reviseaccordingly. Practice sessions that fallshort of this standard are not only lessuseful—they’re counterproductive.They reinforce existing cognitive mech-anisms instead of improving them.

Deliberate Practice is best conductedalone for several reasons. It takes in-tense concentration, and other peoplecan be distracting. It requires deep mo-tivation, often self-generated. But mostimportant, it involves working on thetask that’s most challenging to you per-sonally. Only when you’re alone, Eric-sson told me, can you “go directly tothe part that’s challenging to you. Ifyou want to improve what you’re do-ing, you have to be the one who gener-ates the move. Imagine a groupclass—you’re the one generating the

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move only a small percentage of thetime.”

To see Deliberate Practice in action,we need look no further than the storyof Stephen Wozniak. The Homebrewmeeting was the catalyst that inspiredhim to build that first PC, but theknowledge base and work habits thatmade it possible came from anotherplace entirely: Woz had deliberatelypracticed engineering ever since he wasa little kid. (Ericsson says that it takesapproximately ten thousand hours ofDeliberate Practice to gain true expert-ise, so it helps to start young.)

In iWoz, Wozniak describes his child-hood passion for electronics, and unin-tentionally recounts all the elements ofDeliberate Practice that Ericsson em-phasizes. First, he was motivated: hisfather, a Lockheed engineer, had taughtWoz that engineers could change

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people’s lives and were “among the keypeople in the world.” Second, he builthis expertise step by painstaking step.Because he entered countless sciencefairs, he says,

I acquired a central ability that wasto help me through my entire ca-reer: patience. I’m serious. Patienceis usually so underrated. I mean, forall those projects, from third gradeall the way to eighth grade, I justlearned things gradually, figuringout how to put electronic devices to-gether without so much as crackinga book.… I learned to not worry somuch about the outcome, but toconcentrate on the step I was on andto try to do it as perfectly as I couldwhen I was doing it.

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Third, Woz often worked alone. Thiswas not necessarily by choice. Likemany technically inclined kids, he tooka painful tumble down the social ladderwhen he got to junior high school. As aboy he’d been admired for his scienceprowess, but now nobody seemed tocare. He hated small talk, and his in-terests were out of step with those ofhis peers. A black-and-white photofrom this period shows Woz, hairclosely cropped, grimacing intensely,pointing proudly at his “science-fair-winning Adder/Subtractor,” a boxlikecontraption of wires, knobs, and giz-mos. But the awkwardness of thoseyears didn’t deter him from pursuinghis dream; it probably nurtured it. Hewould never have learned so muchabout computers, Woz says now, if hehadn’t been too shy to leave the house.

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No one would choose this sort ofpainful adolescence, but the fact is thatthe solitude of Woz’s teens, and thesingle-minded focus on what wouldturn out to be a lifelong passion, is typ-ical for highly creative people. Accord-ing to the psychologist MihalyCsikszentmihalyi, who between 1990and 1995 studied the lives of ninety-one exceptionally creative people in thearts, sciences, business, and govern-ment, many of his subjects were on thesocial margins during adolescence,partly because “intense curiosity or fo-cused interest seems odd to theirpeers.” Teens who are too gregarious tospend time alone often fail to cultivatetheir talents “because practicing musicor studying math requires a solitudethey dread.” Madeleine L’Engle, the au-thor of the classic young adult novel AWrinkle in Time and more than sixty

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other books, says that she would neverhave developed into such a boldthinker had she not spent so much ofher childhood alone with books andideas. As a young boy, Charles Darwinmade friends easily but preferred tospend his time taking long, solitarynature walks. (As an adult he was nodifferent. “My dear Mr. Babbage,” hewrote to the famous mathematicianwho had invited him to a dinner party,“I am very much obliged to you forsending me cards for your parties, but Iam afraid of accepting them, for Ishould meet some people there, towhom I have sworn by all the saints inHeaven, I never go out.”)

But exceptional performance dependsnot only on the groundwork we laythrough Deliberate Practice; it also re-quires the right working conditions.

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And in contemporary workplaces, theseare surprisingly hard to come by.

One of the side benefits of being a con-sultant is getting intimate access tomany different work environments.Tom DeMarco, a principal of the At-lantic Systems Guild team of consult-ants, had walked around a good num-ber of offices in his time, and he no-ticed that some workspaces were a lotmore densely packed than others. Hewondered what effect all that social in-teraction had on performance.

To find out, DeMarco and his col-league Timothy Lister devised a studycalled the Coding War Games. The pur-pose of the games was to identify thecharacteristics of the best and worst

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computer programmers; more than sixhundred developers from ninety-twodifferent companies participated. Eachdesigned, coded, and tested a program,working in his normal office space dur-ing business hours. Each participantwas also assigned a partner from thesame company. The partners workedseparately, however, without any com-munication, a feature of the games thatturned out to be critical.

When the results came in, they re-vealed an enormous performance gap.The best outperformed the worst by a10:1 ratio. The top programmers werealso about 2.5 times better than the me-dian. When DeMarco and Lister tried tofigure out what accounted for this as-tonishing range, the factors that you’dthink would matter—such as years ofexperience, salary, even the time spentcompleting the work—had little

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correlation to outcome. Programmerswith ten years’ experience did no betterthan those with two years. The halfwho performed above the medianearned less than 10 percent more thanthe half below—even though they werealmost twice as good. The programmerswho turned in “zero-defect” work tookslightly less, not more, time to com-plete the exercise than those who mademistakes.

It was a mystery with one intriguingclue: programmers from the same com-panies performed at more or less thesame level, even though they hadn’tworked together. That’s because top per-formers overwhelmingly worked forcompanies that gave their workers themost privacy, personal space, controlover their physical environments, andfreedom from interruption. Sixty-twopercent of the best performers said that

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their workspace was acceptably private,compared to only 19 percent of theworst performers; 76 percent of theworst performers but only 38 percent ofthe top performers said that people of-ten interrupted them needlessly.

The Coding War Games are wellknown in tech circles, but DeMarco andLister’s findings reach beyond the worldof computer programmers. A mountainof recent data on open-plan offices frommany different industries corroboratesthe results of the games. Open-plan of-fices have been found to reduce pro-ductivity and impair memory. They’reassociated with high staff turnover.They make people sick, hostile, unmo-tivated, and insecure. Open-plan work-ers are more likely to suffer from highblood pressure and elevated stresslevels and to get the flu; they arguemore with their colleagues; they worry

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about coworkers eavesdropping ontheir phone calls and spying on theircomputer screens. They have fewer per-sonal and confidential conversationswith colleagues. They’re often subjectto loud and uncontrollable noise, whichraises heart rates; releases cortisol, thebody’s fight-or-flight “stress” hormone;and makes people socially distant,quick to anger, aggressive, and slow tohelp others.

Indeed, excessive stimulation seemsto impede learning: a recent studyfound that people learn better after aquiet stroll through the woods thanafter a noisy walk down a city street.Another study, of 38,000 knowledgeworkers across different sectors, foundthat the simple act of being interruptedis one of the biggest barriers to pro-ductivity. Even multitasking, thatprized feat of modern-day office

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warriors, turns out to be a myth. Scient-ists now know that the brain is incap-able of paying attention to two thingsat the same time. What looks like mul-titasking is really switching back andforth between multiple tasks, which re-duces productivity and increases mis-takes by up to 50 percent.

Many introverts seem to know thesethings instinctively, and resist beingherded together. Backbone Entertain-ment, a video game design company inOakland, California, initially used anopen office plan but found that theirgame developers, many of whom wereintroverts, were unhappy. “It was onebig warehouse space, with just tables,no walls, and everyone could see eachother,” recalls Mike Mika, the formercreative director. “We switched over tocubicles and were worried aboutit—you’d think in a creative

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environment that people would hatethat. But it turns out they prefer havingnooks and crannies they can hide awayin and just be away from everybody.”

Something similar happened at Ree-bok International when, in 2000, thecompany consolidated 1,250 employeesin their new headquarters in Canton,Massachusetts. The managers assumedthat their shoe designers would wantoffice space with plenty of access toeach other so they could brainstorm (anidea they probably picked up whenthey were getting their MBAs). Luckily,they consulted first with the shoe de-signers themselves, who told them thatactually what they needed was peaceand quiet so they could concentrate.

This would not have come as news toJason Fried, cofounder of the web ap-plication company 37signals. For tenyears, beginning in 2000, Fried asked

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hundreds of people (mostly designers,programmers, and writers) where theyliked to work when they needed to getsomething done. He found that theywent anywhere but their offices, whichwere too noisy and full of interruptions.That’s why, of Fried’s sixteen employ-ees, only eight live in Chicago, where37signals is based, and even they arenot required to show up for work, evenfor meetings. Especially not for meet-ings, which Fried views as “toxic.”Fried is not anti-collaboration—37sig-nals’ home page touts its products’ abil-ity to make collaboration productiveand pleasant. But he prefers passiveforms of collaboration like e-mail, in-stant messaging, and online chat tools.His advice for other employers?“Cancel your next meeting,” he advises.“Don’t reschedule it. Erase it frommemory.” He also suggests “No-Talk

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Thursdays,” one day a week in whichemployees aren’t allowed to speak toeach other.

The people Fried interviewed weresaying out loud what creative peoplehave always known. Kafka, for ex-ample, couldn’t bear to be near evenhis adoring fiancée while he worked:

You once said that you would like tosit beside me while I write. Listen,in that case I could not write at all.For writing means revealing oneselfto excess; that utmost of self-revela-tion and surrender, in which a hu-man being, when involved with oth-ers, would feel he was losing him-self, and from which, therefore, hewill always shrink as long as he is inhis right mind.… That is why onecan never be alone enough whenone writes, why there can never be

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enough silence around one whenone writes, why even night is notnight enough.

Even the considerably more cheerfulTheodor Geisel (otherwise known asDr. Seuss) spent his workdays en-sconced in his private studio, the wallslined with sketches and drawings, in abell-tower outside his La Jolla, Califor-nia, house. Geisel was a much morequiet man than his jocular rhymes sug-gest. He rarely ventured out in publicto meet his young readership, frettingthat kids would expect a merry, out-spoken, Cat in the Hat–like figure, andwould be disappointed with his re-served personality. “In mass, [children]terrify me,” he admitted.

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If personal space is vital to creativity,so is freedom from “peer pressure.”Consider the story of the legendary ad-vertising man Alex Osborn. Today Os-born’s name rings few bells, but duringthe first half of the twentieth centuryhe was the kind of larger-than-liferenaissance man who mesmerized hiscontemporaries. Osborn was a foundingpartner of the advertising agency Bat-ten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn(BBDO), but it was as an author that hereally made his mark, beginning withthe day in 1938 that a magazine editorinvited him to lunch and asked whathis hobby was.

“Imagination,” replied Osborn.“Mr. Osborn,” said the editor, “you

must do a book on that. It’s a job thathas been waiting to be done all theseyears. There is no subject of greater

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importance. You must give it the timeand energy and thoroughness itdeserves.”

And so Mr. Osborn did. He wrote sev-eral books during the 1940s and 1950s,in fact, each tackling a problem thathad vexed him in his capacity as headof BBDO: his employees were not creat-ive enough. They had good ideas, Os-born believed, but were loath to sharethem for fear of their colleagues’judgment.

For Osborn, the solution was not tohave his employees work alone, butrather to remove the threat of criticismfrom group work. He invented theconcept of brainstorming, a process inwhich group members generate ideas ina nonjudgmental atmosphere. Brain-storming had four rules:

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1. Don’t judge or criticize ideas.2. Be freewheeling. The wilder theidea, the better.3. Go for quantity. The more ideasyou have, the better.4. Build on the ideas of fellow groupmembers.

Osborn believed passionately thatgroups—once freed from the shacklesof social judgment—produced moreand better ideas than did individualsworking in solitude, and he made grandclaims for his favored method. “Thequantitative results of group brain-storming are beyond question,” hewrote. “One group produced 45 sugges-tions for a home-appliance promotion,56 ideas for a money-raising campaign,124 ideas on how to sell more blankets.In another case, 15 groups

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brainstormed one and the same prob-lem and produced over 800 ideas.”

Osborn’s theory had great impact,and company leaders took up brain-storming with enthusiasm. To this day,it’s common for anyone who spendstime in corporate America to find him-self occasionally cooped up with col-leagues in a room full of whiteboards,markers, and a preternaturally peppyfacilitator encouraging everyone tofree-associate.

There’s only one problem with Os-born’s breakthrough idea: group brain-storming doesn’t actually work. One ofthe first studies to demonstrate this wasconducted in 1963. Marvin Dunnette, apsychology professor at the Universityof Minnesota, gathered forty-eight re-search scientists and forty-eight advert-ising executives, all of them male em-ployees of Minnesota Mining and

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Manufacturing (otherwise known as3M, inventors of the Post-it), and askedthem to participate in both solitary andgroup brainstorming sessions. Dunnettewas confident that the executiveswould benefit from the group process.He was less sure that the research sci-entists, whom he considered more in-troverted, would profit from groupwork.

Dunnette divided each set of forty-eight men into twelve groups of four.Each foursome was given a problem tobrainstorm, such as the benefits or diffi-culties that would arise from beingborn with an extra thumb. Each manwas also given a similar problem tobrainstorm on his own. Then Dunnetteand his team counted all the ideas,comparing those produced by thegroups with those generated by peopleworking individually. In order to

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compare apples with apples, Dunnettepooled the ideas of each individual to-gether with those of three other indi-viduals, as if they had been working in“nominal” groups of four. The research-ers also measured the quality of theideas, rating them on a “ProbabilityScale” of 0 through 4.

The results were unambiguous. Themen in twenty-three of the twenty-fourgroups produced more ideas when theyworked on their own than when theyworked as a group. They also producedideas of equal or higher quality whenworking individually. And the advert-ising executives were no better at groupwork than the presumably introvertedresearch scientists.

Since then, some forty years of re-search has reached the same startlingconclusion. Studies have shown thatperformance gets worse as group size

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increases: groups of nine generate few-er and poorer ideas compared to groupsof six, which do worse than groups offour. The “evidence from science sug-gests that business people must be in-sane to use brainstorming groups,”writes the organizational psychologistAdrian Furnham. “If you have talentedand motivated people, they should beencouraged to work alone when cre-ativity or efficiency is the highestpriority.”

The one exception to this is onlinebrainstorming. Groups brainstormingelectronically, when properly managed,not only do better than individuals, re-search shows; the larger the group, thebetter it performs. The same is true ofacademic research—professors whowork together electronically, from dif-ferent physical locations, tend to pro-duce research that is more influential

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than those either working alone orcollaborating face-to-face.

This shouldn’t surprise us; as we’vesaid, it was the curious power of elec-tronic collaboration that contributed tothe New Groupthink in the first place.What created Linux, or Wikipedia, ifnot a gigantic electronic brainstormingsession? But we’re so impressed by thepower of online collaboration thatwe’ve come to overvalue all group workat the expense of solo thought. We failto realize that participating in an onlineworking group is a form of solitude allits own. Instead we assume that thesuccess of online collaborations will bereplicated in the face-to-face world.

Indeed, after all these years of evid-ence that conventional brainstorminggroups don’t work, they remain as pop-ular as ever. Participants in brainstorm-ing sessions usually believe that their

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group performed much better than itactually did, which points to a valuablereason for their continued popular-ity—group brainstorming makes peoplefeel attached. A worthy goal, so long aswe understand that social glue, as op-posed to creativity, is the principalbenefit.

Psychologists usually offer three ex-planations for the failure of groupbrainstorming. The first is social loafing:in a group, some individuals tend to sitback and let others do the work. Thesecond is production blocking: only oneperson can talk or produce an idea atonce, while the other group membersare forced to sit passively. And thethird is evaluation apprehension,

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meaning the fear of looking stupid infront of one’s peers.

Osborn’s “rules” of brainstormingwere meant to neutralize this anxiety,but studies show that the fear of publichumiliation is a potent force. Duringthe 1988–89 basketball season, for ex-ample, two NCAA basketball teamsplayed eleven games without any spec-tators, owing to a measles outbreakthat led their schools to quarantine allstudents. Both teams played much bet-ter (higher free-throw percentages, forexample) without any fans, evenadoring home-team fans, to unnervethem.

The behavioral economist Dan Arielynoticed a similar phenomenon when heconducted a study asking thirty-nineparticipants to solve anagram puzzles,either alone at their desks or with oth-ers watching. Ariely predicted that the

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participants would do better in publicbecause they’d be more motivated. Butthey performed worse. An audiencemay be rousing, but it’s also stressful.

The problem with evaluation appre-hension is that there’s not much we cando about it. You’d think you couldovercome it with will or training or aset of group process rules like Alex Os-born’s. But recent research in neuros-cience suggests that the fear of judg-ment runs much deeper and has morefar-reaching implications than we everimagined.

Between 1951 and 1956, just as Os-born was promoting the power of groupbrainstorming, a psychologist namedSolomon Asch conducted a series ofnow-famous experiments on thedangers of group influence. Aschgathered student volunteers into groupsand had them take a vision test. He

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showed them a picture of three lines ofvarying lengths and asked questionsabout how the lines compared with oneanother: which was longer, which onematched the length of a fourth line, andso on. His questions were so simple that95 percent of students answered everyquestion correctly.

But when Asch planted actors in thegroups, and the actors confidently vo-lunteered the same incorrect answer,the number of students who gave allcorrect answers plunged to 25 percent.That is, a staggering 75 percent of theparticipants went along with thegroup’s wrong answer to at least onequestion.

The Asch experiments demonstratedthe power of conformity at exactly thetime that Osborn was trying to releaseus from its chains. What they didn’t tellus was why we were so prone to

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conform. What was going on in theminds of the kowtowers? Had their per-ception of the lines’ lengths been alteredby peer pressure, or did they knowinglygive wrong answers for fear of beingthe odd one out? For decades, psycho-logists puzzled over this question.

Today, with the help of brain-scan-ning technology, we may be gettingcloser to the answer. In 2005 an EmoryUniversity neuroscientist namedGregory Berns decided to conduct anupdated version of Asch’s experiments.Berns and his team recruited thirty-twovolunteers, men and women betweenthe ages of nineteen and forty-one. Thevolunteers played a game in whicheach group member was shown twodifferent three-dimensional objects on acomputer screen and asked to decidewhether the first object could be ro-tated to match the second. The

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experimenters used an fMRI scanner totake snapshots of the volunteers’ brainsas they conformed to or broke withgroup opinion.

The results were both disturbing andilluminating. First, they corroboratedAsch’s findings. When the volunteersplayed the game on their own, theygave the wrong answer only 13.8 per-cent of the time. But when they playedwith a group whose members gave un-animously wrong answers, they agreedwith the group 41 percent of the time.

But Berns’s study also shed light onexactly why we’re such conformists.When the volunteers played alone, thebrain scans showed activity in a net-work of brain regions including the oc-cipital cortex and parietal cortex, whichare associated with visual and spatialperception, and in the frontal cortex,which is associated with conscious

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decision-making. But when they wentalong with their group’s wrong answer,their brain activity revealed somethingvery different.

Remember, what Asch wanted toknow was whether people conformeddespite knowing that the group waswrong, or whether their perceptionshad been altered by the group. If theformer was true, Berns and his teamreasoned, then they should see morebrain activity in the decision-makingprefrontal cortex. That is, the brainscans would pick up the volunteers de-ciding consciously to abandon theirown beliefs to fit in with the group. Butif the brain scans showed heightenedactivity in regions associated with visu-al and spatial perception, this wouldsuggest that the group had somehowmanaged to change the individual’sperceptions.

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That was exactly whathappened—the conformists showed lessbrain activity in the frontal, decision-making regions and more in the areasof the brain associated with perception.Peer pressure, in other words, is notonly unpleasant, but can actuallychange your view of a problem.

These early findings suggest thatgroups are like mind-altering sub-stances. If the group thinks the answeris A, you’re much more likely to believethat A is correct, too. It’s not thatyou’re saying consciously, “Hmm, I’mnot sure, but they all think the answer’sA, so I’ll go with that.” Nor are you say-ing, “I want them to like me, so I’ll justpretend that the answer’s A.” No, youare doing something much more unex-pected—and dangerous. Most of Berns’svolunteers reported having gone alongwith the group because “they thought

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that they had arrived serendipitously atthe same correct answer.” They wereutterly blind, in other words, to howmuch their peers had influenced them.

What does this have to do with socialfear? Well, remember that the volun-teers in the Asch and Berns studiesdidn’t always conform. Sometimes theypicked the right answer despite theirpeers’ influence. And Berns and histeam found something very interestingabout these moments. They were linkedto heightened activation in the amyg-dala, a small organ in the brain associ-ated with upsetting emotions such asthe fear of rejection.

Berns refers to this as “the pain of in-dependence,” and it has serious implic-ations. Many of our most importantcivic institutions, from elections to jurytrials to the very idea of majority rule,depend on dissenting voices. But when

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the group is literally capable of chan-ging our perceptions, and when tostand alone is to activate primitive,powerful, and unconscious feelings ofrejection, then the health of these insti-tutions seems far more vulnerable thanwe think.

But of course I’ve been simplifying thecase against face-to-face collaboration.Steve Wozniak collaborated with SteveJobs, after all; without their pairing,there would be no Apple today. Everypair bond between mother and father,between parent and child, is an act ofcreative collaboration. Indeed, studiesshow that face-to-face interactions cre-ate trust in a way that online interac-tions can’t. Research also suggests that

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population density is correlated withinnovation; despite the advantages ofquiet walks in the woods, people incrowded cities benefit from the web ofinteractions that urban life offers.

I have experienced this phenomenonpersonally. When I was getting ready towrite this book, I carefully set up myhome office, complete with uncluttereddesk, file cabinets, free counter space,and plenty of natural light—and thenfelt too cut off from the world to type asingle keystroke there. Instead, I wrotemost of this book on a laptop at my fa-vorite densely packed neighborhoodcafé. I did this for exactly the reasonsthat champions of the New Groupthinkmight suggest: the mere presence ofother people helped my mind to makeassociative leaps. The coffee shop wasfull of people bent over their own com-puters, and if the expressions of rapt

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concentration on their faces were anyindication, I wasn’t the only one gettinga lot of work done.

But the café worked as my office be-cause it had specific attributes that areabsent from many modern schools andworkplaces. It was social, yet its casual,come-and-go-as-you-please nature leftme free from unwelcome entangle-ments and able to “deliberately prac-tice” my writing. I could toggle backand forth between observer and socialactor as much as I wanted. I could alsocontrol my environment. Each day Ichose the location of my table—in thecenter of the room or along the peri-meter—depending on whether I wantedto be seen as well as to see. And I hadthe option to leave whenever I wantedpeace and quiet to edit what I’d writtenthat day. Usually I was ready to exer-cise this right after only a few

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hours—not the eight, ten, or fourteenhours that many office dwellers put in.

The way forward, I’m suggesting, isnot to stop collaborating face-to-face,but to refine the way we do it. For onething, we should actively seek outsymbiotic introvert-extrovert relation-ships, in which leadership and othertasks are divided according to people’snatural strengths and temperaments.The most effective teams are composedof a healthy mix of introverts and ex-troverts, studies show, and so are manyleadership structures.

We also need to create settings inwhich people are free to circulate in ashifting kaleidoscope of interactions,and to disappear into their privateworkspaces when they want to focus orsimply be alone. Our schools shouldteach children the skills to work withothers—cooperative learning can be

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effective when practiced well and inmoderation—but also the time andtraining they need to deliberately prac-tice on their own. It’s also vital to re-cognize that many people—especiallyintroverts like Steve Wozniak—need ex-tra quiet and privacy in order to dotheir best work.

Some companies are starting to un-derstand the value of silence andsolitude, and are creating “flexible”open plans that offer a mix of soloworkspaces, quiet zones, casual meet-ing areas, cafés, reading rooms, com-puter hubs, and even “streets” wherepeople can chat casually with each oth-er without interrupting others’ work-flow. At Pixar Animation Studios, thesixteen-acre campus is built around afootball-field-sized atrium housingmailboxes, a cafeteria, and even bath-rooms. The idea is to encourage as

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many casual, chance encounters as pos-sible. At the same time, employees areencouraged to make their individual of-fices, cubicles, desks, and work areastheir own and to decorate them as theywish. Similarly, at Microsoft, many em-ployees enjoy their own private offices,yet they come with sliding doors, mov-able walls, and other features that al-low occupants to decide when theywant to collaborate and when theyneed private time to think. These kindsof diverse workspaces benefit introvertsas well as extroverts, the systemsdesign researcher Matt Davis told me,because they offer more spaces to re-treat to than traditional open-planoffices.

I suspect that Wozniak himself wouldapprove of these developments. Beforehe created the Apple PC, Woz designedcalculators at Hewlett-Packard, a job he

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loved in part because HP made it soeasy to chat with others. Every day at10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. managementwheeled in donuts and coffee, andpeople would socialize and swap ideas.What set these interactions apart washow low-key and relaxed they were. IniWoz, he recalls HP as a meritocracywhere it didn’t matter what you lookedlike, where there was no premium onplaying social games, and where no onepushed him from his beloved engineer-ing work into management. That waswhat collaboration meant for Woz: theability to share a donut and a brain-wave with his laid-back, nonjudgment-al, poorly dressed colleagues—whominded not a whit when he disap-peared into his cubicle to get the realwork done.

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PartTWOYOUR BIOLOGY, YOUR SELF?

4IS TEMPERAMENT DESTINY?

Nature, Nurture, and the OrchidHypothesis

Some people are more certain ofeverything than I am of anything.

—ROBERT RUBIN, In an UncertainWorld

ALMOST TEN YEARS AGO

It’s 2:00 a.m., I can’t sleep, and I wantto die.

I’m not normally the suicidal type,but this is the night before a big speech,and my mind races with horrifyingwhat-if propositions. What if my mouth

dries up and I can’t get any words out?What if I bore the audience? What if Ithrow up onstage?

My boyfriend (now my husband),Ken, watches me toss and turn. He’s be-wildered by my distress. A former UNpeacekeeper, he once was ambushed inSomalia, yet I don’t think he felt asscared then as I do now.

“Try to think of happy things,” hesays, caressing my forehead.

I stare at the ceiling, tears welling.What happy things? Who could behappy in a world of podiums andmicrophones?

“There are a billion people in Chinawho don’t give a rat’s ass about yourspeech,” Ken offers sympathetically.

This helps, for approximately fiveseconds. I turn over and watch thealarm clock. Finally it’s six thirty. Atleast the worst part, the night-before

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part, is over; this time tomorrow, I’ll befree. But first I have to get throughtoday. I dress grimly and put on a coat.Ken hands me a sports water bottlefilled with Baileys Irish Cream. I’m nota big drinker, but I like Baileys becauseit tastes like a chocolate milkshake.“Drink this fifteen minutes before yougo on,” he says, kissing me good-bye.

I take the elevator downstairs andsettle into the car that waits to ferry meto my destination, a big corporateheadquarters in suburban New Jersey.The drive gives me plenty of time towonder how I allowed myself to get in-to this situation. I recently left my jobas a Wall Street lawyer to start my ownconsulting firm. Mostly I’ve workedone-on-one or in small groups, whichfeels comfortable. But when an ac-quaintance who is general counsel at abig media company asked me to run a

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seminar for his entire executive team, Iagreed—enthusiastically, even!—forreasons I can’t fathom now. I find my-self praying for calamity—a flood or asmall earthquake, maybe—anything soI don’t have to go through with this.Then I feel guilty for involving the restof the city in my drama.

The car pulls up at the client’s officeand I step out, trying to project thepeppy self-assurance of a successfulconsultant. The event organizer escortsme to the auditorium. I ask for direc-tions to the bathroom, and, in the pri-vacy of the stall, gulp from the waterbottle. For a few moments I stand still,waiting for the alcohol to work its ma-gic. But nothing happens—I’m still ter-rified. Maybe I should take anotherswig. No, it’s only nine in the morn-ing—what if they smell the liquor onmy breath? I reapply my lipstick and

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make my way back to the event room,where I arrange my notecards at thepodium as the room fills withimportant-looking businesspeople.Whatever you do, try not to vomit, I tellmyself.

Some of the executives glance up atme, but most of them stare fixedly attheir BlackBerrys. Clearly, I’m takingthem away from very pressing work.How am I going to hold their attentionlong enough for them to stop poundingout urgent communiqués into their tinytypewriters? I vow, right then andthere, that I will never make anotherspeech.

Well, since then I’ve given plenty ofthem. I haven’t completely overcome

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my anxiety, but over the years I’ve dis-covered strategies that can help anyonewith stage fright who needs to speak inpublic. More about that in chapter 5.

In the meantime, I’ve told you mytale of abject terror because it lies atthe heart of some of my most urgentquestions about introversion. On somedeep level, my fear of public speakingseems connected to other aspects of mypersonality that I appreciate, especiallymy love of all things gentle and cereb-ral. This strikes me as a not-uncommonconstellation of traits. But are theytruly connected, and if so, how? Arethey the result of “nurture”—the way Iwas raised? Both of my parents are soft-spoken, reflective types; my motherhates public speaking too. Or are theymy “nature”—something deep in mygenetic makeup?

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I’ve been puzzling over these ques-tions for my entire adult life. For-tunately, so have researchers at Har-vard, where scientists are probing thehuman brain in an attempt to discoverthe biological origins of humantemperament.

One such scientist is an eighty-two-year-old man named Jerome Kagan,one of the great developmental psycho-logists of the twentieth century. Kagandevoted his career to studying the emo-tional and cognitive development ofchildren. In a series of groundbreakinglongitudinal studies, he followed chil-dren from infancy through adolescence,documenting their physiologies andpersonalities along the way. Longitud-inal studies like these are time-consum-ing, expensive, and therefore rare—butwhen they pay off, as Kagan’s did, theypay off big.

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For one of those studies, launched in1989 and still ongoing, Professor Kaganand his team gathered five hundredfour-month-old infants in his Laborat-ory for Child Development at Harvard,predicting they’d be able to tell, on thestrength of a forty-five-minute evalu-ation, which babies were more likely toturn into introverts or extroverts. Ifyou’ve seen a four-month-old babylately, this may seem an audaciousclaim. But Kagan had been studyingtemperament for a long time, and hehad a theory.

Kagan and his team exposed the four-month-olds to a carefully chosen set ofnew experiences. The infants heardtape-recorded voices and balloons pop-ping, saw colorful mobiles dance beforetheir eyes, and inhaled the scent of al-cohol on cotton swabs. They had wildlyvarying reactions to the new stimuli.

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About 20 percent cried lustily andpumped their arms and legs. Kagancalled this group “high-reactive.” About40 percent stayed quiet and placid,moving their arms or legs occasionally,but without all the dramatic limb-pumping. This group Kagan called“low-reactive.” The remaining 40 per-cent fell between these two extremes.In a startlingly counterintuitive hypo-thesis, Kagan predicted that it was theinfants in the high-reactive group—thelusty arm-pumpers—who were mostlikely to grow into quiet teenagers.

When they were two, four, seven,and eleven years old, many of the chil-dren returned to Kagan’s lab for follow-up testing of their reactions to newpeople and events. At the age of two,the children met a lady wearing a gasmask and a lab coat, a man dressed in aclown costume, and a radio-controlled

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robot. At seven, they were asked toplay with kids they’d never met before.At eleven, an unfamiliar adult inter-viewed them about their personal lives.Kagan’s team observed how the chil-dren reacted to these strange situations,noting their body language and record-ing how often and spontaneously theylaughed, talked, and smiled. They alsointerviewed the kids and their parentsabout what the children were like out-side the laboratory. Did they prefer oneor two close friends to a merry band?Did they like visiting new places? Werethey risk-takers or were they more cau-tious? Did they consider themselves shyor bold?

Many of the children turned out ex-actly as Kagan had expected. The high-reactive infants, the 20 percent who’dhollered at the mobiles bobbing abovetheir heads, were more likely to have

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developed serious, careful personalities.The low-reactive infants—the quietones—were more likely to have becomerelaxed and confident types. High andlow reactivity tended to correspond, inother words, to introversion and extro-version. As Kagan mused in his 1998book, Galen’s Prophecy, “Carl Jung’s de-scriptions of the introvert and extro-vert, written over seventy-five yearsago, apply with uncanny accuracy to aproportion of our high- and low-react-ive adolescents.”

Kagan describes two of those adoles-cents—reserved Tom and extrovertedRalph—and the differences between thetwo are striking. Tom, who was unusu-ally shy as a child, is good at school,watchful and quiet, devoted to his girl-friend and parents, prone to worry, andloves learning on his own and thinkingabout intellectual problems. He plans to

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be a scientist. “Like … other famous in-troverts who were shy children,” writesKagan, comparing Tom to T. S. Eliotand the mathematician-philosopher Al-fred North Whitehead, Tom “haschosen a life of the mind.”

Ralph, in contrast, is relaxed and self-assured. He engages the interviewerfrom Kagan’s team as a peer, not as anauthority figure twenty-five years hissenior. Though Ralph is very bright, herecently failed his English and scienceclasses because he’d been goofingaround. But nothing much bothers Ral-ph. He admits his flaws cheerfully.

Psychologists often discuss the differ-ence between “temperament” and “per-sonality.” Temperament refers to in-born, biologically based behavioral andemotional patterns that are observablein infancy and early childhood; person-ality is the complex brew that emerges

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after cultural influence and personal ex-perience are thrown into the mix. Somesay that temperament is the foundation,and personality is the building. Kagan’swork helped link certain infant tem-peraments with adolescent personalitystyles like those of Tom and Ralph.

But how did Kagan know that the arm-thrashing infants would likely turn intocautious, reflective teens like Tom, orthat the quiet babies were more likelyto become forthright, too-cool-for-school Ralphs? The answer lies in theirphysiologies.

In addition to observing the chil-dren’s behaviors in strange situations,Kagan’s team measured their heartrates, blood pressure, finger

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temperature, and other properties ofthe nervous system. Kagan chose thesemeasures because they’re believed to becontrolled by a potent organ inside thebrain called the amygdala. The amyg-dala is located deep in the limbic sys-tem, an ancient brain network foundeven in primitive animals like mice andrats. This network—sometimes calledthe “emotional brain”—underlies manyof the basic instincts we share withthese animals, such as appetite, sexdrive, and fear.

The amygdala serves as the brain’semotional switchboard, receiving in-formation from the senses and then sig-naling the rest of the brain and nervoussystem how to respond. One of its func-tions is to instantly detect new orthreatening things in the environ-ment—from an airborne Frisbee to ahissing serpent—and send rapid-fire

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signals through the body that triggerthe fight-or-flight response. When theFrisbee looks like it’s headed straightfor your nose, it’s your amygdala thattells you to duck. When the rattlesnakeprepares to bite, it’s the amygdala thatmakes sure you run.

Kagan hypothesized that infants bornwith an especially excitable amygdalawould wiggle and howl when shownunfamiliar objects—and grow up to bechildren who were more likely to feelvigilant when meeting new people. Andthis is just what he found. In otherwords, the four-month-olds whothrashed their arms like punk rockersdid so not because they were extrovertsin the making, but because their littlebodies reacted strongly—they were“high-reactive”—to new sights, sounds,and smells. The quiet infants were si-lent not because they were future

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introverts—just the opposite—but be-cause they had nervous systems thatwere unmoved by novelty.

The more reactive a child’s amyg-dala, the higher his heart rate is likelyto be, the more widely dilated his eyes,the tighter his vocal cords, the morecortisol (a stress hormone) in hissaliva—the more jangled he’s likely tofeel when he confronts something newand stimulating. As high-reactive in-fants grow up, they continue to con-front the unknown in many differentcontexts, from visiting an amusementpark for the first time to meeting newclassmates on the first day of kinder-garten. We tend to notice most a child’sreaction to unfamiliar people—howdoes he behave on the first day ofschool? Does she seem uncertain atbirthday parties full of kids she doesn’tknow? But what we’re really observing

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is a child’s sensitivity to novelty in gen-eral, not just to people.

High- and low-reactivity are probablynot the only biological routes to intro-version and extroversion. There areplenty of introverts who do not havethe sensitivity of a classic high-reactive,and a small percentage of high-react-ives grow up to be extroverts. Still,Kagan’s decades-long series of discover-ies mark a dramatic breakthrough inour understanding of these personalitystyles—including the value judgmentswe make. Extroverts are sometimescredited with being “pro-so-cial”—meaning caring about oth-ers—and introverts disparaged aspeople who don’t like people. But thereactions of the infants in Kagan’s testshad nothing to do with people. Thesebabies were shouting (or not shouting)over Q-tips. They were pumping their

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limbs (or staying calm) in response topopping balloons. The high-reactive ba-bies were not misanthropes in the mak-ing; they were simply sensitive to theirenvironments.

Indeed, the sensitivity of these chil-dren’s nervous systems seems to belinked not only to noticing scary things,but to noticing in general. High-react-ive children pay what one psychologistcalls “alert attention” to people andthings. They literally use more eyemovements than others to comparechoices before making a decision. It’s asif they process more deeply—some-times consciously, sometimes not—theinformation they take in about theworld. In one early series of studies,Kagan asked a group of first-graders toplay a visual matching game. Eachchild was shown a picture of a teddybear sitting on a chair, alongside six

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other similar pictures, only one ofwhich was an exact match. The high-re-active children spent more time thanothers considering all the alternatives,and were more likely to make the rightchoice. When Kagan asked these samekids to play word games, he found thatthey also read more accurately than im-pulsive children did.

High-reactive kids also tend to thinkand feel deeply about what they’ve no-ticed, and to bring an extra degree ofnuance to everyday experiences. Thiscan be expressed in many differentways. If the child is socially oriented,she may spend a lot of time ponderingher observations of others—why Jasondidn’t want to share his toys today,why Mary got so mad at Nicholas whenhe bumped into her accidentally. If hehas a particular interest—in solvingpuzzles, making art, building sand

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castles—he’ll often concentrate withunusual intensity. If a high-reactivetoddler breaks another child’s toy bymistake, studies show, she often experi-ences a more intense mix of guilt andsorrow than a lower-reactive childwould. All kids notice their environ-ments and feel emotions, of course, buthigh-reactive kids seem to see and feelthings more. If you ask a high-reactiveseven-year-old how a group of kidsshould share a coveted toy, writes thescience journalist Winifred Gallagher,he’ll tend to come up with sophisticatedstrategies like “Alphabetize their lastnames, and let the person closest to Ago first.”

“Putting theory into practice is hardfor them,” writes Gallagher, “becausetheir sensitive natures and elaborateschemes are unsuited to the heterogen-eous rigors of the schoolyard.” Yet as

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we’ll see in the chapters to come, thesetraits—alertness, sensitivity to nuance,complex emotionality—turn out to behighly underrated powers.

Kagan has given us painstakingly docu-mented evidence that high reactivity isone biological basis of introversion(we’ll explore another likely route inchapter 7), but his findings are power-ful in part because they confirm whatwe’ve sensed all along. Some of Kagan’sstudies even venture into the realm ofcultural myth. For example, he be-lieves, based on his data, that high re-activity is associated with physicaltraits such as blue eyes, allergies, andhay fever, and that high-reactive menare more likely than others to have a

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thin body and narrow face. Such con-clusions are speculative and call tomind the nineteenth-century practice ofdivining a man’s soul from the shape ofhis skull. But whether or not they turnout to be accurate, it’s interesting thatthese are just the physical characterist-ics we give fictional characters whenwe want to suggest that they’re quiet,introverted, cerebral. It’s as if thesephysiological tendencies are burieddeep in our cultural unconscious.

Take Disney movies, for example:Kagan and his colleagues speculate thatDisney animators unconsciously under-stood high reactivity when they drewsensitive figures like Cinderella, Pinoc-chio, and Dopey with blue eyes, andbrasher characters like Cinderella’sstepsisters, Grumpy, and Peter Pan withdarker eyes. In many books, Hollywoodfilms, and TV shows, too, the stock

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character of a reedy, nose-blowingyoung man is shorthand for the haplessbut thoughtful kid who gets goodgrades, is a bit overwhelmed by the so-cial whirl, and is talented at introspect-ive activities like poetry or astrophys-ics. (Think Ethan Hawke in Dead PoetsSociety.) Kagan even speculates thatsome men prefer women with fair skinand blue eyes because they uncon-sciously code them as sensitive.

Other studies of personality also sup-port the premise that extroversion andintroversion are physiologically, evengenetically, based. One of the mostcommon ways of untangling naturefrom nurture is to compare the person-ality traits of identical and fraternaltwins. Identical twins develop from asingle fertilized egg and therefore haveexactly the same genes, while fraternaltwins come from separate eggs and

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share only 50 percent of their genes onaverage. So if you measure introversionor extroversion levels in pairs of twinsand find more correlation in identicaltwins than in fraternal pairs—whichscientists do, in study after study, evenof twins raised in separate house-holds—you can reasonably concludethat the trait has some genetic basis.

None of these studies is perfect, butthe results have consistently suggestedthat introversion and extroversion, likeother major personality traits such asagreeableness and conscientiousness,are about 40 to 50 percent heritable.

But are biological explanations for in-troversion wholly satisfying? When Ifirst read Kagan’s book Galen’sProphecy, I was so excited that Icouldn’t sleep. Here, inside these pages,were my friends, my family, myself—allof humanity, in fact!—neatly sorted

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through the prism of a quiescentnervous system versus a reactive one. Itwas as if centuries of philosophical in-quiry into the mystery of human per-sonality had led to this shining momentof scientific clarity. There was an easyanswer to the nature-nurture questionafter all—we are born with prepack-aged temperaments that powerfullyshape our adult personalities.

But it couldn’t be that simple—couldit? Can we really reduce an introvertedor extroverted personality to thenervous system its owner was bornwith? I would guess that I inherited ahigh-reactive nervous system, but mymother insists I was an easy baby, notthe kind to kick and wail over a poppedballoon. I’m prone to wild flights ofself-doubt, but I also have a deep wellof courage in my own convictions. Ifeel horribly uncomfortable on my first

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day in a foreign city, but I love totravel. I was shy as a child, but haveoutgrown the worst of it. Furthermore,I don’t think these contradictions are sounusual; many people have dissonantaspects to their personalities. Andpeople change profoundly over time,don’t they? What about free will—dowe have no control over who we are,and whom we become?

I decided to track down ProfessorKagan to ask him these questions inperson. I felt drawn to him not only be-cause his research findings were socompelling, but also because of what herepresents in the great nature-nurturedebate. He’d launched his career in1954 staunchly on the side of nurture,a view in step with the scientific estab-lishment of the day. Back then, the ideaof inborn temperament was politicaldynamite, evoking the specter of Nazi

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eugenics and white supremacism. Bycontrast, the notion of children as blankslates for whom anything was possibleappealed to a nation built ondemocracy.

But Kagan had changed his mindalong the way. “I have been dragged,kicking and screaming, by my data,” hesays now, “to acknowledge that tem-perament is more powerful than Ithought and wish to believe.” The pub-lication of his early findings on high-re-active children in Science magazine in1988 helped to legitimize the idea ofinborn temperament, partly because his“nurturist” reputation was so strong.

If anyone could help me untangle thenature-nurture question, I hoped, it wasJerry Kagan.

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Kagan ushers me inside his office inHarvard’s William James Hall, survey-ing me unblinkingly as I sit down: notunkind, but definitely discerning. I hadimagined him as a gentle, white-lab-coated scientist in a cartoon, pouringchemicals from one test tube to anotheruntil—poof! Now, Susan, you know ex-actly who you are. But this isn’t themild-mannered old professor I’d ima-gined. Ironically for a scientist whosebooks are infused with humanism andwho describes himself as having beenan anxious, easily frightened boy, I findhim downright intimidating. I kick offour interview by asking a backgroundquestion whose premise he disagreeswith. “No, no, no!” he thunders, as if Iweren’t sitting just across from him.

The high-reactive side of my person-ality kicks into full gear. I’m alwayssoft-spoken, but now I have to force my

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voice to come out louder than a whis-per (on the tape recording of our con-versation, Kagan’s voice sounds boom-ing and declamatory, mine muchquieter). I’m aware that I’m holding mytorso tensely, one of the telltale signs ofthe high-reactive. It feels strange toknow that Kagan must be observingthis too—he says as much, nodding atme as he notes that many high-react-ives become writers or pick other intel-lectual vocations where “you’re incharge: you close the door, pull downthe shades and do your work. You’reprotected from encountering unexpec-ted things.” (Those from less educatedbackgrounds tend to become file clerksand truck drivers, he says, for the samereasons.)

I mention a little girl I know who is“slow to warm up.” She studies newpeople rather than greeting them; her

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family goes to the beach every week-end, but it takes her ages to dip a toeinto the surf. A classic high-reactive, Iremark.

“No!” Kagan exclaims. “Every beha-vior has more than one cause. Don’tever forget that! For every child who’sslow to warm up, yes, there will bestatistically more high-reactives, butyou can be slow to warm up because ofhow you spent the first three and a halfyears of your life! When writers andjournalists talk, they want to see a one-to-one relationship—one behavior, onecause. But it’s really important that yousee, for behaviors like slow-to-warm-up, shyness, impulsivity, there aremany routes to that.”

He reels off examples of environ-mental factors that could produce anintroverted personality independentlyof, or in concert with, a reactive

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nervous system: A child might enjoyhaving new ideas about the world, say,so she spends a lot of time inside herhead. Or health problems might directa child inward, to what’s going on in-side his body.

My fear of public speaking might beequally complex. Do I dread it becauseI’m a high-reactive introvert? Maybenot. Some high-reactives love publicspeaking and performing, and plenty ofextroverts have stage fright; publicspeaking is the number-one fear inAmerica, far more common than thefear of death. Public speaking phobiahas many causes, including early child-hood setbacks, that have to do with ourunique personal histories, not inborntemperament.

In fact, public speaking anxiety maybe primal and quintessentially human,not limited to those of us born with a

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high-reactive nervous system. One the-ory, based on the writings of the so-ciobiologist E. O. Wilson, holds thatwhen our ancestors lived on the savan-nah, being watched intently meant onlyone thing: a wild animal was stalkingus. And when we think we’re about tobe eaten, do we stand tall and holdforth confidently? No. We run. In otherwords, hundreds of thousands of yearsof evolution urge us to get the hell offthe stage, where we can mistake thegaze of the spectators for the glint in apredator’s eye. Yet the audience expectsnot only that we’ll stay put, but thatwe’ll act relaxed and assured. This con-flict between biology and protocol isone reason that speechmaking can beso fraught. It’s also why exhortations toimagine the audience in the nude don’thelp nervous speakers; naked lions are

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just as dangerous as elegantly dressedones.

But even though all human beingsmay be prone to mistaking audiencemembers for predators, each of us has adifferent threshold for triggering thefight-or-flight response. How threaten-ingly must the eyes of the audiencemembers narrow before you feel they’reabout to pounce? Does it happen beforeyou’ve even stepped onstage, or does ittake a few really good hecklers to trig-ger that adrenaline rush? You can seehow a highly sensitive amygdala wouldmake you more susceptible to frownsand bored sighs and people who checktheir BlackBerrys while you’re in mid-sentence. And indeed, studies do showthat introverts are significantly morelikely than extroverts to fear publicspeaking.

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Kagan tells me about the time hewatched a fellow scientist give a won-derful talk at a conference. Afterward,the speaker asked if they could havelunch. Kagan agreed, and the scientistproceeded to tell him that he gives lec-tures every month and, despite his cap-able stage persona, is terrified eachtime. Reading Kagan’s work had had abig impact on him, however.

“You changed my life,” he toldKagan. “All this time I’ve been blamingmy mother, but now I think I’m a high-reactive.”

So am I introverted because I inheritedmy parents’ high reactivity, copiedtheir behaviors, or both? Rememberthat the heritability statistics derived

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from twin studies show thatintroversion-extroversion is only 40 to50 percent heritable. This means that,in a group of people, on average half ofthe variability in introversion-extrover-sion is caused by genetic factors. Tomake things even more complex, thereare probably many genes at work, andKagan’s framework of high reactivity islikely one of many physiological routesto introversion. Also, averages aretricky. A heritability rate of 50 percentdoesn’t necessarily mean that my intro-version is 50 percent inherited from myparents, or that half of the difference inextroversion between my best friendand me is genetic. One hundred percentof my introversion might come fromgenes, or none at all—or more likelysome unfathomable combination ofgenes and experience. To ask whetherit’s nature or nurture, says Kagan, is

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like asking whether a blizzard is causedby temperature or humidity. It’s the in-tricate interaction between the two thatmakes us who we are.

So perhaps I’ve been asking thewrong question. Maybe the mystery ofwhat percent of personality is natureand what percent nurture is less im-portant than the question of how yourinborn temperament interacts with theenvironment and with your own freewill. To what degree is temperamentdestiny?

On the one hand, according to thetheory of gene-environment interaction,people who inherit certain traits tend toseek out life experiences that reinforcethose characteristics. The most low-re-active kids, for example, court dangerfrom the time they’re toddlers, so thatby the time they grow up they don’t batan eye at grown-up-sized risks. They

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“climb a few fences, become desensit-ized, and climb up on the roof,” the latepsychologist David Lykken once ex-plained in an Atlantic article. “They’llhave all sorts of experiences that otherkids won’t. Chuck Yeager (the first pilotto break the sound barrier) could stepdown from the belly of the bomber intothe rocketship and push the button notbecause he was born with that differ-ence between him and me, but becausefor the previous thirty years his tem-perament impelled him to work his wayup from climbing trees through increas-ing degrees of danger and excitement.”

Conversely, high-reactive childrenmay be more likely to develop intoartists and writers and scientists andthinkers because their aversion to nov-elty causes them to spend time insidethe familiar—and intellectually fer-tile—environment of their own heads.

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“The university is filled with intro-verts,” observes the psychologist JerryMiller, director of the Center for theChild and the Family at the Universityof Michigan. “The stereotype of the uni-versity professor is accurate for somany people on campus. They like toread; for them there’s nothing more ex-citing than ideas. And some of this hasto do with how they spent their timewhen they were growing up. If youspend a lot of time charging around,then you have less time for reading andlearning. There’s only so much time inyour life.”

On the other hand, there is also awide range of possible outcomes foreach temperament. Low-reactive, extro-verted children, if raised by attentivefamilies in safe environments, can growup to be energetic achievers with bigpersonalities—the Richard Bransons

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and Oprahs of this world. But givethose same children negligent care-givers or a bad neighborhood, say somepsychologists, and they can turn intobullies, juvenile delinquents, or crimin-als. Lykken has controversially calledpsychopaths and heroes “twigs on thesame genetic branch.”

Consider the mechanism by whichkids acquire their sense of right andwrong. Many psychologists believe thatchildren develop a conscience whenthey do something inappropriate andare rebuked by their caregivers. Disap-proval makes them feel anxious, andsince anxiety is unpleasant, they learnto steer clear of antisocial behavior.This is known as internalizing their par-ents’ standards of conduct, and its coreis anxiety.

But what if some kids are less proneto anxiety than others, as is true of

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extremely low-reactive kids? Often thebest way to teach these children valuesis to give them positive role models andto channel their fearlessness into pro-ductive activities. A low-reactive childon an ice-hockey team enjoys his peers’esteem when he charges at his oppon-ents with a lowered shoulder, which isa “legal” move. But if he goes too far,raises his elbow, and gives another guya concussion, he lands in the penaltybox. Over time he learns to use his ap-petite for risk and assertiveness wisely.

Now imagine this same child growingup in a dangerous neighborhood withfew organized sports or other construct-ive channels for his boldness. You cansee how he might fall into delinquency.It may be that some disadvantaged kidswho get into trouble suffer not solelyfrom poverty or neglect, say those whohold this view, but also from the

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tragedy of a bold and exuberant tem-perament deprived of healthy outlets.

The destinies of the most high-reactivekids are also influenced by the worldaround them—perhaps even more sothan for the average child, according toa groundbreaking new theory dubbed“the orchid hypothesis” by David Dobbsin a wonderful article in The Atlantic.This theory holds that many childrenare like dandelions, able to thrive injust about any environment. But others,including the high-reactive types thatKagan studied, are more like orchids:they wilt easily, but under the rightconditions can grow strong andmagnificent.

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According to Jay Belsky, a leadingproponent of this view and a psycho-logy professor and child care expert atthe University of London, the reactivityof these kids’ nervous systems makesthem quickly overwhelmed by child-hood adversity, but also able to benefitfrom a nurturing environment morethan other children do. In other words,orchid children are more strongly af-fected by all experience, both positiveand negative.

Scientists have known for a whilethat high-reactive temperaments comewith risk factors. These kids are espe-cially vulnerable to challenges like mar-ital tension, a parent’s death, or abuse.They’re more likely than their peers toreact to these events with depression,anxiety, and shyness. Indeed, about aquarter of Kagan’s high-reactive kidssuffer from some degree of the

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condition known as “social anxiety dis-order,” a chronic and disabling form ofshyness.

What scientists haven’t realized untilrecently is that these risk factors havean upside. In other words, the sensitiv-ities and the strengths are a packagedeal. High-reactive kids who enjoygood parenting, child care, and a stablehome environment tend to have feweremotional problems and more socialskills than their lower-reactive peers,studies show. Often they’re exceedinglyempathic, caring, and cooperative.They work well with others. They arekind, conscientious, and easily dis-turbed by cruelty, injustice, and irre-sponsibility. They’re successful at thethings that matter to them. They don’tnecessarily turn into class presidents orstars of the school play, Belsky told me,though this can happen, too: “For some

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it’s becoming the leader of their class.For others it takes the form of doingwell academically or being well-liked.”

The upsides of the high-reactive tem-perament have been documented in ex-citing research that scientists are onlynow beginning to pull together. One ofthe most interesting findings, also re-ported in Dobbs’s Atlantic article, comesfrom the world of rhesus monkeys, aspecies that shares about 95 percent ofits DNA with humans and has elaboratesocial structures that resemble our own.

In these monkeys as well as in hu-mans, a gene known as the serotonin-transporter (SERT) gene, or 5-HTTLPR,helps to regulate the processing of sero-tonin, a neurotransmitter that affectsmood. A particular variation, or allele,of this gene, sometimes referred to asthe “short” allele, is thought to be asso-ciated with high reactivity and

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introversion, as well as a heightenedrisk of depression in humans who havehad difficult lives. When baby monkeyswith a similar allele were subjected tostress—in one experiment they weretaken from their mothers and raised asorphans—they processed serotonin lessefficiently (a risk factor for depressionand anxiety) than monkeys with thelong allele who endured similar priva-tions. But young monkeys with thesame risky genetic profile who wereraised by nurturing mothers did as wellas or better than their long-allelebrethren—even those raised in simil-arly secure environments—at key socialtasks, like finding playmates, buildingalliances, and handling conflicts. Theyoften became leaders of their troops.They also processed serotonin moreefficiently.

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Stephen Suomi, the scientist whoconducted these studies, has speculatedthat these high-reactive monkeys owedtheir success to the enormous amountsof time they spent watching rather thanparticipating in the group, absorbing ona deep level the laws of social dynam-ics. (This is a hypothesis that mightring true to parents whose high-reactivechildren hover observantly on the edgesof their peer group, sometimes forweeks or months, before edging suc-cessfully inside.)

Studies in humans have found thatadolescent girls with the short allele ofthe SERT gene are 20 percent morelikely to be depressed than long-allelegirls when exposed to stressful familyenvironments, but 25 percent less likelyto be depressed when raised in stablehomes. Similarly, short allele adultshave been shown to have more anxiety

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in the evening than others whenthey’ve had stressful days, but less anxi-ety on calm days. High-reactive four-year-olds give more pro-social re-sponses than other children whenpresented with moral dilemmas—butthis difference remains at age five onlyif their mothers used gentle, not harsh,discipline. High-reactive children raisedin supportive environments are evenmore resistant than other kids to thecommon cold and other respiratory ill-nesses, but get sick more easily ifthey’re raised in stressful conditions.The short allele of the SERT gene is alsoassociated with higher performance ona wide range of cognitive tasks.

These findings are so dramatic thatit’s remarkable no one arrived at themuntil recently. Remarkable, but perhapsnot surprising. Psychologists are trainedto heal, so their research naturally

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focuses on problems and pathology. “Itis almost as if, metaphorically speaking,sailors are so busy—and wisely—look-ing under the water line for extensionsof icebergs that could sink their ship,”writes Belsky, “that they fail to appreci-ate that by climbing on top of the ice-berg it might prove possible to chart aclear passage through the ice-ladensea.”

The parents of high-reactive childrenare exceedingly lucky, Belsky told me.“The time and effort they invest will ac-tually make a difference. Instead of see-ing these kids as vulnerable to ad-versity, parents should see them as mal-leable—for worse, but also for better.”He describes eloquently a high-reactivechild’s ideal parent: someone who “canread your cues and respect your indi-viduality; is warm and firm in placingdemands on you without being harsh or

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hostile; promotes curiosity, academicachievement, delayed gratification, andself-control; and is not harsh, neglect-ful, or inconsistent.” This advice is ter-rific for all parents, of course, but it’scrucial for raising a high-reactive child.(If you think your child might be high-reactive, you’re probably already ask-ing yourself what else you can do tocultivate your son or daughter. Chapter11 has some answers.)

But even orchid children can with-stand some adversity, Belsky says. Takedivorce. In general, it will disrupt orch-id kids more than others: “If the parentssquabble a lot, and put their kid in themiddle, then watch out—this is the kidwho will succumb.” But if the divorcingparents get along, if they provide theirchild with the other psychological nu-trients he needs, then even an orchidchild can do just fine.

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Most people would appreciate theflexibility of this message, I think; fewof us had problem-free childhoods.

But there’s another kind of flexibilitythat we all hope applies to the questionof who we are and what we become.We want the freedom to map our owndestinies. We want to preserve the ad-vantageous aspects of our tempera-ments and improve, or even discard,the ones we dislike—such as a horror ofpublic speaking. In addition to our in-born temperaments, beyond the luck ofthe draw of our childhood experience,we want to believe that we—asadults—can shape our selves and makewhat we will of our lives.

Can we?

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5BEYOND TEMPERAMENT

The Role of Free Will (and the Secret ofPublic Speaking for Introverts)

Enjoyment appears at the boundarybetween boredom and anxiety, when thechallenges are just balanced with the per-

son’s capacity to act.—MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

Deep inside the bowels of the AthinoulaA. Martinos Center for Biomedical Ima-ging at Massachusetts General Hospital,the hallways are nondescript, dingyeven. I’m standing outside the lockeddoor of a windowless room with Dr.Carl Schwartz, the director of the

Developmental Neuroimaging and Psy-chopathology Research Lab. Schwartzhas bright, inquisitive eyes, grayingbrown hair, and a quietly enthusiasticmanner. Despite our unprepossessingsurroundings, he prepares with somefanfare to unlock the door.

The room houses a multimillion-dol-lar fMRI (functional magnetic reson-ance imaging) machine, which hasmade possible some of the greatestbreakthroughs in modern neuroscience.An fMRI machine can measure whichparts of the brain are active whenyou’re thinking a particular thought orperforming a specific task, allowing sci-entists to perform the once unimagin-able task of mapping the functions ofthe human brain. A principal inventorof the fMRI technique, says Dr.Schwartz, was a brilliant but unassum-ing scientist named Kenneth Kwong,

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who works inside this very building.This whole place is full of quiet andmodest people doing extraordinarythings, Schwartz adds, waving his handappreciatively at the empty hallway.

Before Schwartz opens the door, heasks me to take off my gold hoop ear-rings and set aside the metal tape re-corder I’ve been using to record ourconversation. The magnetic field of thefMRI machine is 100,000 timesstronger than the earth’s gravitationalpull—so strong, Schwartz says, that itcould rip the earrings right out of myears if they were magnetic and sendthem flying across the room. I worryabout the metal fasteners of my bra,but I’m too embarrassed to ask. I pointinstead to my shoe buckle, which I fig-ure has the same amount of metal asthe bra strap. Schwartz says it’s allright, and we enter the room.

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We gaze reverently at the fMRI scan-ner, which looks like a gleaming rock-etship lying on its side. Schwartz ex-plains that he asks his subjects—whoare in their late teens—to lie down withtheir heads in the scanner while theylook at photographs of faces and themachine tracks how their brains re-spond. He’s especially interested inactivity in the amygdala—the samepowerful organ inside the brain thatKagan found played such an importantrole in shaping some introverts’ and ex-troverts’ personalities.

Schwartz is Kagan’s colleague andprotégé, and his work picks up justwhere Kagan’s longitudinal studies ofpersonality left off. The infants Kaganonce categorized as high- and low-re-active have now grown up, andSchwartz is using the fMRI machine topeer inside their brains. Kagan followed

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his subjects from infancy into adoles-cence, but Schwartz wanted to see whathappened to them after that. Would thefootprint of temperament be detectable,all those years later, in the adult brainsof Kagan’s high- and low-reactive in-fants? Or would it have been erased bysome combination of environment andconscious effort?

Interestingly, Kagan cautionedSchwartz against doing the study. Inthe competitive field of science re-search, you don’t want to waste timeconducting studies that may not yieldsignificant findings. And Kagan worriedthat there were no results to befound—that the link between tempera-ment and destiny would be severed bythe time an infant reached adulthood.

“He was trying to take care of me,”Schwartz tells me. “It was an interest-ing paradox. Because here Jerry was

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doing all these early observations of in-fants, and seeing that it wasn’t justtheir social behavior that was differentin the extremes—everything aboutthese kids was different. Their eyesdilated more widely when they weresolving problems, their vocal cords be-came more tense while uttering words,their heart rate patterns were unique:there were all these channels that sug-gested there was something differentphysiologically about these kids. And Ithink, in spite of this, because of his in-tellectual heritage, he had the feelingthat environmental factors are so com-plex that it would be really hard to pickup that footprint of temperament laterin life.”

But Schwartz, who believes that he’sa high-reactive himself and was draw-ing partly on his own experience, had ahunch that he’d find that footprint even

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farther along the longitudinal timelinethan Kagan had.

He demonstrates his research by al-lowing me to act as if I were one of hissubjects, albeit not inside the fMRIscanner. As I sit at a desk, a computermonitor flashes photos at me, one afteranother, each showing an unfamiliarface: disembodied black-and-whiteheads floating against a dark back-ground. I think I can feel my pulsequicken as the photos start coming atme faster and faster. I also notice thatSchwartz has slipped in some repeatsand that I feel more relaxed as the facesstart to look familiar. I describe my re-actions to Schwartz, who nods. Theslide show is designed, he says, to mim-ic an environment that corresponds tothe sense that high-reactive people getwhen they walk into a crowded room of

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strangers and feel “Geez! Who are thesepeople?”

I wonder if I’m imagining my reac-tions, or exaggerating them, butSchwartz tells me that he’s gotten backthe first set of data on a group of high-reactive children Kagan studied fromfour months of age—and sure enough,the amygdalae of those children, nowgrown up, had turned out to be moresensitive to the pictures of unfamiliarfaces than did the amygdalae of thosewho’d been bold toddlers. Both groupsreacted to the pictures, but the formerlyshy kids reacted more. In other words,the footprint of a high- or low-reactivetemperament never disappeared in adult-hood. Some high-reactives grew into so-cially fluid teenagers who were not out-wardly rattled by novelty, but they nev-er shed their genetic inheritance.

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Schwartz’s research suggestssomething important: we can stretchour personalities, but only up to apoint. Our inborn temperaments influ-ence us, regardless of the lives we lead.A sizable part of who we are is or-dained by our genes, by our brains, byour nervous systems. And yet the elasti-city that Schwartz found in some of thehigh-reactive teens also suggests theconverse: we have free will and can useit to shape our personalities.

These seem like contradictory prin-ciples, but they are not. Free will cantake us far, suggests Dr. Schwartz’s re-search, but it cannot carry us infinitelybeyond our genetic limits. Bill Gates isnever going to be Bill Clinton, no mat-ter how he polishes his social skills, andBill Clinton can never be Bill Gates, nomatter how much time he spends alonewith a computer.

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We might call this the “rubber bandtheory” of personality. We are like rub-ber bands at rest. We are elastic andcan stretch ourselves, but only so much.

To understand why this might be so forhigh-reactives, it helps to look at whathappens in the brain when we greet astranger at a cocktail party. Rememberthat the amygdala, and the limbic sys-tem of which it’s a key part, is an an-cient part of the brain—so old thatprimitive mammals have their own ver-sions of this system. But as mammalsbecame more complex, an area of thebrain called the neocortex developedaround the limbic system. The neocor-tex, and particularly the frontal cortexin humans, performs an astonishing

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array of functions, from deciding whichbrand of toothpaste to buy, to planninga meeting, to pondering the nature ofreality. One of these functions is tosoothe unwarranted fears.

If you were a high-reactive baby,then your amygdala may, for the rest ofyour life, go a bit wild every time youintroduce yourself to a stranger at acocktail party. But if you feel relativelyskilled in company, that’s partly be-cause your frontal cortex is there to tellyou to calm down, extend a handshake,and smile. In fact, a recent fMRI studyshows that when people use self-talk toreassess upsetting situations, activity intheir prefrontal cortex increases in anamount correlated with a decrease ofactivity in their amygdala.

But the frontal cortex isn’t all-power-ful; it doesn’t switch the amygdala offaltogether. In one study, scientists

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conditioned a rat to associate a certainsound with an electrical shock. Thenthey played that sound over and overagain without administering the shock,until the rats lost their fear.

But it turned out that this “unlearn-ing” was not as complete as the scient-ists first thought. When they severedthe neural connections between therats’ cortex and amygdala, the rats be-came afraid of the sound again. Thiswas because the fear conditioning hadbeen suppressed by the activity of thecortex, but was still present in the amy-gdala. In humans with unwarrantedfears, like batophobia, or fear ofheights, the same thing happens.Repeated trips to the top of the EmpireState Building seem to extinguish thefear, but it may come roaring back dur-ing times of stress—when the cortex

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has other things to do than soothe anexcitable amygdala.

This helps explain why many high-re-active kids retain some of the fearful as-pects of their temperament all the wayinto adulthood, no matter how muchsocial experience they acquire or freewill they exercise. My colleague Sally isa good example of this phenomenon.Sally is a thoughtful and talented bookeditor, a self-described shy introvert,and one of the most charming and ar-ticulate people I know. If you invite herto a party, and later ask your otherguests whom they most enjoyed meet-ing, chances are they’ll mention Sally.She’s so sparkly, they’ll tell you. Sowitty! So adorable!

Sally is conscious of how well shecomes across—you can’t be as appeal-ing as she is without being aware of it.But that doesn’t mean her amygdala

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knows it. When she arrives at a party,Sally often wishes she could hide be-hind the nearest couch—until her pre-frontal cortex takes over and she re-members what a good conversationalistshe is. Even so, her amygdala, with itslifetime of stored associations betweenstrangers and anxiety, sometimes pre-vails. Sally admits that sometimes shedrives an hour to a party and thenleaves five minutes after arriving.

When I think of my own experiencesin light of Schwartz’s findings, I realizeit’s not true that I’m no longer shy; I’vejust learned to talk myself down fromthe ledge (thank you, prefrontal cor-tex!). By now I do it so automaticallythat I’m hardly aware it’s happening.When I talk with a stranger or a groupof people, my smile is bright and mymanner direct, but there’s a splitsecond that feels like I’m stepping onto

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a high wire. By now I’ve had so manythousands of social experiences thatI’ve learned that the high wire is a fig-ment of my imagination, or that I won’tdie if I fall. I reassure myself so instant-aneously that I’m barely aware I’m do-ing it. But the reassurance process isstill happening—and occasionally itdoesn’t work. The word that Kagan firstused to describe high-reactive peoplewas inhibited, and that’s exactly how Istill feel at some dinner parties.

This ability to stretch ourselves—withinlimits—applies to extroverts, too. Oneof my clients, Alison, is a business con-sultant, mother, and wife with the kindof extroverted personality—friendly,forthright, perpetually on the go—that

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makes people describe her as a “forceof nature.” She has a happy marriage,two daughters she adores, and her ownconsulting firm that she built fromscratch. She’s rightly proud of whatshe’s accomplished in life.

But she hasn’t always felt so satisfied.The year she graduated from highschool, she took a good look at herselfand didn’t like what she saw. Alison isextremely bright, but you couldn’t seethat from her high school transcript.She’d had her heart set on attending anIvy League school, and had thrown thatchance away.

And she knew why. She’d spent highschool socializing—Alison was involvedin practically every extracurricularactivity her school had to offer—andthat didn’t leave much time for aca-demics. Partly she blamed her parents,who were so proud of their daughter’s

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social gifts that they hadn’t insisted shestudy more. But mostly she blamedherself.

As an adult, Alison is determined notto make similar mistakes. She knowshow easy it would be to lose herself ina whirl of PTA meetings and businessnetworking. So Alison’s solution is tolook to her family for adaptivestrategies. She happens to be the onlychild of two introverted parents, to bemarried to an introvert, and to have ayounger daughter who is a strong intro-vert herself.

Alison has found ways to tap into thewavelength of the quiet types aroundher. When she visits her parents, shefinds herself meditating and writing inher journal, just the way her motherdoes. At home she relishes peacefulevenings with her homebody husband.And her younger daughter, who enjoys

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intimate backyard talks with her moth-er, has Alison spending her afternoonsengaged in thoughtful conversation.

Alison has even created a network ofquiet, reflective friends. Although herbest friend in the world, Amy, is ahighly charged extrovert just like her,most of her other friends are introverts.“I so appreciate people who listenwell,” says Alison. “They are the friendsI go have coffee with. They give me themost spot-on observations. Sometimes Ihaven’t even realized I was doingsomething counterproductive, and myintroverted friends will say, ‘Here’swhat you’re doing, and here are fifteenexamples of when you did that samething,’ whereas my friend Amywouldn’t even notice. But my introver-ted friends are sitting back and ob-serving, and we can really connect overthat.”

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Alison remains her boisterous self,but she has also discovered how to be,and to benefit from, quiet.

Even though we can reach for the outerlimits of our temperaments, it can oftenbe better to situate ourselves squarelyinside our comfort zones.

Consider the story of my client Esth-er, a tax lawyer at a large corporate lawfirm. A tiny brunette with a springystep and blue eyes as bright as head-lamps, Esther was not shy and neverhad been. But she was decidedly intro-verted. Her favorite part of the day wasthe quiet ten minutes when she walkedto the bus along the tree-lined streets ofher neighborhood. Her second favorite

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part was when she got to close the doorto her office and dig into her work.

Esther had chosen her career well. Amathematician’s daughter, she loved tothink about intimidatingly complex taxproblems, and could discuss them withease. (In chapter 7, I examine why in-troverts are so good at complex,focused problem-solving.) She was theyoungest member of a close-knit work-ing group operating inside a much lar-ger law firm. This group comprised fiveother tax lawyers, all of whom suppor-ted one another’s careers. Esther’s workconsisted of thinking deeply aboutquestions that fascinated her and work-ing closely with trusted colleagues.

But it happened that Esther’s smallgroup of tax lawyers periodically had togive presentations to the rest of the lawfirm. These talks were a source ofmisery for Esther, not because she was

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afraid of public speaking, but becauseshe wasn’t comfortable speaking extem-poraneously. Esther’s colleagues, incontrast—all of whom happened to beextroverts—were spontaneous talkerswho decided what they’d say on theirway to the presentation and were some-how able to convey their thoughts in-telligibly and engagingly by the timethey arrived.

Esther was fine if given a chance toprepare, but sometimes her colleaguesfailed to mention that they’d be deliver-ing a talk until she arrived at work thatmorning. She assumed that their abilityto speak improvisationally was a func-tion of their superior understanding oftax law and that, as she gained moreexperience, she too would be able to“wing it.” But as Esther became moresenior and more knowledgeable, shestill couldn’t do it.

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To solve Esther’s problem, let’s focuson another difference between intro-verts and extroverts: their preferencefor stimulation.

For several decades, beginning in thelate 1960s, an influential research psy-chologist named Hans Eysenck hypo-thesized that human beings seek “justright” levels of stimulation—not toomuch and not too little. Stimulation isthe amount of input we have coming infrom the outside world. It can take anynumber of forms, from noise to sociallife to flashing lights. Eysenck believedthat extroverts prefer more stimulationthan introverts do, and that this ex-plained many of their differences: intro-verts enjoy shutting the doors to theiroffices and plunging into their work,because for them this sort of quiet intel-lectual activity is optimally stimulating,while extroverts function best when

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engaged in higher-wattage activitieslike organizing team-building work-shops or chairing meetings.

Eysenck also thought that the basis ofthese differences might be found in abrain structure called the ascending re-ticular activating system (ARAS). TheARAS is a part of the brain stem thathas connections leading up to thecerebral cortex and other parts of thebrain. The brain has excitatory mechan-isms that cause us to feel awake, alert,and energetic—“aroused,” in the par-lance of psychologists. It also has calm-ing mechanisms that do the opposite.Eysenck speculated that the ARAS regu-lates the balance between over- andunder-arousal by controlling theamount of sensory stimulation thatflows into the brain; sometimes thechannels are wide open, so a lot ofstimulation can get in, and sometimes

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they’re constricted, so the brain is lessstimulated. Eysenck thought that theARAS functioned differently in intro-verts and extroverts: introverts havewide-open information channels, caus-ing them to be flooded with stimulationand over-aroused, while extrovertshave tighter channels, making themprone to under-arousal. Over-arousaldoesn’t produce anxiety so much as thesense that you can’t thinkstraight—that you’ve had enough andwould like to go home now. Under-arousal is something like cabin fever.Not enough is happening: you feelitchy, restless, and sluggish, like youneed to get out of the house already.

Today we know that the reality is farmore complex. For one thing, the ARASdoesn’t turn stimulation on and off likea fire truck’s hose, flooding the entirebrain at once; different parts of the

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brain are aroused more than others atdifferent times. Also, high arousallevels in the brain don’t always correl-ate with how aroused we feel. Andthere are many different kinds of arous-al: arousal by loud music is not thesame as arousal by mortar fire, which isnot the same as arousal by presiding ata meeting; you might be more sensitiveto one form of stimulation than to an-other. It’s also too simple to say that wealways seek moderate levels of arousal:excited fans at a soccer game crave hy-perstimulation, while people who visitspas for relaxation treatments seek lowlevels.

Still, more than a thousand studiesconducted by scientists worldwide havetested Eysenck’s theory that corticalarousal levels are an important clue tothe nature of introversion and extrover-sion, and it appears to be what the

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personality psychologist David Fundercalls “half-right”—in very importantways. Whatever the underlying cause,there’s a host of evidence that intro-verts are more sensitive than extrovertsto various kinds of stimulation, fromcoffee to a loud bang to the dull roar ofa networking event—and that intro-verts and extroverts often need verydifferent levels of stimulation to func-tion at their best.

In one well-known experiment, dat-ing all the way back to 1967 and still afavorite in-class demonstration in psy-chology courses, Eysenck placed lemonjuice on the tongues of adult introvertsand extroverts to find out who salivatedmore. Sure enough, the introverts, be-ing more aroused by sensory stimuli,were the ones with the watery mouths.

In another famous study, introvertsand extroverts were asked to play a

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challenging word game in which theyhad to learn, through trial and error,the governing principle of the game.While playing, they wore headphonesthat emitted random bursts of noise.They were asked to adjust the volumeof their headsets up or down to thelevel that was “just right.” On average,the extroverts chose a noise level of 72decibels, while the introverts selectedonly 55 decibels. When working at thevolume that they had selected—loudfor the extroverts, quiet for the intro-verts—the two types were aboutequally aroused (as measured by theirheart rates and other indicators). Theyalso played equally well.

When the introverts were asked towork at the noise level preferred by theextroverts, and vice versa, everythingchanged. Not only were the introvertsover-aroused by the loud noise, but they

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also underperformed—taking an aver-age of 9.1 trials rather than 5.8 to learnthe game. The opposite was true for theextroverts—they were under-aroused(and possibly bored) by the quieterconditions, and took an average of 7.3trials, compared with the 5.4 they’d av-eraged under noisier conditions.

When combined with Kagan’s findingson high reactivity, this line of studiesoffers a very empowering lens throughwhich to view your personality. Onceyou understand introversion and extro-version as preferences for certain levelsof stimulation, you can begin con-sciously trying to situate yourself in en-vironments favorable to your own per-sonality—neither overstimulating nor

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understimulating, neither boring noranxiety-making. You can organize yourlife in terms of what personality psy-chologists call “optimal levels of arous-al” and what I call “sweet spots,” andby doing so feel more energetic andalive than before.

Your sweet spot is the place whereyou’re optimally stimulated. You prob-ably seek it out already without beingaware that you’re doing so. Imaginethat you’re lying contentedly in a ham-mock reading a great novel. This is asweet spot. But after half an hour yourealize that you’ve read the same sen-tence five times; now you’re understim-ulated. So you call a friend and go outfor brunch—in other words, you ratchetup your stimulation level—and as youlaugh and gossip over blueberry pan-cakes, you’re back, thank goodness, in-side your sweet spot. But this agreeable

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state lasts only until your friend—anextrovert who needs much more stimu-lation than you do—persuades you toaccompany her to a block party, whereyou’re now confronted by loud musicand a sea of strangers.

Your friend’s neighbors seem affableenough, but you feel pressured to makesmall talk above the din of music.Now—bang, just like that—you’vefallen out of your sweet spot, exceptthis time you’re overstimulated. Andyou’ll probably feel that way until youpair off with someone on the peripheryof the party for an in-depth conversa-tion, or bow out altogether and returnto your novel.

Imagine how much better you’ll be atthis sweet-spot game once you’re awareof playing it. You can set up your work,your hobbies, and your social life sothat you spend as much time inside

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your sweet spot as possible. People whoare aware of their sweet spots have thepower to leave jobs that exhaust themand start new and satisfying businesses.They can hunt for homes based on thetemperaments of their family mem-bers—with cozy window seats and oth-er nooks and crannies for the intro-verts, and large, open living-diningspaces for the extroverts.

Understanding your sweet spot canincrease your satisfaction in everyarena of your life, but it goes even fur-ther than that. Evidence suggests thatsweet spots can have life-or-death con-sequences. According to a recent studyof military personnel conductedthrough the Walter Reed Army Instituteof Research, introverts function betterthan extroverts when sleep deprived,which is a cortically de-arousing condi-tion (because losing sleep makes us less

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alert, active, and energetic). Drowsy ex-troverts behind the wheel should be es-pecially careful—at least until they in-crease their arousal levels by chuggingcoffee or cranking up the radio. Con-versely, introverts driving in loud,overly arousing traffic noise shouldwork to stay focused, since the noisemay impair their thinking.

Now that we know about optimallevels of stimulation, Esther’s prob-lem—winging it at the podium—alsomakes sense. Overarousal interfereswith attention and short-termmemory—key components of the abil-ity to speak on the fly. And since publicspeaking is an inherently stimulatingactivity—even for those, like Esther,who suffer no stage fright—introvertscan find their attention impaired justwhen they need it most. Esther couldlive to be a one-hundred-year-old

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lawyer, in other words, the most know-ledgeable practitioner in her field, andshe might never be comfortable speak-ing extemporaneously. She might findherself perpetually unable, at speechtime, to draw on the massive body ofdata sitting inside her long-termmemory.

But once Esther understands herself,she can insist to her colleagues thatthey give her advance notice of anyspeaking events. She can practice herspeeches and find herself well insideher sweet spot when finally she reachesthe podium. She can prepare the sameway for client meetings, networkingevents, even casual meetings with hercolleagues—any situation of heightenedintensity in which her short-termmemory and the ability to think on herfeet might be a little more comprom-ised than usual.

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Esther managed to solve her problemfrom the comfort of her sweet spot. Yetsometimes stretching beyond it is ouronly choice. Some years ago I decidedthat I wanted to conquer my fear ofpublic speaking. After much hemmingand hawing, I signed up for a workshopat the Public Speaking–Social AnxietyCenter of New York. I had my doubts; Ifelt like a garden-variety shy person,and I didn’t like the pathological soundof the term “social anxiety.” But theclass was based on desensitizationtraining, an approach that made senseto me. Often used as a way to conquerphobias, desensitization involves expos-ing yourself (and your amygdala) to thething you’re afraid of over and overagain, in manageable doses. This is

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very different from the well-meaningbut unhelpful advice that you shouldjust jump in at the deep end and try toswim—an approach that might work,but more likely will produce panic, fur-ther encoding in your brain a cycle ofdread, fear, and shame.

I found myself in good company.There were about fifteen people in theclass, which was led by Charles diCagno, a wiry, compact man withwarm brown eyes and a sophisticatedsense of humor. Charles is himself aveteran of exposure therapy. Publicspeaking anxiety doesn’t keep him upat night anymore, he says, but fear is awily enemy and he’s always working toget the better of it.

The workshop had been in session fora few weeks before I joined, but Charlesassured me that newcomers were wel-come. The group was more diverse than

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I expected. There was a fashion design-er with long, curly hair, bright lipstick,and pointy snakeskin boots; a secretarywith thick glasses and a clipped,matter-of-fact manner, who talked a lotabout her Mensa membership; a coupleof investment bankers, tall and athletic;an actor with black hair and vivid blueeyes who bounded cheerfully across theroom in his Puma sneakers but claimedto be terrified the entire time; a Chinesesoftware designer with a sweet smileand a nervous laugh. A regular cross-section of New Yorkers, really. It mighthave been a class in digital photo-graphy or Italian cooking.

Except that it wasn’t. Charles ex-plained that each of us would speak infront of the group, but at an anxietylevel we could handle.

A martial arts instructor namedLateesha was first up that evening.

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Lateesha’s assignment was to readaloud to the class from a Robert Frostpoem. With her dreadlocks and widesmile, Lateesha looked as if she wasn’tafraid of anything. But as she got readyto speak, her book propped open at thepodium, Charles asked how anxious shewas, on a scale of 1 to 10.

“At least seven,” said Lateesha.“Take it slow,” he said. “There are

only a few people out there who cancompletely overcome their fears, andthey all live in Tibet.”

Lateesha read the poem clearly andquietly, with only the slightest tremorin her voice. When she was finished,Charles beamed proudly.

“Stand up please, Lisa,” he said, ad-dressing an attractive young marketingdirector with shiny black hair and agleaming engagement ring. “It’s your

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turn to offer feedback. Did Lateeshalook nervous?”

“No,” said Lisa.“I was really scared, though,” Latee-

sha said.“Don’t worry, no one could tell,” Lisa

assured her.The others nodded their heads vigor-

ously. Couldn’t tell at all, they echoed.Lateesha sat down, looking pleased.

Next it was my turn. I stood at amakeshift podium—really a musicstand—and faced the group. The onlysound in the room was the ticking ofthe ceiling fan and the blare of trafficoutside. Charles asked me to introducemyself. I took a deep breath.

“HELLOOO!!!!” I shouted, hoping tosound dynamic.

Charles looked alarmed. “Just beyourself,” he said.

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My first exercise was simple. All Ihad to do was answer a few questionsthat people called out: Where do youlive? What do you do for a living?What did you do this weekend?

I answered the questions in mynormal, soft-spoken way. The grouplistened carefully.

“Does anyone have any more ques-tions for Susan?” asked Charles. Thegroup shook their heads.

“Now, Dan,” said Charles, nodding ata strapping red-haired fellow wholooked like one of those CNBC journal-ists reporting directly from the NewYork Stock Exchange, “you’re a bankerand you have tough standards. Tell me,did Susan look nervous?”

“Not at all,” said Dan.The rest of the group nodded. Not

nervous at all, they murmured—just asthey had for Lateesha.

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You seem so outgoing, they added.You came across as really confident!You’re lucky because you never run out

of things to say.I sat down feeling pretty good about

myself. But soon I saw that Lateeshaand I weren’t the only ones to get thatkind of feedback. A few others did aswell. “You looked so calm!” thesespeakers were told, to their visible re-lief. “No one would ever know if theydidn’t know! What are you doing in thisclass?”

At first I wondered why I prizedthese reassurances so highly. Then Irealized that I was attending the work-shop because I wanted to stretch myselfto the outer limits of my temperament.I wanted to be the best and bravestspeaker I could be. The reassuranceswere evidence that I was on my way to-ward achieving this goal. I suspected

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that the feedback I was getting wasoverly charitable, but I didn’t care.What mattered was that I’d addressedan audience that had received me well,and I felt good about the experience. Ihad begun to desensitize myself to thehorrors of public speaking.

Since then, I’ve done plenty of speak-ing, to groups of ten and crowds ofhundreds. I’ve come to embrace thepower of the podium. For me this in-volves taking specific steps, includingtreating every speech as a creative pro-ject, so that when I get ready for thebig day, I experience that delving-deepsensation I enjoy so much. I also speakon topics that matter to me deeply, andhave found that I feel much morecentered when I truly care about mysubject.

This isn’t always possible, of course.Sometimes speakers need to talk about

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subjects that don’t interest them much,especially at work. I believe this isharder for introverts, who have troubleprojecting artificial enthusiasm. Butthere’s a hidden advantage to this in-flexibility: it can motivate us to maketough but worthwhile career changes ifwe find ourselves compelled to speaktoo often about topics that leave uscold. There is no one more courageousthan the person who speaks with thecourage of his convictions.

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6“FRANKLIN WAS A POLITICIAN, BUT

ELEANOR SPOKE OUT OFCONSCIENCE”

Why Cool Is Overrated

A shy man no doubt dreads the notice ofstrangers, but can hardly be said to beafraid of them. He may be as bold as ahero in battle, and yet have no self-con-fidence about trifles in the presence of

strangers.—CHARLES DARWIN

Easter Sunday, 1939. The Lincoln Me-morial. Marian Anderson, one of themost extraordinary singers of her gen-eration, takes the stage, the statue of

the sixteenth president rising up behindher. A regal woman with toffee-coloredskin, she gazes at her audience of75,000: men in brimmed hats, ladies intheir Sunday best, a great sea of blackand white faces. “My country ’tis ofthee,” she begins, her voice soaring,each word pure and distinct. “Sweetland of liberty.” The crowd is rapt andtearful. They never thought this daywould come to pass.

And it wouldn’t have, without Elean-or Roosevelt. Earlier that year, Ander-son had planned to sing at ConstitutionHall in Washington, D.C., but theDaughters of the American Revolution,who owned the hall, rejected her be-cause of her race. Eleanor Roosevelt,whose family had fought in the Revolu-tion, resigned from the DAR, helped ar-range for Anderson to sing at the Lin-coln Memorial—and ignited a national

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firestorm. Roosevelt was not the onlyone to protest, but she brought politicalclout to the issue, risking her own repu-tation in the process.

For Roosevelt, who seemed constitu-tionally unable to look away from otherpeople’s troubles, such acts of socialconscience were nothing unusual. Butothers appreciated how remarkablethey were. “This was somethingunique,” recalled the African-Americancivil rights leader James Farmer ofRoosevelt’s brave stand. “Franklin wasa politician. He weighed the politicalconsequences of every step that hetook. He was a good politician, too. ButEleanor spoke out of conscience, andacted as a conscientious person. Thatwas different.”

It was a role she played throughouttheir life together: Franklin’s adviser,Franklin’s conscience. He may have

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chosen her for just this reason; in otherways they were such an unlikely pair.

They met when he was twenty.Franklin was her distant cousin, asheltered Harvard senior from anupper-crust family. Eleanor was onlynineteen, also from a moneyed clan,but she had chosen to immerse herselfin the sufferings of the poor, despiteher family’s disapproval. As a volunteerat a settlement house on Manhattan’simpoverished Lower East Side, she hadmet children who were forced to sewartificial flowers in windowless factor-ies to the point of exhaustion. She tookFranklin with her one day. He couldn’tbelieve that human beings lived in suchmiserable conditions—or that a youngwoman of his own class had been theone to open his eyes to this side ofAmerica. He promptly fell in love withher.

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But Eleanor wasn’t the light, wittytype he’d been expected to marry. Justthe opposite: she was slow to laugh,bored by small talk, serious-minded,shy. Her mother, a fine-boned, viva-cious aristocrat, had nicknamed her“Granny” because of her demeanor. Herfather, the charming and popularyounger brother of Theodore Roosevelt,doted on her when he saw her, but hewas drunk most of the time, and diedwhen Eleanor was nine. By the timeEleanor met Franklin, she couldn’t be-lieve that someone like him would beinterested in her. Franklin waseverything that she was not: bold andbuoyant, with a wide, irrepressiblegrin, as easy with people as she wascautious. “He was young and gay andgood looking,” Eleanor recalled, “and Iwas shy and awkward and thrilledwhen he asked me to dance.”

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At the same time, many told Eleanorthat Franklin wasn’t good enough forher. Some saw him as a lightweight, amediocre scholar, a frivolous man-about-town. And however poor Elean-or’s own self-image, she did not lack foradmirers who appreciated her gravitas.Some of her suitors wrote grudging let-ters of congratulations to Franklinwhen he won her hand. “I have morerespect and admiration for Eleanor thanany girl I have ever met,” one letter-writer said. “You are mighty lucky.Your future wife is such as it is theprivilege of few men to have,” saidanother.

But public opinion was beside thepoint for Franklin and Eleanor. Eachhad strengths that the othercraved—her empathy, his bravado. “Eis an Angel,” Franklin wrote in hisjournal. When she accepted his

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marriage proposal in 1903, he pro-claimed himself the happiest man alive.She responded with a flood of love let-ters. They were married in 1905 andwent on to have six children.

Despite the excitement of their court-ship, their differences caused troublefrom the start. Eleanor craved intimacyand weighty conversations; he lovedparties, flirting, and gossip. The manwho would declare that he had nothingto fear but fear itself could not under-stand his wife’s struggles with shyness.When Franklin was appointed assistantsecretary of the navy in 1913, the paceof his social life grew ever more fren-zied and the settings more gilded—eliteprivate clubs, his Harvard friends’ man-sions. He caroused later and later intothe night. Eleanor went home earlierand earlier.

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In the meantime, Eleanor found her-self with a full calendar of social duties.She was expected to pay visits to thewives of other Washington luminaries,leaving calling cards at their doors andholding open houses in her own home.She didn’t relish this role, so she hireda social secretary named Lucy Mercerto help her. Which seemed a goodidea—until the summer of 1917, whenEleanor took the children to Maine forthe summer, leaving Franklin behind inWashington with Mercer. The twobegan a lifelong affair. Lucy was justthe kind of lively beauty Franklin hadbeen expected to marry in the firstplace.

Eleanor found out about Franklin’sbetrayal when she stumbled on a pack-et of love letters in his suitcase. Shewas devastated, but stayed in the mar-riage. And although they never

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rekindled the romantic side of their re-lationship, she and Franklin replaced itwith something formidable: a union ofhis confidence with her conscience.

Fast-forward to our own time, wherewe’ll meet another woman of similartemperament, acting out of her ownsense of conscience. Dr. Elaine Aron isa research psychologist who, since herfirst scientific publication in 1997, hassinglehandedly reframed what JeromeKagan and others call high reactivity(and sometimes “negativity” or “inhibi-tion”). She calls it “sensitivity,” andalong with her new name for the trait,she’s transformed and deepened our un-derstanding of it.

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When I hear that Aron will be thekeynote speaker at an annual weekendgathering of “highly sensitive people”at Walker Creek Ranch in MarinCounty, California, I quickly buy planetickets. Jacquelyn Strickland, a psycho-therapist and the founder and host ofthe event, explains that she createdthese weekends so that sensitive peoplecould benefit from being in one anoth-er’s presence. She sends me an agendaexplaining that we’ll be sleeping inrooms designated for “napping, journal-ing, puttering, meditating, organizing,writing, and reflecting.”

“Please do socialize very quietly inyour room (with consent of your room-mate), or preferably in the group areason walks and at mealtimes,” says theagenda. The conference is geared topeople who enjoy meaningful discus-sions and sometimes “move a

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conversation to a deeper level, only tofind out we are the only ones there.”There will be plenty of time for serioustalk this weekend, we’re assured. Butwe’ll also be free to come and go as weplease. Strickland knows that most ofus will have weathered a lifetime ofmandatory group activities, and shewants to show us a different model, ifonly for a few days.

Walker Creek Ranch sits on 1,741acres of unspoiled Northern Californiawilderness. It offers hiking trails andwildlife and vast crystalline skies, butat its center is a cozy, barnlike confer-ence center where about thirty of usgather on a Thursday afternoon in themiddle of June. The Buckeye Lodge isoutfitted with grey industrial carpets,large whiteboards, and picture win-dows overlooking sunny redwoodforests. Alongside the usual piles of

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registration forms and name badges,there’s a flip chart where we’re asked towrite our name and Myers-Briggs per-sonality type. I scan the list. Everyone’san introvert except for Strickland, whois warm, welcoming, and expressive.(According to Aron’s research, the ma-jority, though not all, of sensitivepeople are introverts.)

The tables and chairs in the room areorganized in a big square so that wecan all sit and face one another. Strick-land invites us—participation option-al—to share what brought us here. Asoftware engineer named Tom kicks off,describing with great passion his reliefat learning that there was “a physiolo-gical basis for the trait of sensitivity.Here’s the research! This is how I am! Idon’t have to try to meet anyone’s ex-pectations anymore. I don’t need to feelapologetic or defensive in any way.”

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With his long, narrow face, brown hair,and matching beard, Tom reminds meof Abraham Lincoln. He introduces hiswife, who talks about how compatibleshe and Tom are, and how togetherthey stumbled across Aron’s work.

When it’s my turn, I talk about howI’ve never been in a group environmentin which I didn’t feel obliged to presentan unnaturally rah-rah version of my-self. I say that I’m interested in the con-nection between introversion and sens-itivity. Many people nod.

On Saturday morning, Dr. Aron ap-pears in the Buckeye Lodge. She waitsplayfully behind an easel containing aflip chart while Strickland introducesher to the audience. Then she emergessmiling—ta-da!—from behind the easel,sensibly clad in a blazer, turtleneck,and corduroy skirt. She has short,feathery brown hair and warm, crinkly

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blue eyes that look as if they don’t missa thing. You can see immediately thedignified scholar Aron is today, as wellas the awkward schoolgirl she mustonce have been. You can see, too, herrespect for her audience.

Getting right down to business, sheinforms us that she has five differentsubtopics she can discuss, and asks usto raise our hands to vote for our first,second, and third choice of subjects.Then she performs, rapid-fire, an elab-orate mathematical calculation fromwhich she determines the three subtop-ics for which we’ve collectively voted.The crowd settles down amiably. Itdoesn’t really matter which subtopicswe’ve chosen; we know that Aron ishere to talk about sensitivity, and thatshe’s taking our preferences intoconsideration.

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Some psychologists make their markby doing unusual research experiments.Aron’s contribution is to think differ-ently, radically differently, about stud-ies that others have done. When shewas a girl, Aron was often told that shewas “too sensitive for her own good.”She had two hardy elder siblings andwas the only child in her family wholiked to daydream, and play inside, andwhose feelings were easily hurt. As shegrew older and ventured outside herfamily’s orbit, she continued to noticethings about herself that seemed differ-ent from the norm. She could drivealone for hours and never turn on theradio. She had strong, sometimes dis-turbing dreams at night. She was“strangely intense,” and often beset bypowerful emotions, both positive andnegative. She had trouble finding thesacred in the everyday; it seemed to be

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there only when she withdrew from theworld.

Aron grew up, became a psycholo-gist, and married a robust man wholoved these qualities. To her husband,Art, Aron was creative, intuitive, and adeep thinker. She appreciated thesethings in herself, too, but saw them as“acceptable surface manifestations of aterrible, hidden flaw I had been awareof all my life.” She thought it was amiracle that Art loved her in spite ofthis flaw.

But when one of her fellow psycholo-gists casually described Aron as “highlysensitive,” a lightbulb went on in herhead. It was as if these two words de-scribed her mysterious failing, exceptthat the psychologist hadn’t been refer-ring to a flaw at all. It had been a neut-ral description.

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Aron pondered this new insight, andthen set out to research this trait called“sensitivity.” She came up mostly dry,so she pored over the vast literature onintroversion, which seemed to be intim-ately related: Kagan’s work on high-re-active children, and the long line of ex-periments on the tendency of introvertsto be more sensitive to social and sens-ory stimulation. These studies gave herglimpses of what she was looking for,but Aron thought that there was a miss-ing piece in the emerging portrait of in-troverted people.

“The problem for scientists is that wetry to observe behavior, and these arethings that you cannot observe,” she ex-plains. Scientists can easily report onthe behavior of extroverts, who can of-ten be found laughing, talking, or ges-ticulating. But “if a person is standingin the corner of a room, you can

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attribute about fifteen motivations tothat person. But you don’t really knowwhat’s going on inside.”

Yet inner behavior was still behavior,thought Aron, even if it was difficult tocatalog. So what is the inner behaviorof people whose most visible feature isthat when you take them to a partythey aren’t very pleased about it? Shedecided to find out.

First Aron interviewed thirty-ninepeople who described themselves as be-ing either introverted or easily over-whelmed by stimulation. She askedthem about the movies they liked, theirfirst memories, relationships with par-ents, friendships, love lives, creativeactivities, philosophical and religiousviews. Based on these interviews, shecreated a voluminous questionnairethat she gave to several large groups ofpeople. Then she boiled their responses

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down to a constellation of twenty-sevenattributes. She named the people whoembodied these attributes “highlysensitive.”

Some of these twenty-seven attrib-utes were familiar from Kagan and oth-ers’ work. For example, highly sensitivepeople tend to be keen observers wholook before they leap. They arrangetheir lives in ways that limit surprises.They’re often sensitive to sights,sounds, smells, pain, coffee. They havedifficulty when being observed (atwork, say, or performing at a music re-cital) or judged for general worthiness(dating, job interviews).

But there were also new insights. Thehighly sensitive tend to be philosophic-al or spiritual in their orientation,rather than materialistic or hedonistic.They dislike small talk. They often de-scribe themselves as creative or

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intuitive (just as Aron’s husband haddescribed her). They dream vividly, andcan often recall their dreams the nextday. They love music, nature, art, phys-ical beauty. They feel exceptionallystrong emotions—sometimes acutebouts of joy, but also sorrow, melan-choly, and fear.

Highly sensitive people also processinformation about their environ-ments—both physical and emotion-al—unusually deeply. They tend to no-tice subtleties that others miss—anoth-er person’s shift in mood, say, or alightbulb burning a touch too brightly.

Recently a group of scientists atStony Brook University tested this find-ing by showing two pairs of photos (ofa fence and some bales of hay) to eight-een people lying inside fMRI machines.In one pair the photos were noticeablydifferent from each other, and in the

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other pair the difference was muchmore subtle. For each pair, the scient-ists asked whether the second photowas the same as the first. They foundthat sensitive people spent more timethan others looking at the photos withthe subtle differences. Their brains alsoshowed more activity in regions thathelp to make associations betweenthose images and other stored informa-tion. In other words, the sensitivepeople were processing the photos at amore elaborate level than their peers,reflecting more on those fenceposts andhaystacks.

This study is very new, and its con-clusions still need to be replicated andexplored in other contexts. But itechoes Jerome Kagan’s findings thathigh-reactive first graders spend moretime than other children comparingchoices when they play matching

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games or reading unfamiliar words.And it suggests, says Jadzia Jagiellow-icz, the lead scientist at Stony Brook,that sensitive types think in an unusu-ally complex fashion. It may also helpexplain why they’re so bored by smalltalk. “If you’re thinking in more com-plicated ways,” she told me, “then talk-ing about the weather or where youwent for the holidays is not quite as in-teresting as talking about values ormorality.”

The other thing Aron found aboutsensitive people is that sometimesthey’re highly empathic. It’s as if theyhave thinner boundaries separatingthem from other people’s emotions andfrom the tragedies and cruelties of theworld. They tend to have unusuallystrong consciences. They avoid violentmovies and TV shows; they’re acutelyaware of the consequences of a lapse in

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their own behavior. In social settingsthey often focus on subjects like person-al problems, which others consider “tooheavy.”

Aron realized that she was on tosomething big. Many of the character-istics of sensitive people that she’didentified—such as empathy and re-sponsiveness to beauty—were believedby psychologists to be characteristic ofother personality traits like “agreeable-ness” and “openness to experience.” ButAron saw that they were also a funda-mental part of sensitivity. Her findingsimplicitly challenged accepted tenets ofpersonality psychology.

She started publishing her results inacademic journals and books, andspeaking publicly about her work. Atfirst this was difficult. Audience mem-bers told her that her ideas were fascin-ating, but that her uncertain delivery

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was distracting. But Aron had a greatdesire to get her message out. She per-severed, and learned to speak like theauthority she was. By the time I sawher at Walker Creek Ranch, she waspracticed, crisp, and sure. The only dif-ference between her and your typicalspeaker was how conscientious sheseemed about answering every lastaudience question. She lingered after-ward with the group, even though, asan extreme introvert, she must havebeen itching to get home.

Aron’s description of highly sensitivepeople sounds as if she’s talking aboutEleanor Roosevelt herself. Indeed, inthe years since Aron first published herfindings, scientists have found thatwhen you put people whose geneticprofiles have been tentatively associ-ated with sensitivity and introversion(people with the gene variant of

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5-HTTLPR that characterized the rhesusmonkeys of chapter 3) inside an fMRImachine and show them pictures ofscared faces, accident victims, mutil-ated bodies, and polluted scenery, theamygdala—the part of the brain thatplays such an important role in pro-cessing emotions—becomes strongly ac-tivated. Aron and a team of scientistshave also found that when sensitivepeople see faces of people experiencingstrong feelings, they have more activa-tion than others do in areas of the brainassociated with empathy and with try-ing to control strong emotions.

It’s as if, like Eleanor Roosevelt, theycan’t help but feel what others feel.

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In 1921, FDR contracted polio. It was aterrible blow, and he considered retir-ing to the country to live out his life asan invalid gentleman. But Eleanor kepthis contacts with the Democratic Partyalive while he recovered, even agreeingto address a party fund-raiser. She wasterrified of public speaking, and notmuch good at it—she had a high-pitched voice and laughed nervously atall the wrong times. But she trained forthe event and made her way throughthe speech.

After that, Eleanor was still unsure ofherself, but she began working to fixthe social problems she saw all aroundher. She became a champion of wo-men’s issues and forged alliances withother serious-minded people. By 1928,when FDR was elected governor of NewYork, she was the director of the Bur-eau of Women’s Activities for the

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Democratic Party and one of the mostinfluential women in American politics.She and Franklin were now a fullyfunctioning partnership of his savoirfaire and her social conscience. “I knewabout social conditions, perhaps morethan he did,” Eleanor recalled withcharacteristic modesty. “But he knewabout government and how you coulduse government to improve things. AndI think we began to get an understand-ing of teamwork.”

FDR was elected president in 1933. Itwas the height of the Depression, andEleanor traveled the country—in asingle three-month period she covered40,000 miles—listening to ordinarypeople tell their hard-luck stories.People opened up to her in ways theydidn’t for other powerful figures. Shebecame for Franklin the voice of thedispossessed. When she returned home

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from her trips, she often told him whatshe’d seen and pressed him to act. Shehelped orchestrate government pro-grams for half-starved miners in Ap-palachia. She urged FDR to include wo-men and African-Americans in his pro-grams to put people back to work. Andshe helped arrange for Marian Ander-son to sing at the Lincoln Memorial.“She kept at him on issues which hemight, in the rush of things, havewanted to overlook,” the historianGeoff Ward has said. “She kept him to ahigh standard. Anyone who ever sawher lock eyes with him and say, ‘NowFranklin, you should …’ never forgot it.”

The shy young woman who’d beenterrified of public speaking grew tolove public life. Eleanor Roosevelt be-came the first First Lady to hold a pressconference, address a national conven-tion, write a newspaper column, and

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appear on talk radio. Later in her careershe served as a U.S. delegate to the Un-ited Nations, where she used her unusu-al brand of political skills and hard-wontoughness to help win passage of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights.

She never did outgrow her vulnerab-ility; all her life she suffered dark“Griselda moods,” as she called them(named for a princess in a medieval le-gend who withdrew into silence), andstruggled to “develop skin as tough asrhinoceros hide.” “I think people whoare shy remain shy always, but theylearn how to overcome it,” she said.But it was perhaps this sensitivity thatmade it easy for her to relate to the dis-enfranchised, and conscientious enoughto act on their behalf. FDR, elected atthe start of the Depression, is re-membered for his compassion. But it

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was Eleanor who made sure he knewhow suffering Americans felt.

The connection between sensitivity andconscience has long been observed.Imagine the following experiment, per-formed by the developmental psycholo-gist Grazyna Kochanska. A kind womanhands a toy to a toddler, explainingthat the child should be very careful be-cause it’s one of the woman’s favorites.The child solemnly nods assent and be-gins to play with the toy. Soon after-ward, it breaks dramatically in two,having been rigged to do so.

The woman looks upset and cries,“Oh my!” Then she waits to see whatthe child does next.

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Some children, it turns out, feel a lotmore guilty about their (supposed)transgression than others. They lookaway, hug themselves, stammer outconfessions, hide their faces. And it’sthe kids we might call the most sensit-ive, the most high-reactive, the oneswho are likely to be introverts who feelthe guiltiest. Being unusually sensitiveto all experience, both positive andnegative, they seem to feel both thesorrow of the woman whose toy isbroken and the anxiety of having donesomething bad. (In case you’re wonder-ing, the woman in the experimentsquickly returned to the room with thetoy “fixed” and reassurances that thechild had done nothing wrong.)

In our culture, guilt is a tainted word,but it’s probably one of the buildingblocks of conscience. The anxiety thesehighly sensitive toddlers feel upon

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apparently breaking the toy gives themthe motivation to avoid harmingsomeone’s plaything the next time. Byage four, according to Kochanska, thesesame kids are less likely than theirpeers to cheat or break rules, even whenthey think they can’t be caught. And bysix or seven, they’re more likely to bedescribed by their parents as havinghigh levels of moral traits such as em-pathy. They also have fewer behavioralproblems in general.

“Functional, moderate guilt,” writesKochanska, “may promote future altru-ism, personal responsibility, adaptivebehavior in school, and harmonious,competent, and prosocial relationshipswith parents, teachers, and friends.”This is an especially important set of at-tributes at a time when a 2010University of Michigan study showsthat college students today are 40

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percent less empathetic than they werethirty years ago, with much of the drophaving occurred since 2000. (Thestudy’s authors speculate that the de-cline in empathy is related to the pre-valence of social media, reality TV, and“hyper-competitiveness.”)

Of course, having these traits doesn’tmean that sensitive children are angels.They have selfish streaks like everyoneelse. Sometimes they act aloof and un-friendly. And when they’re over-whelmed by negative emotions likeshame or anxiety, says Aron, they canbe positively oblivious of other people’sneeds.

But the same receptivity to experi-ence that can make life difficult for thehighly sensitive also builds their con-sciences. Aron tells of one sensitiveteen who persuaded his mother to feeda homeless person he’d met in the park,

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and of another eight-year-old who criednot only when she felt embarrassed, butalso when her peers were teased.

We know this type of person wellfrom literature, probably because somany writers are sensitive introvertsthemselves. He “had gone through lifewith one skin fewer than most men,”the novelist Eric Malpass writes of hisquiet and cerebral protagonist, also anauthor, in the novel The Long LongDances. “The troubles of others movedhim more, as did also the teemingbeauty of life: moved him, compelledhim, to seize a pen and write aboutthem. [He was moved by] walking inthe hills, listening to a Schubert im-promptu, watching nightly from hisarmchair the smashing of bone andflesh that made up so much of the nineo’clock news.”

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The description of such characters asthin-skinned is meant metaphorically,but it turns out that it’s actually quiteliteral. Among the tests researchers useto measure personality traits are skinconductance tests, which record howmuch people sweat in response tonoises, strong emotions, and otherstimuli. High-reactive introverts sweatmore; low-reactive extroverts sweatless. Their skin is literally “thicker,”more impervious to stimuli, cooler tothe touch. In fact, according to some ofthe scientists I spoke to, this is whereour notion of being socially “cool”comes from; the lower-reactive you are,the cooler your skin, the cooler you are.(Incidentally, sociopaths lie at the ex-treme end of this coolness barometer,with extremely low levels of arousal,skin conductance, and anxiety. There is

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some evidence that sociopaths havedamaged amygdalae.)

Lie detectors (polygraphs) are par-tially skin conductance tests. They op-erate on the theory that lying causesanxiety, which triggers the skin to per-spire imperceptibly. When I was in col-lege, I applied for a summer job as asecretary at a large jewelry company. Ihad to take a lie detector test as part ofthe application process. The test wasadministered in a small, dingily litroom with linoleum floors, by a thin,cigarette-puffing man with pocked yel-low skin. The man asked me a series ofwarm-up questions: my name, address,and so on, to establish my baselinelevel of skin conductance. Then thequestions grew more probing and theexaminer’s manner harsher. Had I beenarrested? Had I ever shoplifted? Had Iused cocaine? With this last question

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my interrogator peered at me intently.As it happens, I never had tried cocaine.But he seemed to think I had. The ac-cusing look on his face was the equival-ent of the old policeman’s trick wherethey tell the suspect that they have thedamning evidence and there’s no pointdenying it.

I knew the man was mistaken, but Istill felt myself blush. And sure enough,the test came back showing I’d lied onthe cocaine question. My skin is so thin,apparently, that it sweats in response toimaginary crimes!

We tend to think of coolness as apose that you strike with a pair ofsunglasses, a nonchalant attitude, anddrink in hand. But maybe we didn’tchoose these social accessories at ran-dom. Maybe we’ve adopted darkglasses, relaxed body language, and al-cohol as signifiers precisely because

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they camouflage signs of a nervous sys-tem on overdrive. Sunglasses preventothers from seeing our eyes dilate withsurprise or fear; we know from Kagan’swork that a relaxed torso is a hallmarkof low reactivity; and alcohol removesour inhibitions and lowers our arousallevels. When you go to a football gameand someone offers you a beer, says thepersonality psychologist Brian Little,“they’re really saying hi, have a glass ofextroversion.”

Teenagers understand instinctivelythe physiology of cool. In Curtis Sitten-feld’s novel Prep, which explores theadolescent social rituals of boarding-school life with uncanny precision, theprotagonist, Lee, is invited unexpec-tedly to the dorm room of Aspeth, thecoolest girl in school. The first thingshe notices is how physically stimulat-ing Aspeth’s world is. “From outside the

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door, I could hear pounding music,”she observes. “White Christmas lights,currently turned on, were taped highup along all the walls, and on the northwall they’d hung an enormous orangeand green tapestry.… I felt overstimu-lated and vaguely irritated. The room Ishared with [my roommate] seemed soquiet and plain, our lives seemed soquiet and plain. Had Aspeth been borncool, I wondered, or had someonetaught her, like an older sister or acousin?”

Jock cultures sense the low-reactivephysiology of cool, too. For the earlyU.S. astronauts, having a low heartrate, which is associated with low re-activity, was a status symbol. Lieuten-ant Colonel John Glenn, who becamethe first American to orbit the Earthand would later run for president, wasadmired by his comrades for his

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supercool pulse rate during liftoff (only110 beats per minute).

But physical lack of cool may be moresocially valuable than we think. Thatdeep blush when a hard-bitten testerputs his face an inch from yours andasks if you’ve ever used cocaine turnsout to be a kind of social glue. In a re-cent experiment, a team of psycholo-gists led by Corine Dijk asked sixty-oddparticipants to read accounts of peoplewho’d done something morally wrong,like driving away from a car crash, orsomething embarrassing, like spillingcoffee on someone. The participantswere shown photographs of the wrong-doers, who had one of four different fa-cial expressions: shame or

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embarrassment (head and eyes down);shame/embarrassment plus a blush;neutral; or neutral with a blush. Thenthey were asked to rate how sympathet-ic and trustworthy the transgressorswere.

It turned out that the offenders whoblushed were judged a lot more posit-ively than those who didn’t. This wasbecause the blush signified concern forothers. As Dacher Keltner, a psycholo-gist at the University of California,Berkeley, who specializes in positiveemotions, put it to the New York Times,“A blush comes online in two or threeseconds and says, ‘I care; I know I viol-ated the social contract.’ ”

In fact, the very thing that manyhigh-reactives hate most about blush-ing—its uncontrollability—is whatmakes it so socially useful. “Because itis impossible to control the blush

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intentionally,” Dijk speculates, blushingis an authentic sign of embarrassment.And embarrassment, according to Kelt-ner, is a moral emotion. It shows humil-ity, modesty, and a desire to avoid ag-gression and make peace. It’s not aboutisolating the person who feels ashamed(which is how it sometimes feels toeasy blushers), but about bringingpeople together.

Keltner has tracked the roots of hu-man embarrassment and found thatafter many primates fight, they try tomake up. They do this partly by makinggestures of embarrassment of the kindwe see in humans—looking away,which acknowledges wrongdoing andthe intention to stop; lowering thehead, which shrinks one’s size; andpressing the lips together, a sign of in-hibition. These gestures in humanshave been called “acts of devotion,”

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writes Keltner. Indeed, Keltner, who istrained in reading people’s faces, hasstudied photos of moral heroes likeGandhi and the Dalai Lama and foundthat they feature just such controlledsmiles and averted eyes.

In his book, Born to Be Good, Keltnereven says that if he had to choose hismate by asking a single question at aspeed-dating event, the question hewould choose is: “What was your lastembarrassing experience?” Then hewould watch very carefully for lip-presses, blushing, and averted eyes.“The elements of the embarrassmentare fleeting statements the individualmakes about his or her respect for thejudgment of others,” he writes. “Embar-rassment reveals how much the indi-vidual cares about the rules that bindus to one another.”

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In other words, you want to makesure that your spouse cares what otherpeople think. It’s better to mind toomuch than to mind too little.

No matter how great the benefits ofblushing, the phenomenon of high sens-itivity raises an obvious question. Howdid the highly sensitive manage to sur-vive the harsh sorting-out process ofevolution? If the bold and aggressivegenerally prevail (as it sometimesseems), why were the sensitive not se-lected out of the human populationthousands of years ago, like tree frogscolored orange? For you may, like theprotagonist of The Long Long Dances, bemoved more deeply than the next per-son by the opening chords of a

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Schubert impromptu, and you mayflinch more than others at the smashingof bone and flesh, and you may havebeen the sort of child who squirmedhorribly when you thought you’dbroken someone’s toy, but evolutiondoesn’t reward such things.

Or does it?Elaine Aron has an idea about this.

She believes that high sensitivity wasnot itself selected for, but rather thecareful, reflective style that tends to ac-company it. “The type that is ‘sensitive’or ‘reactive’ would reflect a strategy ofobserving carefully before acting,” shewrites, “thus avoiding dangers, failures,and wasted energy, which would re-quire a nervous system specially de-signed to observe and detect subtle dif-ferences. It is a strategy of ‘betting on asure thing’ or ‘looking before you leap.’In contrast, the active strategy of the

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[other type] is to be first, without com-plete information and with the attend-ant risks—the strategy of ‘taking a longshot’ because the ‘early bird catches theworm’ and ‘opportunity only knocksonce.’ ”

In truth, many people Aron considerssensitive have some of the twenty-sevenattributes associated with the trait, butnot all of them. Maybe they’re sensitiveto light and noise, but not to coffee orpain; maybe they’re not sensitive toanything sensory, but they’re deepthinkers with a rich inner life. Maybethey’re not even introverts—only 70percent of sensitive people are, accord-ing to Aron, while the other 30 percentare extroverts (although this grouptends to report craving more downtimeand solitude than your typical extro-vert). This, speculates Aron, is becausesensitivity arose as a by-product of

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survival strategy, and you need onlysome, not all, of the traits to pull offthe strategy effectively.

There’s a great deal of evidence forAron’s point of view. Evolutionary bio-logists once believed that every animalspecies evolved to fit an ecologicalniche, that there was one ideal set ofbehaviors for that niche, and that spe-cies members whose behavior deviatedfrom that ideal would die off. But itturns out that it’s not only humans thatdivide into those who “watch and wait”and others who “just do it.” More than ahundred species in the animal kingdomare organized in roughly this way.

From fruit flies to house cats tomountain goats, from sunfish to bush-baby primates to Eurasian tit birds, sci-entists have discovered that approxim-ately 20 percent of the members ofmany species are “slow to warm up,”

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while the other 80 percent are “fast”types who venture forth boldly withoutnoticing much of what’s going onaround them. (Intriguingly, the percent-age of infants in Kagan’s lab who wereborn high-reactive was also, you’ll re-call, about twenty.)

If “fast” and “slow” animals hadparties, writes the evolutionary biolo-gist David Sloan Wilson, “some of thefasts would bore everyone with theirloud conversation, while others wouldmutter into their beer that they don’tget any respect. Slow animals are bestdescribed as shy, sensitive types. Theydon’t assert themselves, but they areobservant and notice things that are in-visible to the bullies. They are thewriters and artists at the party whohave interesting conversations out ofearshot of the bullies. They are the in-ventors who figure out new ways to

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behave, while the bullies steal theirpatents by copying their behavior.”

Once in a while, a newspaper or TVprogram runs a story about animal per-sonalities, casting shy behavior as un-seemly and bold behavior as attractiveand admirable. (That’s our kind of fruitfly!) But Wilson, like Aron, believes thatboth types of animals exist becausethey have radically different survivalstrategies, each of which pays off differ-ently and at different times. This iswhat’s known as the trade-off theory ofevolution, in which a particular trait isneither all good nor all bad, but a mixof pros and cons whose survival valuevaries according to circumstance.

“Shy” animals forage less often andwidely for food, conserving energy,sticking to the sidelines, and survivingwhen predators come calling. Bolderanimals sally forth, swallowed regularly

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by those farther up the food chain butsurviving when food is scarce and theyneed to assume more risk. When Wilsondropped metal traps into a pond full ofpumpkinseed fish, an event he saysmust have seemed to the fish as unset-tling as a flying saucer landing onEarth, the bold fish couldn’t help butinvestigate—and rushed headlong intoWilson’s traps. The shy fish hovered ju-diciously at the edge of the pond, mak-ing it impossible for Wilson to catchthem.

On the other hand, after Wilson suc-ceeded in trapping both types of fishwith an elaborate netting system andcarrying them back to his lab, the boldfish acclimated quickly to their new en-vironment and started eating a full fivedays earlier than did their shy brethren.“There is no single best … [animal]personality,” writes Wilson, “but rather

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a diversity of personalities maintainedby natural selection.”

Another example of the trade-off the-ory of evolution is a species known asTrinidadian guppies. These guppies de-velop personalities—with astonishingspeed, in evolutionary terms—to suitthe microclimates in which they live.Their natural predators are pike. Butsome guppy neighborhoods, upstreamof a waterfall for example, are pike-free. If you’re a guppy who grew up insuch a charmed locale, then chancesare you have a bold and carefree per-sonality well suited to la dolce vita. Incontrast, if your guppy family camefrom a “bad neighborhood” down-stream from the waterfall, where pikecruise the waterways menacingly, thenyou probably have a much more cir-cumspect style, just right for avoidingthe bad guys.

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The interesting thing is that these dif-ferences are heritable, not learned, sothat the offspring of bold guppies whomove into bad neighborhoods inherittheir parents’ boldness—even thoughthis puts them at a severe disadvantagecompared to their vigilant peers. Itdoesn’t take long for their genes tomutate, though, and descendants whomanage to survive tend to be carefultypes. The same thing happens to vigil-ant guppies when the pike suddenlydisappear; it takes about twenty yearsfor their descendants to evolve into fishwho act as if they haven’t a care in theworld.

The trade-off theory seems to applyequally to humans. Scientists have

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found that nomads who inherited theform of a particular gene linked to ex-troversion (specifically, to novelty-seek-ing) are better nourished than thosewithout this version of the gene. But insettled populations, people with thissame gene form have poorer nutrition.The same traits that make a nomadfierce enough to hunt and to defendlivestock against raiders may hindermore sedentary activities like farming,selling goods at the market, or focusingat school.

Or consider this trade-off: human ex-troverts have more sex partners than in-troverts do—a boon to any specieswanting to reproduce itself—but theycommit more adultery and divorcemore frequently, which is not a goodthing for the children of all those coup-lings. Extroverts exercise more, but in-troverts suffer fewer accidents and

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traumatic injuries. Extroverts enjoywider networks of social support, butcommit more crimes. As Jung specu-lated almost a century ago about thetwo types, “the one [extroversion] con-sists in a high rate of fertility, with lowpowers of defense and short duration oflife for the single individual; the other[introversion] consists in equipping theindividual with numerous means ofself-preservation plus a low fertilityrate.”

The trade-off theory may even applyto entire species. Among evolutionarybiologists, who tend to subscribe to thevision of lone individuals hell-bent onreproducing their own DNA, the ideathat species include individuals whosetraits promote group survival is hotlydebated and, not long ago, could prac-tically get you kicked out of theacademy. But this view is slowly

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gaining acceptance. Some scientistseven speculate that the evolutionarybasis for traits like sensitivity isheightened compassion for the suffer-ing of other members of one’s species,especially one’s family.

But you don’t have to go that far. AsAron explains, it makes sense that an-imal groups depend on their sensitivemembers for survival. “Suppose a herdof antelope … has a few members whoare constantly stopping their grazing touse their keen senses to watch for pred-ators,” she writes. “Herds with suchsensitive, watchful individuals wouldsurvive better, and so continue tobreed, and so continue to have somesensitive individuals born in thegroup.”

And why should it be any differentfor humans? We need our Eleanor

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Roosevelts as surely as grazing herdsdepend on their sensitive antelopes.

In addition to “shy” and “bold” anim-als, and to “fast” and “slow” ones, bio-logists sometimes speak of the “hawk”and “dove” members of a given species.Great tit birds, for example, some ofwhom are much more aggressive thanothers, often act like case studies in aninternational relations class. Thesebirds feed on beech tree nuts, and inyears when nuts are scarce, the hawk-ish female birds do better, just as you’dexpect, because they’re quick tochallenge nut-eating competitors to aduel. But in seasons when there areplenty of beech nuts to go around, thefemale “doves”—who, incidentally,tend to make more attentive moth-ers—do better than the “hawks,” be-cause the hawks waste time and bodily

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health getting into fights for no goodreason.

Male great tits, on the other hand,have the opposite pattern. This is be-cause their main role in life is not tofind food but to defend territory. Inyears when food is scarce, so many oftheir fellow tit birds die of hunger thatthere’s enough space for all. The hawk-ish males then fall into the same trap astheir female comrades during nutty sea-sons—they brawl, squandering preciousresources with each bloody battle. Butin good years, when competition fornesting territory heats up, aggressionpays for the hawkish male tit bird.

During times of war or fear—the hu-man equivalent of a bad nut season for

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female tit birds—it might seem thatwhat we need most are aggressive hero-ic types. But if our entire populationconsisted of warriors, there would beno one to notice, let alone battle, po-tentially deadly but far quieter threatslike viral disease or climate change.

Consider Vice President Al Gore’sdecades-long crusade to raise aware-ness of global warming. Gore is, bymany accounts, an introvert. “If yousend an introvert into a reception or anevent with a hundred other people hewill emerge with less energy than hehad going in,” says a former aide.“Gore needs a rest after an event.” Goreacknowledges that his skills are notconducive to stumping and speechmak-ing. “Most people in politics draw en-ergy from backslapping and shakinghands and all that,” he has said. “Idraw energy from discussing ideas.”

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But combine that passion for thoughtwith attention to subtlety—both com-mon characteristics of introverts—andyou get a very powerful mix. In 1968,when Gore was a college student atHarvard, he took a class with an influ-ential oceanographer who presentedearly evidence linking the burning offossil fuels with the greenhouse effect.Gore’s ears perked up.

He tried to tell others what he knew.But he found that people wouldn’tlisten. It was as if they couldn’t hearthe alarm bells that rang so loudly inhis ears.

“When I went to Congress in themiddle of the 1970s, I helped organizethe first hearings on global warming,”he recalls in the Oscar-winning movieAn Inconvenient Truth—a film whosemost stirring action scenes involve thesolitary figure of Gore wheeling his

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suitcase through a midnight airport.Gore seems genuinely puzzled that noone paid attention: “I actually thoughtand believed that the story would becompelling enough to cause a real seachange in the way Congress reacted tothat issue. I thought they would bestartled, too. And they weren’t.”

But if Gore had known then what weknow now about Kagan’s research, andAron’s, he might have been less sur-prised by his colleagues’ reactions. Hemight even have used his insight intopersonality psychology to get them tolisten. Congress, he could have safelyassumed, is made up of some of theleast sensitive people in the coun-try—people who, if they’d been kids inone of Kagan’s experiments, wouldhave marched up to oddly attiredclowns and strange ladies wearing gasmasks without so much as a backward

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glance at their mothers. RememberKagan’s introverted Tom and extrover-ted Ralph? Well, Congress is full ofRalphs—it was designed for people likeRalph. Most of the Toms of the worlddo not want to spend their days plan-ning campaigns and schmoozing withlobbyists.

These Ralph-like Congressmen can bewonderful people—exuberant, fearless,persuasive—but they’re unlikely to feelalarmed by a photograph of a tinycrack in a distant glacier. They needmore intense stimulation to get them tolisten. Which is why Gore finally gothis message across when he teamed upwith whiz-bang Hollywood types whocould package his warning into thespecial-effects-laden show that becameAn Inconvenient Truth.

Gore also drew on his own strengths,using his natural focus and diligence to

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tirelessly promote the movie. He visiteddozens of movie theaters across thecountry to meet with viewers, and gaveinnumerable TV and radio interviews.On the subject of global warming, Gorehas a clarity of voice that eluded him asa politician. For Gore, immersing him-self in a complicated scientific puzzlecomes naturally. Focusing on a singlepassion rather than tap dancing fromsubject to subject comes naturally. Eventalking to crowds comes naturally whenthe topic is climate change: Gore onglobal warming has an easy charismaand connection with audience membersthat eluded him as a political candid-ate. That’s because this mission, forhim, is not about politics or personality.It’s about the call of his conscience.“It’s about the survival of the planet,”he says. “Nobody is going to care who

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won or lost any election when the earthis uninhabitable.”

If you’re a sensitive sort, then youmay be in the habit of pretending to bemore of a politician and less cautious orsingle-mindedly focused than you actu-ally are. But in this chapter I’m askingyou to rethink this view. Withoutpeople like you, we will, quite literally,drown.

Back here at Walker Creek Ranch andthe gathering for sensitive people, theExtrovert Ideal and its primacy of coolis turned upside down. If “cool” is lowreactivity that predisposes a person toboldness or nonchalance, then thecrowd that has come to meet ElaineAron is deeply uncool.

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The atmosphere is startling simplybecause it’s so unusual. It’s somethingyou might find at a yoga class or in aBuddhist monastery, except that herethere’s no unifying religion or world-view, only a shared temperament. It’seasy to see this when Aron delivers herspeech. She has long observed thatwhen she speaks to groups of highlysensitive people the room is morehushed and respectful than would beusual in a public gathering place, andthis is true throughout her presentation.But it carries over all weekend.

I’ve never heard so many “afteryou’s” and “thank you’s” as I do here.During meals, which are held at longcommunal tables in a summer-campstyle, open-air cafeteria, people plungehungrily into searching conversations.There’s a lot of one-on-one discussionabout intimate topics like childhood

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experiences and adult love lives, andsocial issues like health care and cli-mate change; there’s not much in theway of storytelling intended to enter-tain. People listen carefully to each oth-er and respond thoughtfully; Aron hasnoted that sensitive people tend tospeak softly because that’s how theyprefer others to communicate withthem.

“In the rest of the world,” observesMichelle, a web designer who leans for-ward as if bracing herself against animaginary blast of wind, “you make astatement and people may or may notdiscuss it. Here you make a statementand someone says, ‘What does thatmean?’ And if you ask that question ofsomeone else, they actually answer.”

It’s not that there’s no small talk, ob-serves Strickland, the leader of thegathering. It’s that it comes not at the

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beginning of conversations but at theend. In most settings, people use smalltalk as a way of relaxing into a new re-lationship, and only once they’re com-fortable do they connect more seri-ously. Sensitive people seem to do thereverse. They “enjoy small talk onlyafter they’ve gone deep,” says Strick-land. “When sensitive people are in en-vironments that nurture their authenti-city, they laugh and chitchat just asmuch as anyone else.”

On the first night we drift to our bed-rooms, housed in a dormlike building. Ibrace myself instinctively: now’s thetime when I’ll want to read or sleep,but will instead be called upon to havea pillow fight (summer camp) or play aloud and boring drinking game(college). But at Walker Creek Ranch,my roommate, a twenty-seven-year-oldsecretary with huge, doe-like eyes and

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the ambition to become an author, ishappy to spend the evening writingpeacefully in her journal. I do the same.

Of course, the weekend is not com-pletely without tension. Some peopleare reserved to the point of appearingsullen. Sometimes the do-your-own-thing policy threatens to devolve intomutual loneliness as everyone goestheir own separate ways. In fact, thereis such a deficit of the social behaviorwe call “cool” that I begin thinkingsomeone should be cracking jokes, stir-ring things up, handing out rum-and-Cokes. Shouldn’t they?

The truth is, as much as I cravebreathing room for sensitive types, Ienjoy hail-fellows-well-met, too. I’mglad for the “cool” among us, and Imiss them this weekend. I’m starting tospeak so softly that I feel like I’m

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putting myself to sleep. I wonder ifdeep down the others feel this way, too.

Tom, the software engineer andAbraham Lincoln look-alike, tells me ofa former girlfriend who was alwaysthrowing open the doors of her houseto friends and strangers. She was ad-venturous in every way: she loved newfood, new sexual experiences, newpeople. It didn’t work out betweenthem—Tom eventually craved the com-pany of a partner who would focusmore on their relationship and less onthe outside world, and he’s happilymarried now to just such a wo-man—but he’s glad for the time withhis ex-girlfriend.

As Tom talks, I think of how much Imiss my husband, Ken, who’s backhome in New York and not a sensitivetype either, far from it. Sometimes thisis frustrating: if something moves me to

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tears of empathy or anxiety, he’ll betouched, but grow impatient if I staythat way too long. But I also know thathis tougher attitude is good for me, andI find his company endlessly delightful.I love his effortless charm. I love thathe never runs out of interesting thingsto say. I love how he pours his heartand soul into everything he does, andeveryone he loves, especially ourfamily.

But most of all I love his way of ex-pressing compassion. Ken may be ag-gressive, more aggressive in a weekthan I’ll be in a lifetime, but he uses iton behalf of others. Before we met, heworked for the UN in war zones allover the world, where, among otherthings, he conducted prisoner-of-warand detainee release negotiations. Hewould march into fetid jails and facedown camp commanders with machine

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guns strapped to their chests until theyagreed to release young girls who’dcommitted no crime other than to befemale and victims of rape. After manyyears on the job, he went home andwrote down what he’d witnessed, inbooks and articles that bristled withrage. He didn’t write in the style of asensitive person, and he made a lot ofpeople angry. But he wrote like a per-son who cares, desperately.

I thought that Walker Creek Ranchwould make me long for a world of thehighly sensitive, a world in whicheveryone speaks softly and no one car-ries a big stick. But instead it reinforcedmy deeper yearning for balance. Thisbalance, I think, is what Elaine Aronwould say is our natural state of being,at least in Indo-European cultures likeours, which she observes have longbeen divided into “warrior kings” and

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“priestly advisers,” into the executivebranch and the judicial branch, intobold and easy FDRs and sensitive, con-scientious Eleanor Roosevelts.

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7WHY DID WALL STREET CRASH AND

WARREN BUFFETT PROSPER?

How Introverts and Extroverts Think(and Process Dopamine) Differently

Tocqueville saw that the life of constantaction and decision which was entailed

by the democratic and businesslike char-acter of American life put a premiumupon rough and ready habits of mind,

quick decision, and the prompt seizure ofopportunities—and that all this activity

was not propitious for deliberation, elab-oration, or precision in thought.

—RICHARD HOFSTADTER, IN Anti-Intel-lectualism in America

Just after 7:30 a.m. on December 11,2008, the year of the great stock mar-ket crash, Dr. Janice Dorn’s phone rang.The markets had opened on the EastCoast to another session of carnage.Housing prices were plummeting, creditmarkets were frozen, and GM teeteredon the brink of bankruptcy.

Dorn took the call from her bedroom,as she often does, wearing a headsetand perched atop her green duvet. Theroom was decorated sparely. The mostcolorful thing in it was Dorn herself,who, with her flowing red hair, ivoryskin, and trim frame, looks like a ma-ture version of Lady Godiva. Dorn has aPhD in neuroscience, with a specialty inbrain anatomy. She’s also an MDtrained in psychiatry, an active traderin the gold futures market, and a “fin-ancial psychiatrist” who has counseledan estimated six hundred traders.

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“Hi, Janice!” said the caller thatmorning, a confident-sounding mannamed Alan. “Do you have time totalk?”

Dr. Dorn did not have time. A daytrader who prides herself on being inand out of trading positions every halfhour, she was eager to start trading.But Dorn heard a desperate note inAlan’s voice. She agreed to take thecall.

Alan was a sixty-year-old midwest-erner who struck Dorn as a salt-of-the-earth type, hardworking and loyal. Hehad the jovial and assertive manner ofan extrovert, and he maintained hisgood cheer despite the story of disasterhe proceeded to tell. Alan and his wifehad worked all their lives, and man-aged to sock away a million dollars forretirement. But four months earlier he’dgotten the idea that, despite having no

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experience in the markets, he shouldbuy a hundred thousand dollars’ worthof GM stock, based on reports that theU.S. government might bail out theauto industry. He was convinced it wasa no-lose investment.

After his trade went through, the me-dia reported that the bailout might nothappen after all. The market sold offGM and the stock price fell. But Alanimagined the thrill of winning big. Itfelt so real he could taste it. He heldfirm. The stock fell again, and again,and kept dropping until finally Alan de-cided to sell, at a big loss.

There was worse to come. When thenext news cycle suggested that the bail-out would happen after all, Alan got ex-cited all over again and invested anoth-er hundred thousand dollars, buyingmore stock at the lower price. But the

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same thing happened: the bailout star-ted looking uncertain.

Alan “reasoned” (this word is in quo-tation marks because, according toDorn, conscious reasoning had little todo with Alan’s behavior) that the pricecouldn’t go much lower. He held on, sa-voring the idea of how much fun heand his wife would have spending allthe money he stood to make. Again thestock went lower. When finally it hitseven dollars per share, Alan sold. Andbought yet again, in a flush of exhilara-tion, when he heard that the bailoutmight happen after all …

By the time GM’s stock price fell totwo dollars a share, Alan had lost sevenhundred thousand dollars, or 70 percentof his family nest egg.

He was devastated. He asked Dorn ifshe could help recoup his losses. Shecould not. “It’s gone,” she told him.

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“You are never going to make thatmoney back.”

He asked what he’d done wrong.Dorn had many ideas about that. As

an amateur, Alan shouldn’t have beentrading in the first place. And he’drisked far too much money; he shouldhave limited his exposure to 5 percentof his net worth, or $50,000. But thebiggest problem may have been beyondAlan’s control: Dorn believed he wasexperiencing an excess of somethingpsychologists call reward sensitivity.

A reward-sensitive person is highlymotivated to seek rewards—from a pro-motion to a lottery jackpot to an enjoy-able evening out with friends. Rewardsensitivity motivates us to pursue goalslike sex and money, social status andinfluence. It prompts us to climb lad-ders and reach for faraway branches inorder to gather life’s choicest fruits.

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But sometimes we’re too sensitive torewards. Reward sensitivity on over-drive gets people into all kinds oftrouble. We can get so excited by theprospect of juicy prizes, like winningbig in the stock market, that we takeoutsized risks and ignore obvious warn-ing signals.

Alan was presented with plenty ofthese signals, but was so animated bythe prospect of winning big that hecouldn’t see them. Indeed, he fell into aclassic pattern of reward sensitivity runamok: at exactly the moments when thewarning signs suggested slowing down,he sped up—dumping money hecouldn’t afford to lose into a speculat-ive series of trades.

Financial history is full of examplesof players accelerating when theyshould be braking. Behavioral econom-ists have long observed that executives

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buying companies can get so excitedabout beating out their competitorsthat they ignore signs that they’re over-paying. This happens so frequently thatit has a name: “deal fever,” followed by“the winner’s curse.” The AOL–TimeWarner merger, which wiped out $200billion of Time Warner shareholdervalue, is a classic example. There wereplenty of warnings that AOL’s stock,which was the currency for the merger,was wildly overvalued, yet TimeWarner’s directors approved the dealunanimously.

“I did it with as much or more excite-ment and enthusiasm as I did when Ifirst made love some forty-two yearsago,” exclaimed Ted Turner, one ofthose directors and the largest individu-al shareholder in the company. “TEDTURNER: IT’S BETTER THAN SEX,” an-nounced the New York Post the day

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after the deal was struck, a headline towhich we’ll return for its power to ex-plain why smart people can sometimesbe too reward-sensitive.

You may be wondering what all thishas to do with introversion and extro-version. Don’t we all get a little carriedaway sometimes?

The answer is yes, except that someof us do so more than others. Dorn hasobserved that her extroverted clientsare more likely to be highly reward-sensitive, while the introverts are morelikely to pay attention to warning sig-nals. They’re more successful at regulat-ing their feelings of desire or excite-ment. They protect themselves betterfrom the downside. “My introvert

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traders are much more able to say, ‘OK,Janice, I do feel these excited emotionscoming up in me, but I understand thatI can’t act on them.’ The introverts aremuch better at making a plan, stayingwith a plan, being very disciplined.”

To understand why introverts and ex-troverts might react differently to theprospect of rewards, says Dorn, youhave to know a little about brain struc-ture. As we saw in chapter 4, our limbicsystem, which we share with the mostprimitive mammals and which Dorncalls the “old brain,” is emotional andinstinctive. It comprises various struc-tures, including the amygdala, and it’shighly interconnected with the nucleusaccumbens, sometimes called thebrain’s “pleasure center.” We examinedthe anxious side of the old brain whenwe explored the role of the amygdala in

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high reactivity and introversion. Nowwe’re about to see its greedy side.

The old brain, according to Dorn, isconstantly telling us, “Yes, yes, yes! Eatmore, drink more, have more sex, takelots of risk, go for all the gusto you canget, and above all, do not think!” Thereward-seeking, pleasure-loving part ofthe old brain is what Dorn believesspurred Alan to treat his life savingslike chips at the casino.

We also have a “new brain” calledthe neocortex, which evolved manythousands of years after the limbic sys-tem. The new brain is responsible forthinking, planning, language, anddecision-making—some of the very fac-ulties that make us human. Althoughthe new brain also plays a significantrole in our emotional lives, it’s the seatof rationality. Its job, according toDorn, includes saying, “No, no, no!

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Don’t do that, because it’s dangerous,makes no sense, and is not in your bestinterests, or those of your family, or ofsociety.”

So where was Alan’s neocortex whenhe was chasing stock market gains?

The old brain and the new brain dowork together, but not always effi-ciently. Sometimes they’re actually inconflict, and then our decisions are afunction of which one is sending outstronger signals. So when Alan’s oldbrain sent its breathless messages up tohis new brain, it probably responded asa neocortex should: it told his old brainto slow down. It said, Watch out! But itlost the ensuing tug-of-war.

We all have old brains, of course. Butjust as the amygdala of a high-reactiveperson is more sensitive than averageto novelty, so do extroverts seem to bemore susceptible than introverts to the

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reward-seeking cravings of the oldbrain. In fact, some scientists are start-ing to explore the idea that reward-sensitivity is not only an interesting fea-ture of extroversion; it is what makes anextrovert an extrovert. Extroverts, inother words, are characterized by theirtendency to seek rewards, from top dogstatus to sexual highs to cold cash.They’ve been found to have greatereconomic, political, and hedonistic am-bitions than introverts; even their soci-ability is a function of reward-sensitiv-ity, according to this view—extrovertssocialize because human connection isinherently gratifying.

What underlies all this reward-seek-ing? The key seems to be positive emo-tion. Extroverts tend to experiencemore pleasure and excitement than in-troverts do—emotions that are activ-ated, explains the psychologist Daniel

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Nettle in his illuminating book on per-sonality, “in response to the pursuit orcapture of some resource that is valued.Excitement builds towards the anticip-ated capture of that resource. Joy fol-lows its capture.” Extroverts, in otherwords, often find themselves in an emo-tional state we might call “buzz”—arush of energized, enthusiastic feelings.This is a sensation we all know andlike, but not necessarily to the same de-gree or with the same frequency: extro-verts seem to get an extra buzz fromthe pursuit and attainment of theirgoals.

The basis of buzz appears to be ahigh degree of activity in a network ofstructures in the brain—often called the“reward system”—including the orbito-frontal cortex, the nucleus accumbens,and the amygdala. The job of the re-ward system is to get us excited about

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potential goodies; fMRI experimentshave shown that the system is activatedby any number of possible delights,from anticipation of a squirt of Kool-Aid on the tongue, to money, to pic-tures of attractive people.

The neurons that transmit informa-tion in the reward network operate inpart through a neurotransmitter—achemical that carries informationbetween brain cells—called dopamine.Dopamine is the “reward chemical” re-leased in response to anticipated pleas-ures. The more responsive your brain isto dopamine, or the higher the level ofdopamine you have available to re-lease, some scientists believe, the morelikely you are to go after rewards likesex, chocolate, money, and status.Stimulating mid-brain dopamine activ-ity in mice gets them to run around ex-citedly in an empty cage until they

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drop dead of starvation. Cocaine andheroin, which stimulate dopamine-re-leasing neurons in humans, makepeople euphoric.

Extroverts’ dopamine pathways ap-pear to be more active than those of in-troverts. Although the exact relation-ship between extroversion, dopamine,and the brain’s reward system has notbeen conclusively established, earlyfindings have been intriguing. In oneexperiment, Richard Depue, a neurobio-logist at Cornell University, gave anamphetamine that activates the dopam-ine system to a group of introverts andextroverts, and found that the extro-verts had a stronger response. Anotherstudy found that extroverts who wingambling games have more activity inthe reward-sensitive regions of theirbrains than victorious introverts do.Still other research has shown that the

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medial orbitofrontal cortex, a key com-ponent of the brain’s dopamine-drivenreward system, is larger in extrovertsthan in introverts.

By contrast, introverts “have a smal-ler response” in the reward system,writes psychologist Nettle, “and so goless out of their way to follow up [re-ward] cues.” They will, “like anyone,be drawn from time to time to sex, andparties, and status, but the kick they getwill be relatively small, so they are notgoing to break a leg to get there.” Inshort, introverts just don’t buzz aseasily.

In some ways, extroverts are lucky;buzz has a delightful champagne-bubble quality. It fires us up to work

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and play hard. It gives us the courageto take chances. Buzz also gets us to dothings that would otherwise seem toodifficult, like giving speeches. Imagineyou work hard to prepare a talk on asubject you care about. You get yourmessage across, and when you finishthe audience rises to its feet, its clap-ping sustained and sincere. One personmight leave the room feeling, “I’m gladI got my message across, but I’m alsohappy it’s over; now I can get back tothe rest of my life.” Another person,more sensitive to buzz, might walkaway feeling, “What a trip! Did youhear that applause? Did you see the ex-pression on their faces when I madethat life-changing point? This is great!”

But buzz also has considerable down-sides. “Everyone assumes that it’s goodto accentuate positive emotions, butthat isn’t correct,” the psychology

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professor Richard Howard told me,pointing to the example of soccer vic-tories that end in violence and propertydamage. “A lot of antisocial and self-de-feating behavior results from peoplewho amplify positive emotions.”

Another disadvantage of buzz may beits connection to risk—sometimes out-sized risk. Buzz can cause us to ignorewarning signs we should be heeding.When Ted Turner (who appears to bean extreme extrovert) compared theAOL–Time Warner deal to his first sexu-al experience, he may have been tellingus that he was in the same buzzy stateof mind as an adolescent who’s so ex-cited about spending the night with hisnew girlfriend that he’s not thinkingmuch about the consequences. Thisblindness to danger may explain whyextroverts are more likely than intro-verts to be killed while driving, be

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hospitalized as a result of accident orinjury, smoke, have risky sex, particip-ate in high-risk sports, have affairs, andremarry. It also helps explain why ex-troverts are more prone than introvertsto overconfidence—defined as greaterconfidence unmatched by greater abil-ity. Buzz is JFK’s Camelot, but it’s alsothe Kennedy Curse.

This theory of extroversion is stillyoung, and it is not absolute. We can’tsay that all extroverts constantly craverewards or that all introverts alwaysbrake for trouble. Still, the theory sug-gests that we should rethink the rolesthat introverts and extroverts play intheir own lives, and in organizations. Itsuggests that when it comes time to

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make group decisions, extroverts woulddo well to listen to introverts—espe-cially when they see problems ahead.

In the wake of the 2008 crash, a fin-ancial catastrophe caused in part byuncalculated risk-taking and blindnessto threat, it became fashionable to spec-ulate whether we’d have been better offwith more women and fewer men—orless testosterone—on Wall Street. Butmaybe we should also ask what mighthave happened with a few more intro-verts at the helm—and a lot lessdopamine.

Several studies answer this questionimplicitly. Kellogg School of Manage-ment Professor Camelia Kuhnen hasfound that the variation of a dopamine-regulating gene (DRD4) associated witha particularly thrill-seeking version ofextroversion is a strong predictor offinancial risk-taking. By contrast,

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people with a variant of a serotonin-regulating gene linked to introversionand sensitivity take 28 percent less fin-ancial risk than others. They have alsobeen found to outperform their peerswhen playing gambling games callingfor sophisticated decision-making.(When faced with a low probability ofwinning, people with this gene varianttend to be risk-averse; when they havea high probability of winning, they be-come relatively risk-seeking.) Anotherstudy, of sixty-four traders at an invest-ment bank, found that the highest-per-forming traders tended to be emotion-ally stable introverts.

Introverts also seem to be better thanextroverts at delaying gratification, acrucial life skill associated witheverything from higher SAT scores andincome to lower body mass index. Inone study, scientists gave participants

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the choice of a small reward immedi-ately (a gift certificate from Amazon) ora bigger gift certificate in two to fourweeks. Objectively, the bigger rewardin the near but not immediate futurewas the more desirable option. Butmany people went for the “I want itnow” choice—and when they did, abrain scanner revealed that their re-ward network was activated. Thosewho held out for the larger reward twoweeks hence showed more activity inthe prefrontal cortex—the part of thenew brain that talks us out of sendingill-considered e-mails and eating toomuch chocolate cake. (A similar studysuggests that the former group tendedto be extroverts and the latter groupintroverts.)

Back in the 1990s, when I was a juni-or associate at a Wall Street law firm, Ifound myself on a team of lawyers

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representing a bank considering buyinga portfolio of subprime mortgage loansmade by other lenders. My job was toperform due diligence—to review thedocumentation to see whether the loanshad been made with the proper paper-work. Had the borrowers been notifiedof the interest rates they were slated topay? That the rates would go up overtime?

The papers turned out to be chock-full of irregularities. If I’d been in thebankers’ shoes, this would have mademe nervous, very nervous. But whenour legal team summarized the risks ina caution-filled conference call, thebankers seemed utterly untroubled.They saw the potential profits of buyingthose loans at a discount, and theywanted to go ahead with the deal. Yetit was just this kind of risk-reward mis-calculation that contributed to the

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failure of many banks during the GreatRecession of 2008.

At about the same time I evaluatedthat portfolio of loans, I heard a storycirculating on Wall Street about a com-petition among investment banks for aprestigious piece of business. Each ofthe major banks sent a squad of theirtop employees to pitch the client. Eachteam deployed the usual tools: spreadsheets, “pitch books,” and PowerPointpresentations. But the winning team ad-ded its own piece of theatrics: they raninto the room wearing matching base-ball caps and T-shirts emblazoned withthe letters FUD, an acronym for Fear,Uncertainty, and Doubt. In this case FUDhad been crossed out with an emphaticred X; FUD was an unholy trinity. Thatteam, the vanquishers of FUD, won thecontest.

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Disdain for FUD—and for the type ofperson who tends to experience it—iswhat helped cause the crash, saysBoykin Curry, a managing director ofthe investment firm Eagle Capital, whohad front-row seats to the 2008 melt-down. Too much power was concen-trated in the hands of aggressive risk-takers. “For twenty years, the DNA ofnearly every financial institu-tion … morphed dangerously,” he toldNewsweek magazine at the height of thecrash. “Each time someone at the tablepressed for more leverage and morerisk, the next few years proved them‘right.’ These people were emboldened,they were promoted and they gainedcontrol of ever more capital. Mean-while, anyone in power who hesitated,who argued for caution, was proved‘wrong.’ The cautious types were in-creasingly intimidated, passed over for

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promotion. They lost their hold on cap-ital. This happened every day in almostevery financial institution, over andover, until we ended up with a veryspecific kind of person running things.”

Curry is a Harvard Business Schoolgrad and, with his wife, CelerieKemble, a Palm Beach–born designer, aprominent fixture on New York politic-al and social scenes. Which is to saythat he would seem to be a card-carry-ing member of what he calls the “go-goaggressive” crowd, and an unlikely ad-vocate for the importance of introverts.But one thing he’s not shy about is histhesis that it was forceful extrovertswho caused the global financial crash.

“People with certain personalitytypes got control of capital and institu-tions and power,” Curry told me. “Andpeople who are congenitally more cau-tious and introverted and statistical in

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their thinking became discredited andpushed aside.”

Vincent Kaminski, a Rice Universitybusiness school professor who onceserved as managing director of researchfor Enron, the company that famouslyfiled for bankruptcy in 2001 as a resultof reckless business practices, told theWashington Post a similar story of abusiness culture in which aggressiverisk-takers enjoyed too high a status re-lative to cautious introverts. Kaminski,a soft-spoken and careful man, was oneof the few heroes of the Enron scandal.He repeatedly tried to sound the alarmwith senior management that the com-pany had entered into business dealsrisky enough to threaten its survival.When the top brass wouldn’t listen, herefused to sign off on these dangeroustransactions and ordered his team notto work on them. The company

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stripped him of his power to reviewcompany-wide deals.

“There have been some complaints,Vince, that you’re not helping people todo transactions,” the president of Enrontold him, according to Conspiracy ofFools, a book about the Enron scandal.“Instead, you’re spending all your timeacting like cops. We don’t need cops,Vince.”

But they did need them, and still do.When the credit crisis threatened theviability of some of Wall Street’sbiggest banks in 2007, Kaminski sawthe same thing happening all overagain. “Let’s just say that all thedemons of Enron have not been exor-cised,” he told the Post in November ofthat year. The problem, he explained,was not only that many had failed tounderstand the risks the banks weretaking. It was also that those who did

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understand were consistently ig-nored—in part because they had thewrong personality style: “Many times Ihave been sitting across the table froman energy trader and I would say, ‘Yourportfolio will implode if this specificsituation happens.’ And the traderwould start yelling at me and telling meI’m an idiot, that such a situationwould never happen. The problem isthat, on one side, you have a rainmakerwho is making lots of money for thecompany and is treated like a superstar,and on the other side you have an in-troverted nerd. So who do you thinkwins?”

But what exactly is the mechanism bywhich buzz clouds good judgment?

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How did Janice Dorn’s client, Alan, dis-miss the danger signs screaming that hemight lose 70 percent of his life sav-ings? What prompts some people to actas if FUD doesn’t exist?

One answer comes from an intriguingline of research conducted by theUniversity of Wisconsin psychologistJoseph Newman. Imagine that you’vebeen invited to Newman’s lab to parti-cipate in one of his studies. You’rethere to play a game: the more pointsyou get, the more money you win.Twelve different numbers flash across acomputer screen, one at a time, in noparticular order. You’re given a button,as if you were a game-show contestant,which you can press or not as eachnumber appears. If you press the buttonfor a “good” number, you win points; ifyou press for a “bad” number, you losepoints; and if you don’t press at all,

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nothing happens. Through trial and er-ror you learn that four is a nice numberand nine is not. So the next time thenumber nine flashes across your screen,you know not to press that button.

Except that sometimes people pressthe button for the bad numbers, evenwhen they should know better. Extro-verts, especially highly impulsive extro-verts, are more likely than introverts tomake this mistake. Why? Well, in thewords of psychologists John Brebnerand Chris Cooper, who have shown thatextroverts think less and act faster onsuch tasks: introverts are “geared to in-spect” and extroverts “geared torespond.”

But the more interesting aspect ofthis puzzling behavior is not what theextroverts do before they’ve hit thewrong button, but what they do after.When introverts hit the number nine

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button and find they’ve lost a point,they slow down before moving on tothe next number, as if to reflect onwhat went wrong. But extroverts notonly fail to slow down, they actuallyspeed up.

This seems strange; why would any-one do this? Newman explains that itmakes perfect sense. If you focus onachieving your goals, as reward-sensit-ive extroverts do, you don’t want any-thing to get in your way—neithernaysayers nor the number nine. Youspeed up in an attempt to knock theseroadblocks down.

Yet this is a crucially important mis-step, because the longer you pause toprocess surprising or negative feedback,the more likely you are to learn from it.If you force extroverts to pause, saysNewman, they’ll do just as well as in-troverts at the numbers game. But, left

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to their own devices, they don’t stop.And so they don’t learn to avoid thetrouble staring them in the face. New-man says that this is exactly whatmight happen to extroverts like TedTurner when bidding for a company onauction. “When a person bids up toohigh,” he told me, “that’s because theydidn’t inhibit a response they shouldhave inhibited. They didn’t consider in-formation that should have been weigh-ing on their decision.”

Introverts, in contrast, are constitu-tionally programmed to downplay re-ward—to kill their buzz, you mightsay—and scan for problems. “As soonthey get excited,” says Newman,“they’ll put the brakes on and thinkabout peripheral issues that may bemore important. Introverts seem to bespecifically wired or trained so whenthey catch themselves getting excited

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and focused on a goal, their vigilanceincreases.”

Introverts also tend to compare newinformation with their expectations, hesays. They ask themselves, “Is this whatI thought would happen? Is it how itshould be?” And when the situationfalls short of expectations, they form as-sociations between the moment of dis-appointment (losing points) andwhatever was going on in their envir-onment at the time of the disappoint-ment (hitting the number nine.) Theseassociations let them make accuratepredictions about how to react to warn-ing signals in the future.

Introverts’ disinclination to chargeahead is not only a hedge against risk;

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it also pays off on intellectual tasks.Here are some of the things we knowabout the relative performance of intro-verts and extroverts at complexproblem-solving. Extroverts get bettergrades than introverts during element-ary school, but introverts outperformextroverts in high school and college.At the university level, introversionpredicts academic performance betterthan cognitive ability. One study tested141 college students’ knowledge oftwenty different subjects, from art toastronomy to statistics, and found thatintroverts knew more than the extro-verts about every single one of them.Introverts receive disproportionatenumbers of graduate degrees, NationalMerit Scholarship finalist positions, andPhi Beta Kappa keys. They outperformextroverts on the Watson-Glaser CriticalThinking Appraisal test, an assessment

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of critical thinking widely used by busi-nesses for hiring and promotion.They’ve been shown to excel atsomething psychologists call “insightfulproblem solving.”

The question is: Why?Introverts are not smarter than extro-

verts. According to IQ scores, the twotypes are equally intelligent. And onmany kinds of tasks, particularly thoseperformed under time or social pressureor involving multitasking, extroverts dobetter. Extroverts are better than intro-verts at handling information overload.Introverts’ reflectiveness uses up a lotof cognitive capacity, according toJoseph Newman. On any given task, hesays, “if we have 100 percent cognitivecapacity, an introvert may have only 75percent on task and 25 percent off task,whereas an extrovert may have 90 per-cent on task.” This is because most

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tasks are goal-directed. Extroverts ap-pear to allocate most of their cognitivecapacity to the goal at hand, while in-troverts use up capacity by monitoringhow the task is going.

But introverts seem to think morecarefully than extroverts, as the psycho-logist Gerald Matthews describes in hiswork. Extroverts are more likely to takea quick-and-dirty approach to problem-solving, trading accuracy for speed,making increasing numbers of mistakesas they go, and abandoning ship alto-gether when the problem seems too dif-ficult or frustrating. Introverts think be-fore they act, digest information thor-oughly, stay on task longer, give up lesseasily, and work more accurately. Intro-verts and extroverts also direct their at-tention differently: if you leave them totheir own devices, the introverts tendto sit around wondering about things,

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imagining things, recalling events fromtheir past, and making plans for the fu-ture. The extroverts are more likely tofocus on what’s happening aroundthem. It’s as if extroverts are seeing“what is” while their introverted peersare asking “what if.”

Introverts’ and extroverts’ contrastingproblem-solving styles have been ob-served in many different contexts. Inone experiment, psychologists gavefifty people a difficult jigsaw puzzle tosolve, and found that the extrovertswere more likely than the introverts toquit midway. In another, ProfessorRichard Howard gave introverts and ex-troverts a complicated series of printedmazes, and found not only that the in-troverts tended to solve more mazescorrectly, but also that they spent amuch greater percentage of their allot-ted time inspecting the maze before

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entering it. A similar thing happenedwhen groups of introverts and extro-verts were given the Raven StandardProgressive Matrices, an intelligencetest that consists of five sets of prob-lems of increasing difficulty. The extro-verts tended to do better on the firsttwo sets, presumably because of theirability to orient quickly to their goal.But on the three more difficult sets,where persistence pays, the introvertssignificantly outperformed them. By thefinal, most complicated set, the extro-verts were much more likely than theintroverts to abandon the taskaltogether.

Introverts sometimes outperform ex-troverts even on social tasks that re-quire persistence. Wharton manage-ment professor Adam Grant (who con-ducted the leadership studies describedin chapter 2) once studied the

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personality traits of effective call-centeremployees. Grant predicted that the ex-troverts would be better telemarketers,but it turned out that there was zerocorrelation between extroversion levelsand cold-calling prowess.

“The extroverts would make thesewonderful calls,” Grant told me, “butthen a shiny object of some kind wouldcross their paths and they’d lose focus.”The introverts, in contrast, “would talkvery quietly, but boom, boom, boom,they were making those calls. Theywere focused and determined.” Theonly extroverts to outperform themwere those who also happened to beunusually high scorers for a separatepersonality trait measuring conscien-tiousness. Introvert persistence wasmore than a match for extrovert buzz,in other words, even at a task where

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social skills might be considered at apremium.

Persistence isn’t very glamorous. Ifgenius is one percent inspiration andninety-nine percent perspiration, thenas a culture we tend to lionize the onepercent. We love its flash and dazzle.But great power lies in the otherninety-nine percent.

“It’s not that I’m so smart,” said Ein-stein, who was a consummate introvert.“It’s that I stay with problems longer.”

None of this is to denigrate those whoforge ahead quickly, or to blindly glori-fy the reflective and careful. The pointis that we tend to overvalue buzz anddiscount the risks of reward-sensitivity:

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we need to find a balance between ac-tion and reflection.

For example, if you were staffing aninvestment bank, management profess-or Kuhnen told me, you’d want to hirenot only reward-sensitive types, whoare likely to profit from bull markets,but also those who remain emotionallymore neutral. You’d want to make surethat important corporate decisions re-flect the input of both kinds of people,not just one type. And you’d want toknow that individuals on all points ofthe reward-sensitivity spectrum under-stand their own emotional preferencesand can temper them to match marketconditions.

But it’s not just employers who bene-fit from taking a closer look at theiremployees. We also need to take acloser look at ourselves. Understandingwhere we fall on the reward-sensitivity

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spectrum gives us the power to live ourlives well.

If you’re a buzz-prone extrovert, thenyou’re lucky to enjoy lots of invigorat-ing emotions. Make the most of them:build things, inspire others, think big.Start a company, launch a website,build an elaborate tree house for yourkids. But also know that you’re operat-ing with an Achilles’ heel that you mustlearn to protect. Train yourself to spendenergy on what’s truly meaningful toyou instead of on activities that looklike they’ll deliver a quick buzz ofmoney or status or excitement. Teachyourself to pause and reflect whenwarning signs appear that things aren’tworking out as you’d hoped. Learnfrom your mistakes. Seek out counter-parts (from spouses to friends to busi-ness partners) who can help rein you inand compensate for your blind spots.

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And when it comes time to invest, orto do anything that involves a sage bal-ance of risk and reward, keep yourselfin check. One good way to do this is tomake sure that you’re not surroundingyourself with images of reward at thecrucial moment of decision. Kuhnenand Brian Knutson have found that menwho are shown erotic pictures just be-fore they gamble take more risks thanthose shown neutral images like desksand chairs. This is because anticipatingrewards—any rewards, whether or notrelated to the subject at hand—excitesour dopamine-driven reward networksand makes us act more rashly. (Thismay be the single best argument yet forbanning pornography fromworkplaces.)

And if you’re an introvert who’s rel-atively immune to the excesses of re-ward sensitivity? At first blush, the

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research on dopamine and buzz seemsto imply that extroverts, and extrovertsalone, are happily motivated to workhard by the excitement they get frompursuing their goals. As an introvert, Iwas puzzled by this idea when I firstcame across it. It didn’t reflect my ownexperience. I’m in love with my workand always have been. I wake up in themorning excited to get started. So whatdrives people like me?

One answer is that even if thereward-sensitivity theory of extrover-sion turns out to be correct, we can’tsay that all extroverts are always moresensitive to rewards and blasé aboutrisk, or that all introverts are constantlyunmoved by incentives and vigilantabout threats. Since the days of Aris-totle, philosophers have observed thatthese two modes—approaching thingsthat appear to give pleasure and

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avoiding others that seem to causepain—lie at the heart of all humanactivity. As a group, extroverts tend tobe reward-seeking, but every humanbeing has her own mix of approach andavoidance tendencies, and sometimesthe combination differs depending onthe situation. Indeed, many contempor-ary personality psychologists would saythat threat-vigilance is more character-istic of a trait known as “neuroticism”than of introversion. The body’s rewardand threat systems also seem to workindependently of each other, so that thesame person can be generally sensitive,or insensitive, to both reward andthreat.

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If you want to determine whetheryou are reward-oriented, threat-oriented, or both, try asking your-self whether the following groupsof statements are true of you.

If you are reward-oriented:1. When I get something I want, I feel

excited and energized.2. When I want something, I usually

go all out to get it.3. When I see an opportunity for

something I like, I get excitedright away.

4. When good things happen to me, itaffects me strongly.

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5. I have very few fears compared tomy friends.

If you are threat-oriented:1. Criticism or scolding hurts me

quite a bit.2. I feel pretty worried or upset when

I think or know somebody isangry at me.

3. If I think something unpleasant isgoing to happen, I usually getpretty “worked up.”

4. I feel worried when I think I havedone poorly at somethingimportant.

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5. I worry about making mistakes.

But I believe that another importantexplanation for introverts who lovetheir work may come from a very dif-ferent line of research by the influentialpsychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyion the state of being he calls “flow.”Flow is an optimal state in which youfeel totally engaged in an activ-ity—whether long-distance swimmingor songwriting, sumo wrestling or sex.In a state of flow, you’re neither borednor anxious, and you don’t questionyour own adequacy. Hours passwithout your noticing.

The key to flow is to pursue an activ-ity for its own sake, not for the rewardsit brings. Although flow does not de-pend on being an introvert or an

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extrovert, many of the flow experiencesthat Csikszentmihalyi writes about aresolitary pursuits that have nothing todo with reward-seeking: reading, tend-ing an orchard, solo ocean cruising.Flow often occurs, he writes, in condi-tions in which people “become inde-pendent of the social environment tothe degree that they no longer respondexclusively in terms of its rewards andpunishments. To achieve suchautonomy, a person has to learn toprovide rewards to herself.”

In a sense, Csikszentmihalyi tran-scends Aristotle; he is telling us thatthere are some activities that are notabout approach or avoidance, but aboutsomething deeper: the fulfillment thatcomes from absorption in an activityoutside yourself. “Psychological theor-ies usually assume that we are motiv-ated either by the need to eliminate an

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unpleasant condition like hunger orfear,” Csikszentmihalyi writes, “or bythe expectation of some future rewardsuch as money, status, or prestige.” Butin flow, “a person could work aroundthe clock for days on end, for no betterreason than to keep on working.”

If you’re an introvert, find your flowby using your gifts. You have the powerof persistence, the tenacity to solvecomplex problems, and the clear-sightedness to avoid pitfalls that tripothers up. You enjoy relative freedomfrom the temptations of superficialprizes like money and status. Indeed,your biggest challenge may be to fullyharness your strengths. You may be sobusy trying to appear like a zestful,reward-sensitive extrovert that you un-dervalue your own talents, or feel un-derestimated by those around you. Butwhen you’re focused on a project that

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you care about, you probably find thatyour energy is boundless.

So stay true to your own nature. Ifyou like to do things in a slow andsteady way, don’t let others make youfeel as if you have to race. If you enjoydepth, don’t force yourself to seekbreadth. If you prefer single-tasking tomultitasking, stick to your guns. Beingrelatively unmoved by rewards givesyou the incalculable power to go yourown way. It’s up to you to use that in-dependence to good effect.

Of course, that isn’t always easy.While writing this chapter, I correspon-ded with Jack Welch, the former chair-man of General Electric. He had justpublished a BusinessWeek onlinecolumn called “Release Your Inner Ex-trovert,” in which he called for intro-verts to act more extroverted on thejob. I suggested that extroverts

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sometimes need to act more introver-ted, too, and shared with him some ofthe ideas you’ve just read about howWall Street might have benefited fromhaving more introverts at the helm.Welch was intrigued. But, he said, “theextroverts would argue that they neverheard from the introverts.”

Welch makes a fair point. Introvertsneed to trust their gut and share theirideas as powerfully as they can. Thisdoes not mean aping extroverts; ideascan be shared quietly, they can be com-municated in writing, they can be pack-aged into highly produced lectures,they can be advanced by allies. Thetrick for introverts is to honor theirown styles instead of allowing them-selves to be swept up by prevailingnorms. The story of the lead-up to theGreat Recession of 2008 is peppered,alas, with careful types who took

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inappropriate risks, like the formerchief executive of Citigroup, ChuckPrince, a former lawyer who maderisky loans into a falling market be-cause, he said, “as long as the music isplaying, you’ve got to get up anddance.”

“People who are initially cautious be-come more aggressive,” observesBoykin Curry of this phenomenon.“They say, ‘Hey, the more aggressivepeople are getting promoted and I’mnot, so I’m going to be more aggressivetoo.’ ”

But stories of financial crises often con-tain subplots about people who fam-ously (and profitably) saw them com-ing—and such tales tend to feature just

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the kinds of people who embrace FUD,or who like to close the blinds to theiroffices, insulate themselves from massopinion and peer pressure, and focus insolitude. One of the few investors whomanaged to flourish during the crash of2008 was Seth Klarman, president of ahedge fund called the Baupost Group.Klarman is known for consistently out-performing the market while steadfastlyavoiding risk, and for keeping a signi-ficant percentage of his assets in cash.In the two years since the crash of2008, when most investors were fleeinghedge funds in droves, Klarman almostdoubled Baupost’s assets under man-agement to $22 billion.

Klarman achieved this with an in-vestment strategy based explicitly onFUD. “At Baupost, we are big fans offear, and in investing, it is clearly bet-ter to be scared than sorry,” he once

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wrote in a letter to investors. Klarmanis a “world-class worrier,” observes theNew York Times, in a 2007 article called“Manager Frets Over the Market, ButStill Outdoes It.” He owns a racehorsecalled “Read the Footnotes.”

During the years leading up to the2008 crash, Klarman “was one of thefew people to stick to a cautious andseemingly paranoid message,” saysBoykin Curry. “When everyone else wascelebrating, he was probably storingcans of tuna in his basement, to preparefor the end of civilization. Then, wheneveryone else panicked, he started buy-ing. It’s not just analysis; it’s his emo-tional makeup. The same wiring thathelps Seth find opportunities that noone else sees can make him seem aloofor blunt. If you’re the kind of personwho frets every time the quarter isgood, you may have trouble rising to

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the top of a corporate pyramid. Sethprobably wouldn’t have made it as asales manager. But he is one of thegreat investors of our time.”

Similarly, in his book on the run-upto the 2008 crash, The Big Short, Mi-chael Lewis introduces three of the fewpeople who were astute enough to fore-cast the coming disaster. One was asolitary hedge-fund manager namedMichael Burry who describes himself as“happy in my own head” and whospent the years prior to the crash alonein his office in San Jose, California,combing through financial documentsand developing his own contrarianviews of market risk. The others were apair of socially awkward investorsnamed Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai,whose entire investment strategy wasbased on FUD: they placed bets thathad limited downside, but would pay

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off handsomely if dramatic but unex-pected changes occurred in the market.It was not an investment strategy somuch as a life philosophy—a belief thatmost situations were not as stable asthey appeared to be.

This “suited the two men’s personal-ities,” writes Lewis. “They never had tobe sure of anything. Both were predis-posed to feel that people, and by exten-sion markets, were too certain about in-herently uncertain things.” Even afterbeing proven right with their 2006 and2007 bets against the subprime mort-gage market, and earning $100 millionin the process, “they actually spenttime wondering how people who hadbeen so sensationally right (i.e., theythemselves) could preserve the capacityfor diffidence and doubt and uncer-tainty that had enabled them to beright.”

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Ledley and Mai understood the valueof their constitutional diffidence, butothers were so spooked by it that theygave up the chance to invest moneywith the two—in effect, sacrificing mil-lions of dollars to their prejudiceagainst FUD. “What’s amazing withCharlie Ledley,” says Boykin Curry,who knows him well, “is that here youhad a brilliant investor who was ex-ceedingly conservative. If you wereconcerned about risk, there was no onebetter to go to. But he was terrible atraising capital because he seemed sotentative about everything. Potentialclients would walk out of Charlie’s of-fice scared to give him money becausethey thought he lacked conviction.Meanwhile, they poured money intofunds run by managers who exudedconfidence and certainty. Of course,when the economy turned, the

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confident group lost half their clients’money, while Charlie and Jamie madea fortune. Anyone who used conven-tional social cues to evaluate moneymanagers was led to exactly the wrongconclusion.”

Another example, this one from the2000 crash of the dot-com bubble, con-cerns a self-described introvert based inOmaha, Nebraska, where he’s wellknown for shutting himself inside hisoffice for hours at a time.

Warren Buffett, the legendary in-vestor and one of the wealthiest men inthe world, has used exactly the attrib-utes we’ve explored in this chapter—in-tellectual persistence, prudent thinking,and the ability to see and act on

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warning signs—to make billions of dol-lars for himself and the shareholders inhis company, Berkshire Hathaway. Buf-fett is known for thinking carefullywhen those around him lose theirheads. “Success in investing doesn’tcorrelate with IQ,” he has said. “Onceyou have ordinary intelligence, whatyou need is the temperament to controlthe urges that get other people intotrouble in investing.”

Every summer since 1983, theboutique investment bank Allen & Co.has hosted a weeklong conference inSun Valley, Idaho. This isn’t just anyconference. It’s an extravaganza, withlavish parties, river-rafting trips, ice-skating, mountain biking, fly fishing,horseback riding, and a fleet of babysit-ters to care for guests’ children. Thehosts service the media industry, andpast guest lists have included

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newspaper moguls, Hollywood celebrit-ies, and Silicon Valley stars, with mar-quee names such as Tom Hanks, Can-dice Bergen, Barry Diller, Rupert Mur-doch, Steve Jobs, Diane Sawyer, andTom Brokaw.

In July 1999, according to AliceSchroeder’s excellent biography of Buf-fett, The Snowball, he was one of thoseguests. He had attended year after yearwith his entire family in tow, arrivingby Gulfstream jet and staying with theother VIP attendees in a select group ofcondos overlooking the golf course.Buffett loved his annual vacation at SunValley, regarding it as a great place forhis family to gather and for him tocatch up with old friends.

But this year the mood was different.It was the height of the technologyboom, and there were new faces at thetable—the heads of technology

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companies that had grown rich andpowerful almost overnight, and theventure capitalists who had fed themcash. These people were riding high.When the celebrity photographer AnnieLeibovitz showed up to shoot “theMedia All-Star Team” for Vanity Fair,some of them lobbied to get in thephoto. They were the future, theybelieved.

Buffett was decidedly not a part ofthis group. He was an old-school in-vestor who didn’t get caught up inspeculative frenzy around companieswith unclear earnings prospects. Somedismissed him as a relic of the past. ButBuffett was still powerful enough togive the keynote address on the finalday of the conference.

He thought long and hard about thatspeech and spent weeks preparing forit. After warming up the crowd with a

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charmingly self-deprecating story—Buf-fett used to dread public speaking untilhe took a Dale Carnegie course—hetold the crowd, in painstaking, bril-liantly analyzed detail, why the tech-fueled bull market wouldn’t last. Buffetthad studied the data, noted the dangersignals, and then paused and reflectedon what they meant. It was the firstpublic forecast he had made in thirtyyears.

The audience wasn’t thrilled, accord-ing to Schroeder. Buffett was raining ontheir parade. They gave him a standingovation, but in private, many dismissedhis ideas. “Good old Warren,” they said.“Smart man, but this time he missedthe boat.”

Later that evening, the conferencewrapped up with a glorious display offireworks. As always, it had been ablazing success. But the most important

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aspect of the gathering—Warren Buffettalerting the crowd to the market’swarning signs—wouldn’t be revealeduntil the following year, when the dot-com bubble burst, just as he said itwould.

Buffett takes pride not only in histrack record, but also in following hisown “inner scorecard.” He divides theworld into people who focus on theirown instincts and those who follow theherd. “I feel like I’m on my back,” saysBuffett about his life as an investor,“and there’s the Sistine Chapel, and I’mpainting away. I like it when peoplesay, ‘Gee, that’s a pretty good-lookingpainting.’ But it’s my painting, andwhen somebody says, ‘Why don’t youuse more red instead of blue?’ Good-bye. It’s my painting. And I don’t carewhat they sell it for. The painting itself

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will never be finished. That’s one of thegreat things about it.”

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PartThreeDO ALL CULTURES HAVE AN

EXTROVERT IDEAL?

8SOFT POWER

Asian-Americans and the Extrovert Ideal

In a gentle way, you can shake theworld.

—MAHATMA GANDHI

It’s a sunny spring day in 2006, andMike Wei, a seventeen-year-oldChinese-born senior at Lynbrook HighSchool near Cupertino, California, istelling me about his experiences as anAsian-American student. Mike isdressed in sporty all-American attire ofkhakis, windbreaker, and baseball cap,but his sweet, serious face and wispymustache give him the aura of a

budding philosopher, and he speaks sosoftly that I have to lean forward tohear him.

“At school,” says Mike, “I’m a lotmore interested in listening to what theteacher says and being the good stu-dent, rather than the class clown or in-teracting with other kids in the class. Ifbeing outgoing, shouting, or acting outin class is gonna affect the education Ireceive, it’s better if I go for education.”

Mike relates this view matter-of-factly, but he seems to know how un-usual it is by American standards. Hisattitude comes from his parents, he ex-plains. “If I have a choice between do-ing something for myself, like going outwith my friends, or staying home andstudying, I think of my parents. Thatgives me the strength to keep studying.My father tells me that his job is

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computer programming, and my job isto study.”

Mike’s mother taught the same lessonby example. A former math teacherwho worked as a maid when the familyimmigrated to North America, shememorized English vocabulary wordswhile washing dishes. She is very quiet,says Mike, and very resolute. “It’s reallyChinese to pursue your own educationlike that. My mother has the kind ofstrength that not everyone can see.”

By all indications, Mike has made hisparents proud. His e-mail username is“A-student,” and he’s just won acoveted spot in Stanford University’sfreshman class. He’s the kind ofthoughtful, dedicated student that anycommunity would be proud to call itsown. And yet, according to an articlecalled “The New White Flight” that ranin the Wall Street Journal just six

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months previously, white families areleaving Cupertino in droves, preciselybecause of kids like Mike. They arefleeing the sky-high test scores andawe-inspiring study habits of manyAsian-American students. The articlesaid that white parents feared that theirkids couldn’t keep up academically. Itquoted a student from a local highschool: “If you were Asian, you had toconfirm you were smart. If you werewhite, you had to prove it.”

But the article didn’t explore whatlay behind this stellar academic per-formance. I was curious whether thetown’s scholarly bent reflected a cultureinsulated from the worst excesses of theExtrovert Ideal—and if so, what thatwould feel like. I decided to visit andfind out.

At first blush, Cupertino seems likethe embodiment of the American

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Dream. Many first- and second-genera-tion Asian immigrants live here andwork at the local high-tech office parks.Apple Computer’s headquarters at 1 In-finite Loop is in town. Google’s Moun-tain View headquarters is just down theroad. Meticulously maintained carsglide along the boulevards; the fewpedestrians are crisply dressed in brightcolors and cheerful whites. Unprepos-sessing ranch houses are pricey, butbuyers think the cost is worth it to gettheir kids into the town’s famed publicschool system, with its ranks of Ivy-bound kids. Of the 615 students in thegraduating class of 2010 at Cupertino’sMonta Vista High School (77 percent ofwhom are Asian-American, accordingto the school’s website, some of whichis accessible in Chinese), 53 were Na-tional Merit Scholarship semifinalists.The average combined score of Monta

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Vista students who took the SAT in2009 was 1916 out of 2400, 27 percenthigher than the nationwide average.

Respected kids at Monta Vista HighSchool are not necessarily athletic orvivacious, according to the students Imeet here. Rather, they’re studious andsometimes quiet. “Being smart is actu-ally admired, even if you’re weird,” aKorean-American high school sopho-more named Chris tells me. Chris de-scribes the experience of his friend,whose family left to spend two years ina Tennessee town where few Asian-Americans lived. The friend enjoyed it,but suffered culture shock. In Tennessee“there were insanely smart people, butthey were always by themselves. Here,the really smart people usually have alot of friends, because they can helppeople out with their work.”

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The library is to Cupertino what themall or soccer field is to other towns:an unofficial center of village life. Highschool kids cheerfully refer to studyingas “going nerding.” Football and cheer-leading aren’t particularly respectedactivities. “Our football team sucks,”Chris says good-naturedly. Though theteam’s recent stats are more impressivethan Chris suggests, having a lousyfootball team seems to hold symbolicsignificance for him. “You couldn’treally even tell they’re football play-ers,” he explains. “They don’t weartheir jackets and travel in big groups.When one of my friends graduated,they played a video and my friend waslike, ‘I can’t believe they’re showingfootball players and cheerleaders in thisvideo.’ That’s not what drives thistown.”

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Ted Shinta, a teacher and adviser tothe Robotics Team at Monta Vista HighSchool, tells me something similar.“When I was in high school,” he says,“you were discouraged from voting instudent elections unless you were wear-ing a varsity jacket. At most highschools you have a popular group thattyrannizes the others. But here the kidsin that group don’t hold any powerover the other students. The studentbody is too academically oriented forthat.”

A local college counselor namedPurvi Modi agrees. “Introversion is notlooked down upon,” she tells me. “It isaccepted. In some cases it is evenhighly respected and admired. It is coolto be a Master Chess Champion andplay in the band.” There’s an introvert-extrovert spectrum here, as every-where, but it’s as if the population is

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distributed a few extra degrees towardthe introverted end of the scale. Oneyoung woman, a Chinese-Americanabout to begin her freshman year at anelite East Coast college, noticed thisphenomenon after meeting some of herfuture classmates online, and worrieswhat the post-Cupertino future mighthold. “I met a couple of people on Face-book,” she says, “and they’re just so dif-ferent. I’m really quiet. I’m not thatmuch of a partier or socializer, buteveryone there seems to be very socialand stuff. It’s just very different frommy friends. I’m not even sure if I’mgonna have friends when I get there.”

One of her Facebook correspondentslives in nearby Palo Alto, and I ask howshe’ll respond if that person invites herto get together over the summer.

“I probably wouldn’t do it,” she says.“It would be interesting to meet them

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and stuff, but my mom doesn’t want megoing out that much, because I have tostudy.”

I’m struck by the young woman’ssense of filial obligation, and its con-nection to prioritizing study over sociallife. But this is not unusual in Cuper-tino. Many Asian-American kids heretell me that they study all summer attheir parents’ request, even declininginvitations to July birthday parties sothey can get ahead on the followingOctober’s calculus curriculum.

“I think it’s our culture,” explainsTiffany Liao, a poised Swarthmore-bound high school senior whose par-ents are from Taiwan. “Study, do well,don’t create waves. It’s inbred in us tobe more quiet. When I was a kid andwould go to my parents’ friends’ houseand didn’t want to talk, I would bring abook. It was like this shield, and they

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would be like, ‘She’s so studious!’ Andthat was praise.”

It’s hard to imagine other Americanmoms and dads outside Cupertino smil-ing on a child who reads in publicwhile everyone else is gathered aroundthe barbecue. But parents schooled ageneration ago in Asian countries werelikely taught this quieter style as chil-dren. In many East Asian classrooms,the traditional curriculum emphasizeslistening, writing, reading, and memor-ization. Talking is simply not a focus,and is even discouraged.

“The teaching back home is very dif-ferent from here,” says Hung Wei Chi-en, a Cupertino mom who came to theUnited States from Taiwan in 1979 toattend graduate school at UCLA.“There, you learn the subject, and theytest you. At least when I grew up, theydon’t go off subject a lot, and they don’t

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allow the students to ramble. If youstand up and talk nonsense, you’ll bereprimanded.”

Hung is one of the most jolly, extro-verted people I’ve ever met, given tolarge, expansive gestures and frequentbelly laughs. Dressed in running shorts,sneakers, and amber jewelry, she greetsme with a bear hug and drives us to abakery for breakfast. We dig into ourpastries, chatting companionably.

So it’s telling that even Hung recallsher culture shock upon entering herfirst American-style classroom. She con-sidered it rude to participate in classbecause she didn’t want to waste herclassmates’ time. And sure enough, shesays, laughing, “I was the quiet personthere. At UCLA, the professor wouldstart class, saying, ‘Let’s discuss!’ Iwould look at my peers while theywere talking nonsense, and the

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professors were so patient, just listeningto everyone.” She nods her head comic-ally, mimicking the overly respectfulprofessors.

“I remember being amazed. It was alinguistics class, and that’s not even lin-guistics the students are talking about! Ithought, ‘Oh, in the U.S., as soon as youstart talking, you’re fine.’ ”

If Hung was bewildered by the Amer-ican style of class participation, it’slikely that her teachers were equallyperplexed by her unwillingness tospeak. A full twenty years after Hungmoved to the United States, the SanJose Mercury News ran an article called“East, West Teaching Traditions Col-lide,” exploring professors’ dismay atthe reluctance of Asian-born studentslike Hung to participate in Californiauniversity classrooms. One professornoted a “deference barrier” created by

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Asian students’ reverence for theirteachers. Another vowed to make classparticipation part of the grade in orderto prod Asian students to speak in class.“You’re supposed to downgrade your-self in Chinese learning because otherthinkers are so much greater than you,”said a third. “This is a perennial prob-lem in classes with predominantlyAsian-American students.”

The article generated a passionate re-action in the Asian-American com-munity. Some said the universities wereright that Asian students need to adaptto Western educational norms. “Asian-Americans have let people walk all overthem because of their silence,” posted areader of the sardonically titled websiteModelMinority.com. Others felt thatAsian students shouldn’t be forced tospeak up and conform to the Westernmode. “Perhaps instead of trying to

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change their ways, colleges can learn tolisten to their sound of silence,” wroteHeejung Kim, a Stanford University cul-tural psychologist, in a paper arguingthat talking is not always a positive act.

How is it that Asians and Westernerscan look at the exact same classroominteractions, and one group will label it“class participation” and the other“talking nonsense”? The Journal of Re-search in Personality has published ananswer to this question in the form of amap of the world drawn by researchpsychologist Robert McCrae. McCrae’smap looks like something you’d see in ageography textbook, but it’s based, hesays, “not on rainfall or populationdensity, but on personality trait levels,”

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and its shadings of dark and lightgrays—dark for extroversion, light forintroversion—reveal a picture that “isquite clear: Asia … is introverted,Europe extroverted.” Had the map alsoincluded the United States, it would becolored dark gray. Americans are someof the most extroverted people onearth.

McCrae’s map might seem like agrand exercise in cultural stereotyping.To group entire continents by personal-ity type is an act of gross generaliza-tion: you can find loud people in main-land China just as easily as in Atlanta,Georgia. Nor does the map account forsubtleties of cultural difference within acountry or region. People in Beijinghave different styles from those inShanghai, and both are different stillfrom the citizens of Seoul or Tokyo.Similarly, describing Asians as a “model

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minority”—even when meant as a com-pliment—is just as confining and con-descending as any description that re-duces individuals to a set of perceivedgroup characteristics. Perhaps it is alsoproblematic to characterize Cupertinoas an incubator for scholarly stand-outs,no matter how flattering this mightsound to some.

But although I don’t want to encour-age rigid national or ethnic typecasting,to avoid entirely the topic of culturaldifference and introversion would be ashame: there are too many aspects ofAsian cultural and personality stylesthat the rest of the world could andshould learn from. Scholars have fordecades studied cultural differences inpersonality type, especially betweenEast and West, and especially the di-mension of introversion-extroversion,the one pair of traits that psychologists,

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who agree on practically nothing whenit comes to cataloging human personal-ity, believe is salient and measurable allover the world.

Much of this research yields the sameresults as McCrae’s map. One studycomparing eight- to ten-year-old chil-dren in Shanghai and southern Ontario,Canada, for example, found that shyand sensitive children are shunned bytheir peers in Canada but make sought-after playmates in China, where theyare also more likely than other childrento be considered for leadership roles.Chinese children who are sensitive andreticent are said to be dongshi (under-standing), a common term of praise.

Similarly, Chinese high school stu-dents tell researchers that they preferfriends who are “humble” and “altruist-ic,” “honest” and “hardworking,” whileAmerican high school students seek out

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the “cheerful,” “enthusiastic,” and “so-ciable.” “The contrast is striking,”writes Michael Harris Bond, a cross-cul-tural psychologist who focuses on Ch-ina. “The Americans emphasize sociab-ility and prize those attributes thatmake for easy, cheerful association. TheChinese emphasize deeper attributes,focusing on moral virtues andachievement.”

Another study asked Asian-Americansand European-Americans to think outloud while solving reasoning problems,and found that the Asians did muchbetter when they were allowed to bequiet, compared to the Caucasians, whoperformed well when vocalizing theirproblem-solving.

These results would not surprise any-one familiar with traditional Asian atti-tudes to the spoken word: talk is forcommunicating need-to-know

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information; quiet and introspectionare signs of deep thought and highertruth. Words are potentially dangerousweapons that reveal things better leftunsaid. They hurt other people; theycan get their speaker into trouble. Con-sider, for example, these proverbs fromthe East:

The wind howls, but the mountain re-mains still.

—JAPANESE PROVERB

Those who know do not speak.Those who speak do not know.

—LAO ZI, The Way of Lao Zi

Even though I make no special attemptto observe the discipline of silence, liv-ing alone automatically makes me re-frain from the sins of speech.

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—KAMO NO CHOMEI, 12th Century Japaneserecluse

And compare them to proverbs fromthe West:

Be a craftsman in speech that thoumayest be strong, for the strength ofone is the tongue, and speech is mighti-er than all fighting.

—MAXIMS OF PTAHHOTEP, 2400 B.C.E.

Speech is civilization itself. The word,even the most contradictory word, pre-serves contact—it is silence whichisolates.—THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

What lies behind these starkly differ-ent attitudes? One answer is the

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widespread reverence for educationamong Asians, particularly those from“Confucian belt” countries like China,Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. To thisday, some Chinese villages displaystatues of students who passed thegrueling Ming dynasty–era jinshi examhundreds of years ago. It’s a lot easierto achieve that kind of distinctionif—like some of the kids from Cuper-tino—you spend your summersstudying.

Another explanation is group iden-tity. Many Asian cultures are team-ori-ented, but not in the way that Western-ers think of teams. Individuals in Asiasee themselves as part of a greaterwhole—whether family, corporation, orcommunity—and place tremendousvalue on harmony within their group.They often subordinate their own

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desires to the group’s interests, accept-ing their place in its hierarchy.

Western culture, by contrast, is or-ganized around the individual. We seeourselves as self-contained units; ourdestiny is to express ourselves, to fol-low our bliss, to be free of undue re-straint, to achieve the one thing thatwe, and we alone, were brought intothis world to do. We may be gregari-ous, but we don’t submit to group will,or at least we don’t like to think we do.We love and respect our parents, butbridle at notions like filial piety, withtheir implications of subordination andrestraint. When we get together withothers, we do so as self-contained unitshaving fun with, competing with,standing out from, jockeying for posi-tion with, and, yes, loving, other self-contained units. Even the Western Godis assertive, vocal, and dominant; his

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son Jesus is kind and tender, but also acharismatic, crowd-pleasing man of in-fluence (Jesus Christ Superstar).

It makes sense, then, that Westernersvalue boldness and verbal skill, traitsthat promote individuality, while Asi-ans prize quiet, humility, and sensitiv-ity, which foster group cohesion. If youlive in a collective, then things will go alot more smoothly if you behave withrestraint, even submission.

This preference was vividly demon-strated in a recent fMRI study in whichresearchers showed seventeen Americ-ans and seventeen Japanese pictures ofmen in dominance poses (arms crossed,muscles bulging, legs planted squarelyon the ground) and subordinate posi-tions (shoulders bent, hands interlockedprotectively over groin, legs squeezedtogether tight). They found that thedominant pictures activated pleasure

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centers in the American brains, whilethe submissive pictures did the samefor the Japanese.

From a Western perspective, it can behard to see what’s so attractive aboutsubmitting to the will of others. Butwhat looks to a Westerner like subor-dination can seem like basic politenessto many Asians. Don Chen, the Chinese-American Harvard Business School stu-dent you met in chapter 2, told meabout the time he shared an apartmentwith a group of Asian friends plus hisclose Caucasian friend, a gentle, easy-going guy Don felt would fit right in.

Conflicts arose when the Caucasianfriend noticed dishes piling up in thesink and asked his Asian roommates todo their fair share of the washing up. Itwasn’t an unreasonable complaint, saysDon, and his friend thought he phrasedhis request politely and respectfully.

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But his Asian roommates saw it differ-ently. To them, he came across as harshand angry. An Asian in that situation,said Don, would be more careful withhis tone of voice. He would phrase hisdispleasure in the form of a question,not a request or command. Or he mightnot bring it up at all. It wouldn’t beworth upsetting the group over a fewdirty dishes.

What looks to Westerners like Asiandeference, in other words, is actually adeeply felt concern for the sensibilitiesof others. As the psychologist HarrisBond observes, “It is only those from anexplicit tradition who would label [theAsian] mode of discourse ‘self-efface-ment.’ Within this indirect tradition itmight be labeled ‘relationship honour-ing.’ ” And relationship honoring leadsto social dynamics that can seem re-markable from a Western perspective.

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It’s because of relationship honoring,for example, that social anxiety dis-order in Japan, known as taijin kyo-fusho, takes the form not of excessiveworry about embarrassing oneself, as itdoes in the United States, but of embar-rassing others. It’s because ofrelationship-honoring that TibetanBuddhist monks find inner peace (andoff-the-chart happiness levels, as meas-ured in brain scans) by meditatingquietly on compassion. And it’s becauseof relationship-honoring that Hiroshimavictims apologized to each other forsurviving. “Their civility has been welldocumented but still stays the heart,”writes the essayist Lydia Millet. “ ‘I amsorry,’ said one of them, bowing, withthe skin of his arms peeling off instrips. ‘I regret I am still alive whileyour baby is not.’ ‘I am sorry,’ anothersaid earnestly, with lips swollen to the

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size of oranges, as he spoke to a childweeping beside her dead mother. ‘I amso sorry that I was not taken instead.’ ”

Though Eastern relationship-honor-ing is admirable and beautiful, so isWestern respect for individual freedom,self-expression, and personal destiny.The point is not that one is superior tothe other, but that a profound differ-ence in cultural values has a powerfulimpact on the personality styles favoredby each culture. In the West, we sub-scribe to the Extrovert Ideal, while inmuch of Asia (at least before theWesternization of the past several dec-ades), silence is golden. These contrast-ing outlooks affect the things we saywhen our roommates’ dishes pile up inthe sink—and the things we don’t sayin a university classroom.

Moreover, they tell us that the Extro-vert Ideal is not as sacrosanct as we

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may have thought. So if, deep down,you’ve been thinking that it’s only nat-ural for the bold and sociable to domin-ate the reserved and sensitive, and thatthe Extrovert Ideal is innate to human-ity, Robert McCrae’s personality mapsuggests a different truth: that eachway of being—quiet and talkative,careful and audacious, inhibited andunrestrained—is characteristic of itsown mighty civilization.

Ironically, some of the people who havethe most trouble holding on to thistruth are Asian-American kids from Cu-pertino. Once they emerge from adoles-cence and leave the confines of theirhometown, they find a world in whichloudness and speaking out are the

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tickets to popularity and financial suc-cess. They come to live with a double-consciousness—part Asian and partAmerican—with each side calling theother into question. Mike Wei, the highschool senior who told me he’d ratherstudy than socialize, is a perfect ex-ample of this ambivalence. When wefirst met, he was a high school senior,still nestled in the Cupertino cocoon.“Because we put so much emphasis oneducation,” Mike told me then, refer-ring to Asians in general, “socializing isnot a big part of our selves.”

When I caught up with Mike the fol-lowing autumn, in his freshman year atStanford, only a twenty-minute drivefrom Cupertino but a world awaydemographically, he seemed unsettled.We met at an outdoor café, where wesat next to a coed group of athleteserupting regularly in laughter. Mike

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nodded at the athletes, all of whomwere white. Caucasians, he said, seemto be “less afraid of other people think-ing that what they said was too loud ortoo stupid.” Mike was frustrated by thesuperficiality of dining-hall conversa-tion, and by the “bullshitting” that of-ten substituted for class participation infreshman seminars. He was spendinghis free time mostly with other Asians,partly because they had “the same levelof outgoingness” he did. The non-Asi-ans tended to make him feel as if hehad to “be really hyped up or excited,even though that might not be true towho I am.”

“My dorm has four Asians in it, outof fifty kids,” he told me. “So I feelmore comfortable around them. There’sthis one guy called Brian, and he’spretty quiet. I can tell he has that Asianquality where you’re kind of shy, and I

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feel comfortable around him for thatreason. I feel like I can be myselfaround him. I don’t have to dosomething just to look cool, whereasaround a big group of people thataren’t Asian or are just really loud, Ifeel like I have to play a role.”

Mike sounded dismissive of Westerncommunication styles, but he admittedthat he sometimes wished he could benoisy and uninhibited himself. “They’remore comfortable with their own char-acter,” he said of his Caucasian class-mates. Asians are “not uncomfortablewith who they are, but are uncomfort-able with expressing who they are. In agroup, there’s always that pressure tobe outgoing. When they don’t live up toit, you can see it in their faces.”

Mike told me about a freshmanicebreaking event he’d participated in,a scavenger hunt in San Francisco that

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was supposed to encourage students tostep out of their comfort zones. Mikewas the only Asian assigned to a rowdygroup, some of whom streaked nakeddown a San Francisco street and cross-dressed in a local department store dur-ing the hunt. One girl went to a Victor-ia’s Secret display and stripped down toher underwear. As Mike recountedthese details, I thought he was going totell me that his group had been overthe top, inappropriate. But he wasn’tcritical of the other students. He wascritical of himself.

“When people do things like that,there’s a moment where I feel uncom-fortable with it. It shows my own lim-its. Sometimes I feel like they’re betterthan I am.”

Mike was getting similar messagesfrom his professors. A few weeks afterthe orientation event, his freshman

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adviser—a professor at Stanford’s med-ical school—invited a group of studentsto her house. Mike hoped to make agood impression, but he couldn’t thinkof anything to say. The other studentsseemed to have no problem jokingaround and asking intelligent questions.“Mike, you were so loud today,” theprofessor teased him when finally hesaid good-bye. “You just blew meaway.” He left her house feeling badabout himself. “People who don’t talkare seen as weak or lacking,” he con-cluded ruefully.

To be sure, these feelings were nottotally new to Mike. He’d experiencedglimmers of them back in high school.Cupertino may have an almost Con-fucian ethic of quiet, study, andrelationship-honoring, but it’s subjectto the mores of the Extrovert Ideal allthe same. At the local shopping center

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on a weekday afternoon, cocky Asian-American teenage guys with spiky hair-cuts call out to eye-rolling, wise-crack-ing girls in spaghetti-strap tank tops.On a Saturday morning at the library,some teens study intently in corners,but others congregate at boisteroustables. Few of the Asian-American kidsI spoke to in Cupertino wanted toidentify themselves with the word intro-vert, even if they effectively describedthemselves that way. While deeplycommitted to their parents’ values, theyseemed to divide the world into “tradi-tional” Asians versus “Asian super-stars.” The traditionals keep their headsdown and get their homework done.The superstars do well academicallybut also joke around in class, challengetheir teachers, and get themselvesnoticed.

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Many students deliberately try to bemore outgoing than their parents, Miketold me. “They think their parents aretoo quiet and they try to overcom-pensate by being flauntingly outgoing.”Some of the parents have started toshift their values too. “Asian parentsare starting to see that it doesn’t pay tobe quiet, so they encourage their kidsto take speech and debate,” Mike said.“Our speech and debate program wasthe second largest in California, to givekids exposure to speaking loudly andconvincingly.”

Still, when I first met Mike in Cuper-tino, his sense of himself and his valueswas pretty much intact. He knew thathe wasn’t one of the Asian super-stars—he rated himself a 4 on a pop-ularity scale of 1 to 10—but seemedcomfortable in his own skin. “I’d ratherhang out with people whose

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personalities are more genuine,” he toldme then, “and that tends to lead me to-ward more quiet people. It’s hard to begleeful when at the same time I’m try-ing to be wise.”

Indeed, Mike was probably lucky toenjoy the Cupertino cocoon for as longas he did. Asian-American kids whogrow up in more typical American com-munities often face the issues that Mikeconfronted as a Stanford freshmanmuch earlier in their lives. One studycomparing European-American andsecond-generation Chinese-Americanteens over a five-year period found thatthe Chinese-Americans were signific-antly more introverted than their Amer-ican peers throughout adoles-cence—and paid the price with theirself-esteem. While introverted Chinese-American twelve-year-olds felt perfectlyfine about themselves—presumably

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because they still measured themselvesaccording to their parents’ traditionalvalue systems—by the time they got tobe seventeen and had been more ex-posed to America’s Extrovert Ideal,their self-regard had taken a nosedive.

For Asian-American kids, the cost offailing to fit in is social unease. But asthey grow up, they may pay the pricewith their paychecks. The journalistNicholas Lemann once interviewed agroup of Asian-Americans on the sub-ject of meritocracy for his book The BigTest. “A sentiment that emerges consist-ently,” he wrote, “is that meritocracyends on graduation day, and that after-ward, Asians start to fall behind be-cause they don’t have quite the right

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cultural style for getting ahead: toopassive, not hail-fellow-well-metenough.”

I met many professionals in Cuper-tino who were struggling with this is-sue. A well-heeled housewife confidedthat all the husbands in her social circlehad recently accepted jobs in China,and were now commuting between Cu-pertino and Shanghai, partly becausetheir quiet styles prevented them fromadvancing locally. The American com-panies “think they can’t handle busi-ness,” she said, “because of presenta-tion. In business, you have to put a lotof nonsense together and present it. Myhusband always just makes his pointand that’s the end of it. When you lookat big companies, almost none of thetop executives are Asians. They hiresomeone who doesn’t know anything

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about the business, but maybe he canmake a good presentation.”

A software engineer told me howoverlooked he felt at work in comparis-on to other people, “especially peoplefrom European origin, who speakwithout thinking.” In China, he said, “Ifyou’re quiet, you’re seen as being wise.It’s completely different here. Herepeople like to speak out. Even if theyhave an idea, not completely matureyet, people still speak out. If I could bebetter in communication, my workwould be much more recognized. Eventhough my manager appreciates me, hestill doesn’t know I have done work sowonderful.”

The engineer then confided that hehad sought training in American-styleextroversion from a Taiwanese-borncommunications professor named Pre-ston Ni. At Foothill College, just outside

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Cupertino, Ni conducts daylong sem-inars called “Communication Successfor Foreign-Born Professionals.” Theclass is advertised online through a loc-al group called the Silicon ValleySpeakUp Association, whose mission isto “help foreign-born professionals tosucceed in life through enhancement insoft skills.” (“Speak you [sic] mind!”reads the organization’s home page.“Together everyone achieve [sic] moreat SVSpeakup.”)

Curious about what speaking one’smind looks like from an Asian perspect-ive, I signed up for the class and, a fewSaturday mornings later, found myselfsitting at a desk in a starkly modernclassroom, the Northern Californiamountain sun streaming through itsplate-glass windows. There were aboutfifteen students in all, many from Asian

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countries but some from EasternEurope and South America, too.

Professor Ni, a friendly-looking manwearing a Western-style suit, a gold-colored tie with a Chinese drawing of awaterfall, and a shy smile, began theclass with an overview of Americanbusiness culture. In the United States,he warned, you need style as well assubstance if you want to get ahead. Itmay not be fair, and it might not be thebest way of judging a person’s contribu-tion to the bottom line, “but if youdon’t have charisma you can be themost brilliant person in the world andyou’ll still be disrespected.”

This is different from many other cul-tures, said Ni. When a Chinese Com-munist leader makes a speech, he readsit, not even from a teleprompter butfrom a paper. “If he’s the leader, every-one has to listen.”

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Ni asked for volunteers and broughtRaj, a twentysomething Indian softwareengineer at a Fortune 500 company, tothe front of the room. Raj was dressedin the Silicon Valley uniform of casualbutton-down shirt and chinos, but hisbody language was defensive. He stoodwith his arms crossed protectively overhis chest, scuffing at the ground withhis hiking boots. Earlier that morning,when we’d gone around the room intro-ducing ourselves, he’d told us, in atremulous voice from his seat in theback row, that he wanted to learn “howto make more conversation” and “to bemore open.”

Professor Ni asked Raj to tell theclass about his plans for the rest of theweekend.

“I’m going to dinner with a friend,”replied Raj, looking fixedly at Ni, his

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voice barely audible, “and then perhapstomorrow I’ll go hiking.”

Professor Ni asked him to try itagain.

“I’m going to dinner with a friend,”said Raj, “and then, mumble, mumble,mumble, I’ll go hiking.”

“My impression of you,” Professor Nitold Raj gently, “is that I can give you alot of work to do, but I don’t have topay much attention to you. Remember,in Silicon Valley, you can be thesmartest, most capable person, but ifyou can’t express yourself aside fromshowing your work, you’ll be underap-preciated. Many foreign-born profes-sionals experience this; you’re a glori-fied laborer instead of a leader.”

The class nodded sympathetically.“But there’s a way to be yourself,”

continued Ni, “and to let more of youcome out through your voice. Many

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Asians use only a narrow set of muscleswhen they speak. So we’ll start withbreathing.”

With that, he directed Raj to lie onhis back and vocalize the five AmericanEnglish vowels. “A … E … U … O …I …” intoned Raj, his voice floating upfrom the classroom floor. “A … E …U … O … I … A … E … U … O … I …”

Finally Professor Ni deemed Rajready to stand up again.

“Now, what interesting things do youhave planned for after class?” he asked,clapping his hands encouragingly.

“Tonight I’m going to a friend’s placefor dinner, and tomorrow I’m goinghiking with another friend.” Raj’s voicewas louder than before, and the classapplauded with gusto.

The professor himself is a role modelfor what can happen when you work atit. After class, I visited him in his office,

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and he told me how shy he’d beenwhen he first came to the UnitedStates—how he put himself in situ-ations, like summer camp and businessschool, where he could practice actingextroverted until it came more natur-ally. These days he has a successfulconsulting practice, with clients that in-clude Yahoo!, Visa, and Microsoft,teaching some of the same skills helabored to acquire himself.

But when we began talking aboutAsian concepts of “soft power”—whatNi calls leadership “by water ratherthan by fire”—I started to see a side ofhim that was less impressed by Westernstyles of communication. “In Asian cul-tures,” Ni said, “there’s often a subtleway to get what you want. It’s not al-ways aggressive, but it can be very de-termined and very skillful. In the end,much is achieved because of it.

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Aggressive power beats you up; softpower wins you over.”

I asked the professor for real-life ex-amples of soft power, and his eyesshone as he told me of clients whosestrength lay in their ideas and heart.Many of these people were organizersof employee groups—women’s groups,diversity groups—who had managed torally people to their cause through con-viction rather than dynamism. He alsotalked about groups like MothersAgainst Drunk Driving—clusters ofpeople who change lives through thepower not of their charisma but of theircaring. Their communication skills aresufficient to convey their message, buttheir real strength comes fromsubstance.

“In the long run,” said Ni, “if the ideais good, people shift. If the cause is justand you put heart into it, it’s almost a

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universal law: you will attract peoplewho want to share your cause. Softpower is quiet persistence. The peopleI’m thinking of are very persistent intheir day-to-day, person-to-person in-teractions. Eventually they build up ateam.” Soft power, said Ni, was wieldedby people we’ve admired throughouthistory: Mother Teresa, the Buddha,Gandhi.

I was struck when Ni mentionedGandhi. I had asked almost all the Cu-pertino high school students I met toname a leader they admired, and manyhad named Gandhi. What was it abouthim that inspired them so?

Gandhi was, according to his autobio-graphy, a constitutionally shy and quiet

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man. As a child, he was afraid ofeverything: thieves, ghosts, snakes, thedark, and especially other people. Heburied himself in books and ran homefrom school as soon as it was over, forfear of having to talk to anybody. Evenas a young man, when he was electedto his first leadership position as amember of the Executive Committee ofthe Vegetarian Society, he attendedevery meeting, but was too shy tospeak.

“You talk to me quite all right,” oneof the members asked him, confused,“but why is it that you never open yourlips at a committee meeting? You are adrone.” When a political struggle oc-curred on the committee, Gandhi hadfirm opinions, but was too scared tovoice them. He wrote his thoughtsdown, intending to read them aloud at

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a meeting. But in the end he was toocowed even to do that.

Gandhi learned over time to managehis shyness, but he never really over-came it. He couldn’t speak extemporan-eously; he avoided making speecheswhenever possible. Even in his lateryears, he wrote, “I do not think I couldor would even be inclined to keep ameeting of friends engaged in talk.”

But with his shyness came his uniquebrand of strength—a form of restraintbest understood by examining littleknown corners of Gandhi’s life story. Asa young man he decided to travel toEngland to study law, against thewishes of the leaders of his ModhiBania subcaste. Caste members wereforbidden to eat meat, and the leadersbelieved that vegetarianism was im-possible in England. But Gandhi hadalready vowed to his beloved mother to

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abstain from meat, so he saw no dangerin the trip. He said as much to theSheth, the headman of the community.

“Will you disregard the orders of thecaste?” demanded the Sheth.

“I am really helpless,” repliedGandhi. “I think the caste should notinterfere in the matter.”

Boom! He was excommunicated—ajudgment that remained in force evenwhen he returned from England severalyears later with the promise of successthat attended a young, English-speakinglawyer. The community was dividedover how to handle him. One camp em-braced him; the other cast him out.This meant that Gandhi was not al-lowed even to eat or drink at the homesof fellow subcaste members, includinghis own sister and his mother- andfather-in-law.

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Another man, Gandhi knew, wouldprotest for readmission. But he couldn’tsee the point. He knew that fightingwould only generate retaliation. Insteadhe followed the Sheth’s wishes and keptat a distance, even from his own family.His sister and in-laws were prepared tohost him at their homes in secret, buthe turned them down.

The result of this compliance? Thesubcaste not only stopped botheringhim, but its members—including thosewho had excommunicated him—helpedin his later political work, without ex-pecting anything in return. Theytreated him with affection and generos-ity. “It is my conviction,” Gandhi wrotelater, “that all these good things aredue to my non-resistance. Had I agit-ated for being admitted to the caste,had I attempted to divide it into morecamps, had I provoked the castemen,

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they would surely have retaliated, andinstead of steering clear of the storm, Ishould, on arrival from England, havefound myself in a whirlpool ofagitation.”

This pattern—the decision to acceptwhat another man would chal-lenge—occurred again and again inGandhi’s life. As a young lawyer inSouth Africa, he applied for admissionto the local bar. The Law Society didn’twant Indian members, and tried tothwart his application by requiring anoriginal copy of a certificate that wason file in the Bombay High Court andtherefore inaccessible. Gandhi was en-raged; he knew well that the true reas-on for these barriers was discrimina-tion. But he didn’t let his feelings show.Instead he negotiated patiently, untilthe Law Society agreed to accept an af-fidavit from a local dignitary.

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The day arrived when he stood totake the oath, at which point the chiefjustice ordered him to take off histurban. Gandhi saw his true limitationsthen. He knew that resistance would bejustified, but believed in picking hisbattles, so he took off his headgear. Hisfriends were upset. They said he wasweak, that he should have stood up forhis beliefs. But Gandhi felt that he hadlearned “to appreciate the beauty ofcompromise.”

If I told you these stories withoutmentioning Gandhi’s name and laterachievements, you might view him as adeeply passive man. And in the West,passivity is a transgression. To be “pass-ive,” according to the Merriam-WebsterDictionary, means to be “acted upon byan external agency.” It also means to be“submissive.” Gandhi himself ulti-mately rejected the phrase “passive

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resistance,” which he associated withweakness, preferring satyagraha, theterm he coined to mean “firmness inpursuit of truth.”

But as the word satyagraha implies,Gandhi’s passivity was not weakness atall. It meant focusing on an ultimategoal and refusing to divert energy tounnecessary skirmishes along the way.Restraint, Gandhi believed, was one ofhis greatest assets. And it was born ofhis shyness:

I have naturally formed the habit ofrestraining my thoughts. A thought-less word hardly ever escaped mytongue or pen. Experience hastaught me that silence is part of thespiritual discipline of a votary oftruth. We find so many people impa-tient to talk. All this talking canhardly be said to be of any benefit

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to the world. It is so much waste oftime. My shyness has been in realitymy shield and buckler. It has al-lowed me to grow. It has helped mein my discernment of truth.

Soft power is not limited to moral ex-emplars like Mahatma Gandhi. Con-sider, for example, the much-bally-hooed excellence of Asians in fields likemath and science. Professor Ni definessoft power as “quiet persistence,” andthis trait lies at the heart of academicexcellence as surely as it does inGandhi’s political triumphs. Quiet per-sistence requires sustained atten-tion—in effect restraining one’s reac-tions to external stimuli.

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The TIMSS exam (Trends in Interna-tional Mathematics and Science Study)is a standardized math and science testgiven every four years to kids aroundthe world. After each test, researchersslice and dice the results, comparingthe performance of students from dif-ferent countries; Asian countries suchas Korea, Singapore, Japan, and Taiwanconsistently rank at the top of the list.In 1995, for example, the first year theTIMSS was given, Korea, Singapore,and Japan had the world’s highestaverage middle-school math scores andwere among the top four worldwide inscience. In 2007, when researchersmeasured how many students in a giv-en country reached the Advanced Inter-national Benchmark—a kind of super-star status for math students—theyfound that most of the standouts wereclustered in just a few Asian countries.

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About 40 percent of fourth graders inSingapore and Hong Kong reached orsurpassed the Advanced Benchmark,and about 40 to 45 percent of eighthgraders in Taiwan, Korea, and Singa-pore pulled it off. Worldwide, the medi-an percentage of students reaching theAdvanced Benchmark was only 5 per-cent at the fourth grade and 2 percentat the eighth grade.

How to explain these sensational per-formance gaps between Asia and therest of the world? Consider this inter-esting wrinkle in the TIMSS exam. Stu-dents taking the test are also asked toanswer a tedious series of questionsabout themselves, ranging from howmuch they enjoy science to whetherthere are enough books in their hometo fill three or more bookcases. Thequestionnaire takes a long time to com-plete, and since it doesn’t count toward

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the final grade, many students leave alot of questions blank. You’d have to bepretty persistent to answer every singleone. But it turns out, according to astudy by education professor ErlingBoe, that the nations whose students fillout more of the questionnaire also tendto have students who do well on theTIMSS test. In other words, excellentstudents seem not only to possess thecognitive ability to solve math and sci-ence problems, but also to have a usefulpersonality characteristic: quietpersistence.

Other studies have also found unusu-al levels of persistence in even veryyoung Asian children. For example, thecross-cultural psychologist PriscillaBlinco gave Japanese and Americanfirst graders an unsolvable puzzle towork on in solitude, without the help ofother children or a teacher, and

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compared how long they tried beforegiving up. The Japanese children spentan average of 13.93 minutes on thepuzzle before calling it quits, whereasthe American kids spent only 9.47minutes. Fewer than 27 percent of theAmerican students persisted as long asthe average Japanese student—andonly 10 percent of the Japanese stu-dents gave up as quickly as the averageAmerican. Blinco attributes these res-ults to the Japanese quality ofpersistence.

The quiet persistence shown by manyAsians, and Asian-Americans, is notlimited to the fields of math and sci-ence. Several years after my first trip toCupertino, I caught up with TiffanyLiao, the Swarthmore-bound highschool student whose parents hadpraised her so highly for loving to read,even in public, when she was a young

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girl. When we first met, Tiffany was ababy-faced seventeen-year-old on herway to college. She told me then thatshe was excited to travel to the EastCoast and meet new people, but wasalso afraid of living in a place where noone else would drink bubble tea, thepopular drink invented in Taiwan.

Now Tiffany was a worldly and soph-isticated college senior. She had studiedabroad in Spain. She signed her noteswith a continental touch: “Abrazos,Tiffany.” In her Facebook picture, thechildlike look was gone, replaced witha smile that was still soft and friendlybut also knowing.

Tiffany was on her way to realizingher dream of becoming a journalist,having just been elected editor-in-chiefof the college newspaper. She still de-scribed herself as shy—she feels a heatrush on her face when she first speaks

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in public or picks up the phone to call astranger—but had become more com-fortable speaking up. She believed thather “quiet traits,” as she called them,had helped her become editor-in-chief.For Tiffany, soft power meant listeningattentively, taking thorough notes, anddoing deep research on her interviewsubjects before meeting them face-to-face. “This process has contributed tomy success as a journalist,” she wroteto me. Tiffany had come to embrace thepower of quiet.

When I first met Mike Wei, the Stanfordstudent who wished he was as uninhib-ited as his classmates, he said that therewas no such thing as a quiet leader.“How can you let people know you

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have conviction if you’re quiet aboutit?” he asked. I reassured him that thiswasn’t so, but Mike had so much quietconviction about the inability of quietpeople to convey conviction that deepdown I’d wondered whether he had apoint.

But that was before I heard ProfessorNi talk about Asian-style soft power,before I read Gandhi on satyagraha, be-fore I contemplated Tiffany’s bright fu-ture as a journalist. Conviction is con-viction, the kids from Cupertino taughtme, at whatever decibel level it’sexpressed.

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PartFourHOW TO LOVE, HOW TO

WORK

9WHEN SHOULD YOU ACT MORE

EXTROVERTED THAN YOU REALLYARE?

A man has as many social selves as thereare distinct groups of persons about

whose opinion he cares. He generallyshows a different side of himself to each

of these different groups.—WILLIAM JAMES

Meet Professor Brian Little, former Har-vard University psychology lecturer andwinner of the 3M Teaching Fellowship,sometimes referred to as the Nobel Pr-ize of university teaching. Short, sturdy,bespectacled, and endearing, Professor

Little has a booming baritone, a habitof breaking into song and twirlingabout onstage, and an old-school act-or’s way of emphasizing consonantsand elongating vowels. He’s been de-scribed as a cross between Robin Willi-ams and Albert Einstein, and when hemakes a joke that pleases his audience,which happens a lot, he looks evenmore delighted than they do. Hisclasses at Harvard were always over-subscribed and often ended with stand-ing ovations.

In contrast, the man I’m about to de-scribe seems a very different breed: helives with his wife in a tucked-awayhouse on more than two acres of re-mote Canadian woods, visited occasion-ally by his children and grandchildren,but otherwise keeping to himself. Hespends his free time scoring music,reading and writing books and articles,

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and e-mailing friends long notes hecalls “e-pistles.” When he does social-ize, he favors one-on-one encounters.At parties, he pairs off into quiet con-versations as soon as he can or excuseshimself “for a breath of fresh air.”When he’s forced to spend too muchtime out and about or in any situationinvolving conflict, he can literally be-come ill.

Would you be surprised if I told youthat the vaudevillean professor and therecluse who prefers a life of the mindare one and the same man? Maybe not,when you consider that we all behavedifferently depending on the situation.But if we’re capable of such flexibility,does it even make sense to chart thedifferences between introverts and ex-troverts? Is the very notion ofintroversion-extroversion too pat a di-chotomy: the introvert as sage

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philosopher, the extrovert as fearlessleader? The introvert as poet or sciencenerd, the extrovert as jock or cheerlead-er? Aren’t we all a little of both?

Psychologists call this the “person-situation” debate: Do fixed personalitytraits really exist, or do they shift ac-cording to the situation in whichpeople find themselves? If you talk toProfessor Little, he’ll tell you that des-pite his public persona and his teachingaccolades, he’s a true blue, off-the-charts introvert, not only behaviorallybut also neurophysiologically (he tookthe lemon juice test I described inchapter 4 and salivated right on cue).This would seem to place him squarelyon the “person” side of the debate:Little believes that personality traits ex-ist, that they shape our lives in pro-found ways, that they’re based onphysiological mechanisms, and that

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they’re relatively stable across alifespan. Those who take this viewstand on broad shoulders: Hippocrates,Milton, Schopenhauer, Jung, and morerecently the prophets of fMRI machinesand skin conductance tests.

On the other side of the debate are agroup of psychologists known as theSituationists. Situationism posits thatour generalizations about people, in-cluding the words we use to describeone another—shy, aggressive, conscien-tious, agreeable—are misleading. Thereis no core self; there are only the vari-ous selves of Situations X, Y, and Z. TheSituationist view rose to prominence in1968 when the psychologist WalterMischel published Personality andAssessment, challenging the idea offixed personality traits. Mischel arguedthat situational factors predict the

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behavior of people like Brian Littlemuch better than supposed personalitytraits.

For the next few decades, Situation-ism prevailed. The postmodern view ofself that emerged around this time, in-fluenced by theorists like Erving Goff-man, author of The Presentation of Selfin Everyday Life, suggested that sociallife is performance and social masks areour true selves. Many researchersdoubted whether personality traits evenexisted in any meaningful sense. Per-sonality researchers had trouble findingjobs.

But just as the nature-nurture debatewas replaced with interactionism—theinsight that both factors contribute towho we are, and indeed influence eachother—so has the person-situation de-bate been superseded by a more nu-anced understanding. Personality

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psychologists acknowledge that we canfeel sociable at 6:00 p.m. and solitaryat 10:00 p.m., and that these fluctu-ations are real and situation-dependent.But they also emphasize how muchevidence has emerged to support thepremise that notwithstanding thesevariations, there truly is such a thing asa fixed personality.

These days, even Mischel admits thatpersonality traits exist, but he believesthey tend to occur in patterns. For ex-ample, some people are aggressive withpeers and subordinates but docile withauthority figures; others are just the op-posite. People who are “rejection-sens-itive” are warm and loving when theyfeel secure, hostile and controllingwhen they feel rejected.

But this comfortable compromiseraises a variation on the problem offree will that we explored in chapter 5.

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We know that there are physiologicallimits on who we are and how we act.But should we attempt to manipulateour behavior within the range availableto us, or should we simply be true toourselves? At what point does con-trolling our behavior become futile, orexhausting?

If you’re an introvert in corporateAmerica, should you try to save yourtrue self for quiet weekends and spendyour weekdays striving to “get outthere, mix, speak more often, and con-nect with your team and others, de-ploying all the energy and personalityyou can muster,” as Jack Welch advisedin a BusinessWeek online column? Ifyou’re an extroverted university stu-dent, should you save your true self forrowdy weekends and spend your week-days focusing and studying? Can people

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fine-tune their own personalities thisway?

The only good answer I’ve heard tothese questions comes from ProfessorBrian Little.

On the morning of October 12, 1979,Little visited the Royal Military CollegeSaint-Jean on the Richelieu River, fortykilometers south of Montreal, to ad-dress a group of senior military officers.As an introvert might be expected todo, he’d prepared thoroughly for thespeech, not only rehearsing his remarksbut also making sure he could cite thelatest research. Even while deliveringhis talk, he was in what he calls classicintrovert mode, continually scanningthe room for audience displeasure and

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making adjustments as needed—a stat-istical reference here, a dollop of hu-mor there.

The speech was a success (so muchso that he would be invited to make itevery year). But the next invitation thecollege extended horrified him: to jointhe top brass for lunch. Little had to de-liver another lecture that afternoon,and he knew that making small talk foran hour and a half would wipe him out.He needed to recharge for his afternoonperformance.

Thinking quickly, he announced thathe had a passion for ship design andasked his hosts if he might instead takethe opportunity of his visit to admirethe boats passing by on the RichelieuRiver. He then spent his lunch hourstrolling up and down the river path-way with an appreciative expression onhis face.

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For years Little returned to lecture atthe college, and for years, at lunchtime,he walked the banks of the RichelieuRiver indulging his imaginaryhobby—until the day the collegemoved its campus to a landlocked loca-tion. Stripped of his cover story, Pro-fessor Little resorted to the only escapehatch he could find—the men’s room.After each lecture, he would race to therestroom and hide inside a stall. Onetime, a military man spotted Little’sshoes under the door and began ahearty conversation, so Little took tokeeping his feet propped up on thebathroom walls, where they would behidden from view. (Taking shelter inbathrooms is a surprisingly commonphenomenon, as you probably know ifyou’re an introvert. “After a talk, I’m inbathroom stall number nine,” Littleonce told Peter Gzowski, one of

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Canada’s most eminent talk-show hosts.“After a show, I’m in stall numbereight,” replied Gzowski, not missing abeat.)

You might wonder how a strong in-trovert like Professor Little manages tospeak in public so effectively. The an-swer, he says, is simple, and it has todo with a new field of psychology thathe created almost singlehandedly,called Free Trait Theory. Little believesthat fixed traits and free traits coexist.According to Free Trait Theory, we areborn and culturally endowed with cer-tain personality traits—introversion, forexample—but we can and do act out ofcharacter in the service of “core person-al projects.”

In other words, introverts are capableof acting like extroverts for the sake ofwork they consider important, peoplethey love, or anything they value

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highly. Free Trait Theory explains whyan introvert might throw his extrover-ted wife a surprise party or join thePTA at his daughter’s school. It explainshow it’s possible for an extroverted sci-entist to behave with reserve in herlaboratory, for an agreeable person toact hard-nosed during a business nego-tiation, and for a cantankerous uncle totreat his niece tenderly when he takesher out for ice cream. As these ex-amples suggest, Free Trait Theory ap-plies in many different contexts, but it’sespecially relevant for introverts livingunder the Extrovert Ideal.

According to Little, our lives are dra-matically enhanced when we’re in-volved in core personal projects that weconsider meaningful, manageable, andnot unduly stressful, and that are sup-ported by others. When someone asksus “How are things?” we may give a

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throwaway answer, but our true re-sponse is a function of how well ourcore personal projects are going.

That’s why Professor Little, the con-summate introvert, lectures with suchpassion. Like a modern-day Socrates, heloves his students deeply; opening theirminds and attending to their well-beingare two of his core personal projects.When Little held office hours at Har-vard, the students lined up in the hall-way as if he were giving out free ticketsto a rock concert. For more than twentyyears his students asked him to writeseveral hundred letters of recommenda-tion a year. “Brian Little is the most en-gaging, entertaining, and caring pro-fessor I have ever encountered,” wroteone student about him. “I cannot evenbegin to explain the myriad ways inwhich he has positively affected mylife.” So, for Brian Little, the additional

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effort required to stretch his naturalboundaries is justified by seeing hiscore personal project—igniting all thoseminds—come to fruition.

At first blush, Free Trait Theoryseems to run counter to a cherishedpiece of our cultural heritage.Shakespeare’s oft-quoted advice, “Tothine own self be true,” runs deep inour philosophical DNA. Many of us areuncomfortable with the idea of takingon a “false” persona for any length oftime. And if we act out of character byconvincing ourselves that our pseudo-self is real, we can eventually burn outwithout even knowing why. The geniusof Little’s theory is how neatly it re-solves this discomfort. Yes, we are onlypretending to be extroverts, and yes,such inauthenticity can be morally am-biguous (not to mention exhausting),but if it’s in the service of love or a

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professional calling, then we’re doingjust as Shakespeare advised.

When people are skilled at adoptingfree traits, it can be hard to believe thatthey’re acting out of character. Profess-or Little’s students are usually incredu-lous when he claims to be an introvert.But Little is far from unique; manypeople, especially those in leadershiproles, engage in a certain level ofpretend-extroversion. Consider, for ex-ample, my friend Alex, the socially ad-ept head of a financial services com-pany, who agreed to give a candid in-terview on the condition of sealed-in-blood anonymity. Alex told me thatpretend-extroversion was something hetaught himself in the seventh grade,

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when he decided that other kids weretaking advantage of him.

“I was the nicest person you’d everwant to know,” Alex recalls, “but theworld wasn’t that way. The problemwas that if you were just a nice person,you’d get crushed. I refused to live alife where people could do that stuff tome. I was like, OK, what’s the policyprescription here? And there really wasonly one. I needed to have every personin my pocket. If I wanted to be a niceperson, I needed to run the school.”

But how to get from A to B? “I stud-ied social dynamics, I guarantee morethan anyone you’ve ever met,” Alextold me. He observed the way peopletalked, the way they walked—espe-cially male dominance poses. He adjus-ted his own persona, which allowedhim to go on being a fundamentallyshy, sweet kid, but without being taken

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advantage of. “Any hard thing whereyou can get crushed, I was like, ‘I needto learn how to do this.’ So by now I’mbuilt for war. Because then people don’tscrew you.”

Alex also took advantage of his nat-ural strengths. “I learned that boys ba-sically do only one thing: they chasegirls. They get them, they lose them,they talk about them. I was like, ‘That’scompletely circuitous. I really like girls.’That’s where intimacy comes from. Sorather than sitting around and talkingabout girls, I got to know them. I usedhaving relationships with girls, plus be-ing good at sports, to have the guys inmy pocket. Oh, and every once in awhile, you have to punch people. I didthat, too.”

Today Alex has a folksy, affable,whistle-while-you-work demeanor. I’venever seen him in a bad mood. But

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you’ll see his self-taught bellicose sideif you ever try to cross him in a negoti-ation. And you’ll see his introverted selfif you ever try to make dinner planswith him.

“I could literally go years withouthaving any friends except for my wifeand kids,” he says. “Look at you andme. You’re one of my best friends, andhow many times do we actuallytalk—when you call me! I don’t like so-cializing. My dream is to live off theland on a thousand acres with my fam-ily. You never see a team of friends inthat dream. So notwithstandingwhatever you might see in my publicpersona, I am an introvert. I think thatfundamentally I’m the same person I al-ways was. Massively shy, but I com-pensate for it.”

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But how many of us are really capableof acting out of character to this degree(putting aside, for the moment, thequestion of whether we want to)? Pro-fessor Little happens to be a great per-former, and so are many CEOs. Whatabout the rest of us?

Some years ago, a research psycholo-gist named Richard Lippa set out to an-swer this question. He called a group ofintroverts to his lab and asked them toact like extroverts while pretending toteach a math class. Then he and histeam, video cameras in hand, measuredthe length of their strides, the amountof eye contact they made with their“students,” the percentage of time theyspent talking, the pace and volume oftheir speech, and the total length of

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each teaching session. They also ratedhow generally extroverted the subjectsappeared, based on their recordedvoices and body language.

Then Lippa did the same thing withactual extroverts and compared the res-ults. He found that although the lattergroup came across as more extroverted,some of the pseudo-extroverts were sur-prisingly convincing. It seems that mostof us know how to fake it to some ex-tent. Whether or not we’re aware thatthe length of our strides and theamount of time we spend talking andsmiling mark us as introverts and extro-verts, we know it unconsciously.

Still, there’s a limit to how much wecan control our self-presentation. Thisis partly because of a phenomenoncalled behavioral leakage, in which ourtrue selves seep out via unconsciousbody language: a subtle look away at a

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moment when an extrovert would havemade eye contact, or a skillful turn ofthe conversation by a lecturer thatplaces the burden of talking on theaudience when an extroverted speakerwould have held the floor a littlelonger.

How was it that some of Lippa’spseudo-extroverts came so close to thescores of true extroverts? It turned outthat the introverts who were especiallygood at acting like extroverts tended toscore high for a trait that psychologistscall “self-monitoring.” Self-monitors arehighly skilled at modifying their beha-vior to the social demands of a situ-ation. They look for cues to tell themhow to act. When in Rome, they do asthe Romans do, according to the psy-chologist Mark Snyder, author of PublicAppearances, Private Realities, and creat-or of the Self-Monitoring Scale.

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One of the most effective self-monit-ors I’ve ever met is a man namedEdgar, a well-known and much-belovedfixture on the New York social circuit.He and his wife host or attend fund-raisers and other social events seem-ingly every weeknight. He’s the kind ofenfant terrible whose latest antics are afavorite topic of conversation. ButEdgar is an avowed introvert. “I’d muchrather sit and read and think aboutthings than talk to people,” he says.

Yet talk to people he does. Edgar wasraised in a highly social family that ex-pected him to self-monitor, and he’smotivated to do so. “I love politics,” hesays. “I love policy, I love makingthings happen, I want to change theworld in my own way. So I do stuffthat’s artificial. I don’t really like beingthe guest at someone else’s party, be-cause then I have to be entertaining.

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But I’ll host parties because it puts youat the center of things without actuallybeing a social person.”

When he does find himself at otherpeople’s parties, Edgar goes to greatlengths to play his role. “All throughcollege, and recently even, before I everwent to a dinner or cocktail party, Iwould have an index card with three tofive relevant, amusing anecdotes. I’dcome up with them during the day—ifsomething struck me I’d jot it down.Then, at dinner, I’d wait for the rightopening and launch in. Sometimes I’dhave to go to the bathroom and pullout my cards to remember what mylittle stories were.”

Over time, though, Edgar stoppedbringing index cards to dinner parties.He still considers himself an introvert,but he grew so deeply into his extrover-ted role that telling anecdotes started to

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come naturally to him. Indeed, thehighest self-monitors not only tend tobe good at producing the desired effectand emotion in a given social situ-ation—they also experience less stresswhile doing so.

In contrast to the Edgars of theworld, low self-monitors base their be-havior on their own internal compass.They have a smaller repertoire of socialbehaviors and masks at their disposal.They’re less sensitive to situationalcues, like how many anecdotes you’reexpected to share at a dinner party, andless interested in role-playing, evenwhen they know what the cues are. It’sas if low self-monitors (LSMs) and highself-monitors (HSMs) play to differentaudiences, Snyder has said: one inner,the other outer.

If you want to know how strong aself-monitor you are, here are a few

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questions from Snyder’s Self-MonitoringScale:

• When you’re uncertain how toact in a social situation, do youlook to the behavior of othersfor cues?

• Do you often seek the advice ofyour friends to choose movies,books, or music?

• In different situations and withdifferent people, do you oftenact like very different people?

• Do you find it easy to imitateother people?

• Can you look someone in theeye and tell a lie with a straightface if for a right end?

• Do you ever deceive people bybeing friendly when really youdislike them?

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• Do you put on a show to im-press or entertain people?

• Do you sometimes appear toothers to be experiencing deep-er emotions than you actuallyare?

The more times you answered “yes” tothese questions, the more of a high self-monitor you are.

Now ask yourself these questions:

• Is your behavior usually an ex-pression of your true inner feel-ings, attitudes, and beliefs?

• Do you find that you can onlyargue for ideas that you alreadybelieve?

• Would you refuse to changeyour opinions, or the way youdo things, in order to please

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someone else or win theirfavor?

• Do you dislike games likecharades or improvisationalacting?

• Do you have trouble changingyour behavior to suit differentpeople and different situations?

The more you tended to answer “yes”to this second set of questions, themore of a low self-monitor you are.

When Professor Little introduced theconcept of self-monitoring to his per-sonality psychology classes, some stu-dents got very worked up about wheth-er it was ethical to be a high self-monit-or. A few “mixed” couples—HSMs andLSMs in love—even broke up over it, hewas told. To high self-monitors, lowself-monitors can seem rigid and so-cially awkward. To low self-monitors,

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high self-monitors can come across asconformist and deceptive—“more prag-matic than principled,” in MarkSnyder’s words. Indeed, HSMs havebeen found to be better liars than LSMs,which would seem to support the mor-alistic stance taken by low self-monitors.

But Little, an ethical and sympatheticman who happens to be an extremelyhigh self-monitor, sees things differ-ently. He views self-monitoring as anact of modesty. It’s about accommodat-ing oneself to situational norms, ratherthan “grinding down everything toone’s own needs and concerns.” Not allself-monitoring is based on acting, hesays, or on working the room. A moreintroverted version may be less con-cerned with spotlight-seeking and morewith the avoidance of social faux pas.When Professor Little makes a great

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speech, it’s partly because he’s self-monitoring every moment, continuallychecking his audience for subtle signsof pleasure or boredom and adjustinghis presentation to meet its needs.

So if you can fake it, if you master theacting skills, the attention to social nu-ance, and the willingness to submit tosocial norms that self-monitoring re-quires, should you? The answer is that aFree Trait strategy can be effectivewhen used judiciously, but disastrous ifoverdone.

Recently I spoke on a panel at Har-vard Law School. The occasion was thefifty-fifth anniversary of women beingadmitted to the law school. Alumnaefrom all over the country gathered on

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campus to celebrate. The subject of thepanel was “In a Different Voice:Strategies for Powerful Self-Presenta-tion.” There were four speakers: a triallawyer, a judge, a public-speakingcoach, and me. I’d prepared my re-marks carefully; I knew the role Iwanted to play.

The public-speaking coach went first.She talked about how to give a talk thatknocks people’s socks off. The judge,who happened to be Korean-American,spoke of how frustrating it is whenpeople assume that all Asians are quietand studious when in fact she’s outgo-ing and assertive. The litigator, whowas petite and blond and feisty as hell,talked about the time she conducted across-examination only to be admon-ished by a judge to “Back down, tiger!”

When my turn came, I aimed my re-marks at the women in the audience

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who didn’t see themselves as tigers,myth-busters, or sock-knocker-offers. Isaid that the ability to negotiate is notinborn, like blond hair or straight teeth,and it does not belong exclusively tothe table-pounders of the world.Anyone can be a great negotiator, I toldthem, and in fact it often pays to bequiet and gracious, to listen more thantalk, and to have an instinct for har-mony rather than conflict. With thisstyle, you can take aggressive positionswithout inflaming your counterpart’sego. And by listening, you can learnwhat’s truly motivating the personyou’re negotiating with and come upwith creative solutions that satisfy bothparties.

I also shared some psychologicaltricks for feeling calm and secure dur-ing intimidating situations, such as pay-ing attention to how your face and

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body arrange themselves when you’refeeling genuinely confident, and adopt-ing those same positions when it comestime to fake it. Studies show that takingsimple physical steps—like smil-ing—makes us feel stronger and happi-er, while frowning makes us feel worse.

Naturally, when the panel was overand the audience member came aroundto chat with the panelists, it was the in-troverts and pseudo-extroverts whosought me out. Two of those womenstand out in my mind.

The first was Alison, a trial lawyer.Alison was slim and meticulouslygroomed, but her face was pale,pinched, and unhappy-looking. She’dbeen a litigator at the same corporatelaw firm for over a decade. Now shewas applying for general counsel posi-tions at various companies, whichseemed a logical next step, except that

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her heart clearly wasn’t in it. And sureenough, she hadn’t gotten a single joboffer. On the strength of her creden-tials, she was advancing to the finalround of interviews, only to be weededout at the last minute. And she knewwhy, because the head-hunter who’dcoordinated her interviews gave thesame feedback each time: she lackedthe right personality for the job. Alison,a self-described introvert, lookedpained as she related this damningjudgment.

The second alumna, Jillian, held asenior position at an environmental ad-vocacy organization that she loved. Jil-lian came across as kind, cheerful, anddown-to-earth. She was fortunate tospend much of her time researchingand writing policy papers on topics shecared about. Sometimes, though, shehad to chair meetings and make

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presentations. Although she felt deepsatisfaction after these meetings, shedidn’t enjoy the spotlight, and wantedmy advice on staying cool when she feltscared.

So what was the difference betweenAlison and Jillian? Both were pseudo-extroverts, and you might say that Alis-on was trying and failing where Jillianwas succeeding. But Alison’s problemwas actually that she was acting out ofcharacter in the service of a project shedidn’t care about. She didn’t love thelaw. She’d chosen to become a WallStreet litigator because it seemed to herthat this was what powerful and suc-cessful lawyers did, so her pseudo-ex-troversion was not supported by deepervalues. She was not telling herself, I’mdoing this to advance work I care aboutdeeply, and when the work is done I’llsettle back into my true self. Instead, her

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interior monologue was The route tosuccess is to be the sort of person I amnot. This is not self-monitoring; it isself-negation. Where Jillian acts out ofcharacter for the sake of worthy tasksthat temporarily require a different ori-entation, Alison believes that there issomething fundamentally wrong withwho she is.

It’s not always so easy, it turns out,to identify your core personal projects.And it can be especially tough for intro-verts, who have spent so much of theirlives conforming to extroverted normsthat by the time they choose a career,or a calling, it feels perfectly normal toignore their own preferences. They maybe uncomfortable in law school or nurs-ing school or in the marketing depart-ment, but no more so than they wereback in middle school or summer camp.

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I, too, was once in this position. I en-joyed practicing corporate law, and fora while I convinced myself that I wasan attorney at heart. I badly wanted tobelieve it, since I had already investedyears in law school and on-the-jobtraining, and much about Wall Streetlaw was alluring. My colleagues wereintellectual, kind, and considerate(mostly). I made a good living. I had anoffice on the forty-second floor of a sky-scraper with views of the Statue ofLiberty. I enjoyed the idea that I couldflourish in such a high-powered envir-onment. And I was pretty good at ask-ing the “but” and “what if” questionsthat are central to the thought pro-cesses of most lawyers.

It took me almost a decade to under-stand that the law was never my per-sonal project, not even close. Today Ican tell you unhesitatingly what is: my

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husband and sons; writing; promotingthe values of this book. Once I realizedthis, I had to make a change. I lookback on my years as a Wall Street law-yer as time spent in a foreign country.It was absorbing, it was exciting, and Igot to meet a lot of interesting peoplewhom I never would have known oth-erwise. But I was always an expatriate.

Having spent so much time navigat-ing my own career transition and coun-seling others through theirs, I havefound that there are three key steps toidentifying your own core personalprojects.

First, think back to what you loved todo when you were a child. How didyou answer the question of what youwanted to be when you grew up? Thespecific answer you gave may havebeen off the mark, but the underlyingimpulse was not. If you wanted to be a

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fireman, what did a fireman mean toyou? A good man who rescued peoplein distress? A daredevil? Or the simplepleasure of operating a truck? If youwanted to be a dancer, was it becauseyou got to wear a costume, or becauseyou craved applause, or was it the purejoy of twirling around at lightningspeed? You may have known moreabout who you were then than you donow.

Second, pay attention to the workyou gravitate to. At my law firm I neveronce volunteered to take on an extracorporate legal assignment, but I didspend a lot of time doing pro bonowork for a nonprofit women’s leader-ship organization. I also sat on severallaw firm committees dedicated to ment-oring, training, and personal develop-ment for young lawyers in the firm.Now, as you can probably tell from this

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book, I am not the committee type. Butthe goals of those committees lit me up,so that’s what I did.

Finally, pay attention to what youenvy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, butit tells the truth. You mostly envy thosewho have what you desire. I met myown envy after some of my former lawschool classmates got together andcompared notes on alumni careertracks. They spoke with admirationand, yes, jealousy, of a classmate whoargued regularly before the SupremeCourt. At first I felt critical. More powerto that classmate! I thought, congratu-lating myself on my magnanimity. ThenI realized that my largesse came cheap,because I didn’t aspire to argue a casebefore the Supreme Court, or to any ofthe other accolades of lawyering. WhenI asked myself whom I did envy, the an-swer came back instantly. My college

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classmates who’d grown up to bewriters or psychologists. Today I’m pur-suing my own version of both thoseroles.

But even if you’re stretching yourself inthe service of a core personal project,you don’t want to act out of charactertoo much, or for too long. Rememberthose trips Professor Little made to therestroom in between speeches? Thosehideout sessions tell us that, paradoxic-ally, the best way to act out of charac-ter is to stay as true to yourself as youpossibly can—starting by creating asmany “restorative niches” as possible inyour daily life.

“Restorative niche” is ProfessorLittle’s term for the place you go when

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you want to return to your true self. Itcan be a physical place, like the pathbeside the Richelieu River, or a tempor-al one, like the quiet breaks you planbetween sales calls. It can mean can-celing your social plans on the weekendbefore a big meeting at work, practi-cing yoga or meditation, or choosing e-mail over an in-person meeting. (EvenVictorian ladies, whose job effectivelywas to be available to friends and fam-ily, were expected to withdraw for arest each afternoon.)

You choose a restorative niche whenyou close the door to your private of-fice (if you’re lucky enough to haveone) in between meetings. You caneven create a restorative niche during ameeting, by carefully selecting whereyou sit, and when and how you parti-cipate. In his memoir In an UncertainWorld, Robert Rubin, the treasury

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secretary under President Clinton, de-scribes how he “always liked to beaway from the center, whether in theOval Office or the chief of staff’s office,where my regular seat became the footof the table. That little bit of physicaldistance felt more comfortable to me,and let me read the room and commentfrom a perspective ever so slightly re-moved. I didn’t worry about beingoverlooked. No matter how far awayyou were sitting or standing, you couldalways just say, ‘Mr. President, I thinkthis, that, or the other.’ ”

We would all be better off if, beforeaccepting a new job, we evaluated thepresence or absence of restorativeniches as carefully as we consider thefamily leave policy or health insuranceplans. Introverts should ask themselves:Will this job allow me to spend time onin-character activities like, for example,

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reading, strategizing, writing, and re-searching? Will I have a private work-space or be subject to the constant de-mands of an open office plan? If the jobdoesn’t give me enough restorativeniches, will I have enough free time onevenings and weekends to grant themto myself?

Extroverts will want to look for res-torative niches, too. Does the job in-volve talking, traveling, and meetingnew people? Is the office space stimu-lating enough? If the job isn’t a perfectfit, are the hours flexible enough that Ican blow off steam after work? Thinkthrough the job description carefully.One highly extroverted woman I inter-viewed was excited about a position asthe “community organizer” for a par-enting website, until she realized thatshe’d be sitting by herself behind acomputer every day from nine to five.

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Sometimes people find restorativeniches in professions where you’d leastexpect them. One of my former col-leagues is a trial lawyer who spendsmost of her time in splendid solitude,researching and writing legal briefs. Be-cause most of her cases settle, she goesto court rarely enough that she doesn’tmind exercising her pseudo-extrover-sion skills when she has to. An introver-ted administrative assistant I inter-viewed parlayed her office experienceinto a work-from-home Internet busi-ness that serves as a clearinghouse andcoaching service for “virtual assistants.”And in the next chapter we’ll meet a su-perstar salesman who broke his com-pany’s sales records year after year byinsisting on staying true to his introver-ted self. All three of these people havetaken decidedly extroverted fields andreinvented them in their own image, so

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that they’re acting in character most ofthe time, effectively turning their work-days into one giant restorative niche.

Finding restorative niches isn’t al-ways easy. You might want to readquietly by the fire on Saturday nights,but if your spouse wishes you’d spendthose evenings out with her large circleof friends, then what? You might wantto retreat to the oasis of your privateoffice in between sales calls, but what ifyour company just switched over to anopen office plan? If you plan to exercisefree traits, you’ll need the help offriends, family, and colleagues. Whichis why Professor Little calls, with greatpassion, for each of us to enter into “aFree Trait Agreement.”

This is the final piece of Free TraitTheory. A Free Trait Agreement ac-knowledges that we’ll each act out ofcharacter some of the time—in

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exchange for being ourselves the rest ofthe time. It’s a Free Trait Agreementwhen a wife who wants to go out everySaturday night and a husband whowants to relax by the fire work out aschedule: half the time we’ll go out, andhalf the time we’ll stay home. It’s a FreeTrait Agreement when you attend yourextroverted best friend’s weddingshower, engagement celebration, andbachelorette party, but she understandswhen you skip out on the three days’worth of group activities leading up tothe wedding itself.

It’s often possible to negotiate FreeTrait Agreements with friends and lov-ers, whom you want to please and wholove your true, in-character self. Yourwork life is a little trickier, since mostbusinesses still don’t think in theseterms. For now, you may have to pro-ceed indirectly. Career counselor Shoya

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Zichy told me the story of one of herclients, an introverted financial analystwho worked in an environment whereshe was either presenting to clients ortalking to colleagues who continuallycycled in and out of her office. She wasso burned out that she planned to quither job—until Zichy suggested that shenegotiate for downtime.

Now, this woman worked for a WallStreet bank, not a culture conducive toa frank discussion about the needs ofthe highly introverted. So she carefullyconsidered how to frame her request.She told her boss that the very natureof her work—strategic analysis—re-quired quiet time in which to concen-trate. Once she made her case empiric-ally, it was easier to ask for what sheneeded psychologically: two days aweek of working from home. Her bosssaid yes.

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But the person with whom you canbest strike a Free Trait Agree-ment—after overcoming his or her res-istance—is yourself.

Let’s say you’re single. You dislikethe bar scene, but you crave intimacy,and you want to be in a long-term rela-tionship in which you can share cozyevenings and long conversations withyour partner and a small circle offriends. In order to achieve this goal,you make an agreement with yourselfthat you will push yourself to go to so-cial events, because only in this waycan you hope to meet a mate and re-duce the number of gatherings you at-tend over the long term. But while youpursue this goal, you will attend only asmany events as you can comfortablystand. You decide in advance what thatamount is—once a week, once a month,once a quarter. And once you’ve met

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your quota, you’ve earned the right tostay home without feeling guilty.

Or perhaps you’ve always dreamed ofbuilding your own small company,working from home so you can spendmore time with your spouse and chil-dren. You know you’ll need to do a cer-tain amount of networking, so youmake the following Free Trait Agree-ment with yourself: you will go to oneschmooze-fest per week. At each eventyou will have at least one genuine con-versation (since this comes easier toyou than “working the room”) and fol-low up with that person the next day.After that, you get to go home and notfeel bad when you turn down other net-working opportunities that come yourway.

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Professor Little knows all too well whathappens when you lack a Free TraitAgreement with yourself. Apart fromoccasional excursions to the RichelieuRiver or the restroom, he once followeda schedule that combined the mostenergy-zapping elements of both intro-version and extroversion. On the extro-verted side, his days consisted of non-stop lectures, meetings with students,monitoring a student discussion group,and writing all those letters of recom-mendation. On the introverted side, hetook those responsibilities very, veryseriously.

“One way of looking at this,” he saysnow, “is to say that I was heavily en-gaged in extrovert-like behaviors, but,of course, had I been a real extrovert Iwould have done quicker, less nuancedletters of recommendation, would nothave invested the time in preparation

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of lectures, and the social events wouldnot have drained me.” He also sufferedfrom a certain amount of what he calls“reputational confusion,” in which hebecame known for being over-the-topeffervescent, and the reputation fed onitself. This was the persona that othersknew, so it was the persona he felt ob-liged to serve up.

Naturally, Professor Little started toburn out, not only mentally but alsophysically. Never mind. He loved hisstudents, he loved his field, he loved itall. Until the day that he ended up inthe doctor’s office with a case of doublepneumonia that he’d been too busy tonotice. His wife had dragged him thereagainst his will, and a good thing too.According to the doctors, if she hadwaited much longer, he would havedied.

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Double pneumonia and an oversched-uled life can happen to anyone, ofcourse, but for Little, it was the resultof acting out of character for too longand without enough restorative niches.When your conscientiousness impelsyou to take on more than you canhandle, you begin to lose interest, evenin tasks that normally engage you. Youalso risk your physical health. “Emo-tional labor,” which is the effort wemake to control and change our ownemotions, is associated with stress,burnout, and even physical symptomslike an increase in cardiovascular dis-ease. Professor Little believes that pro-longed acting out of character may alsoincrease autonomic nervous systemactivity, which can, in turn, comprom-ise immune functioning.

One noteworthy study suggests thatpeople who suppress negative emotions

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tend to leak those emotions later in un-expected ways. The psychologist JudithGrob asked people to hide their emo-tions as she showed them disgustingimages. She even had them hold pensin their mouths to prevent them fromfrowning. She found that this group re-ported feeling less disgusted by the pic-tures than did those who’d been al-lowed to react naturally. Later,however, the people who hid theiremotions suffered side effects. Theirmemory was impaired, and the negat-ive emotions they’d suppressed seemedto color their outlook. When Grob hadthem fill in the missing letter to theword “gr_ss,” for example, they weremore likely than others to offer “gross”rather than “grass.” “People who tendto [suppress their negative emotions]regularly,” concludes Grob, “might start

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to see the world in a more negativelight.”

That’s why these days Professor Littleis in restorative mode, retired from theuniversity and reveling in his wife’scompany in their house in the Canadiancountryside. Little says that his wife,Sue Phillips, the director of the Schoolof Public Policy and Administration atCarleton University, is so much likehim that they don’t need a Free TraitAgreement to govern their relationship.But his Free Trait Agreement with him-self provides that he do his remaining“scholarly and professional deeds withgood grace,” but not “hang aroundlonger than necessary.”

Then he goes home and snuggles bythe fire with Sue.

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10THE COMMUNICATION GAP

How to Talk to Members of the OppositeType

The meeting of two personalities is likethe contact of two chemical substances; if

there is any reaction, both are trans-formed.

—CARL JUNG

If introverts and extroverts are thenorth and south of temperament—op-posite ends of a single spectrum—thenhow can they possibly get along? Yetthe two types are often drawn to eachother—in friendship, business, and es-pecially romance. These pairs can enjoy

great excitement and mutual admira-tion, a sense that each completes theother. One tends to listen, the other totalk; one is sensitive to beauty, but alsoto slings and arrows, while the otherbarrels cheerfully through his days; onepays the bills and the other arrangesthe children’s play dates. But it can alsocause problems when members of theseunions pull in opposite directions.

Greg and Emily are an example of anintrovert-extrovert couple who love andmadden each other in equal measure.Greg, who just turned thirty, has abounding gait, a mop of dark hair con-tinually falling over his eyes, and aneasy laugh. Most people would describehim as gregarious. Emily, a maturetwenty-seven, is as self-contained asGreg is expansive. Graceful and soft-spoken, she keeps her auburn hair tied

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in a chignon, and often gazes at peoplefrom under lowered lashes.

Greg and Emily complement eachother beautifully. Without Greg, Emilymight forget to leave the house, exceptto go to work. But without Emily, Gregwould feel—paradoxically for such asocial creature—alone.

Before they met, most of Greg’s girl-friends were extroverts. He says he en-joyed those relationships, but never gotto know his girlfriends well, becausethey were always “plotting how to bewith groups of people.” He speaks ofEmily with a kind of awe, as if she hasaccess to a deeper state of being. Healso describes her as “the anchor”around which his world revolves.

Emily, for her part, treasures Greg’sebullient nature; he makes her feelhappy and alive. She has always beenattracted to extroverts, who she says

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“do all the work of making conversa-tion. For them, it’s not work at all.”

The trouble is that for most of thefive years they’ve been together, Gregand Emily have been having one ver-sion or another of the same fight. Greg,a music promoter with a large circle offriends, wants to host dinner partiesevery Friday—casual, animated get-to-gethers with heaping bowls of pastaand flowing bottles of wine. He’s beengiving Friday-night dinners since hewas a senior in college, and they’ve be-come a highlight of his week and atreasured piece of his identity.

Emily has come to dread theseweekly events. A hardworking staff at-torney for an art museum and a veryprivate person, the last thing she wantsto do when she gets home from work isentertain. Her idea of a perfect start to

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the weekend is a quiet evening at themovies, just her and Greg.

It seems an irreconcilable difference:Greg wants fifty-two dinner parties ayear, Emily wants zero.

Greg says that Emily should makemore of an effort. He accuses her of be-ing antisocial. “I am social,” she says. “Ilove you, I love my family, I love myclose friends. I just don’t love dinnerparties. People don’t really relate atthose parties—they just socialize. You’relucky because I devote all my energy toyou. You spread yours around toeveryone.”

But Emily soon backs off, partly be-cause she hates fighting, but also be-cause she doubts herself. Maybe I amantisocial, she thinks. Maybe there issomething wrong with me. Whenever sheand Greg argue about this, she’sflooded with childhood memories: how

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school was tougher for her than for heremotionally hardier younger sister; howshe seemed to worry more than otherpeople did about social issues, like howto say no when someone asked her toget together after school and she pre-ferred to stay home. Emily had plentyof friends—she’s always had a talent forfriendship—but she never traveled inpacks.

Emily has suggested a compromise:What if Greg gives his dinner partieswhenever she’s out of town visiting hersister? But Greg doesn’t want to hostdinners by himself. He loves Emily andwants to be with her, and so doeseveryone else, once they get to knowher. So why does Emily withdraw?

This question, for Greg, is more thanmere pique. Being alone for him is akind of Kryptonite; it makes him feelweak. He had looked forward to a

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married life of shared adventures. He’dimagined being part of a couple at thecenter of things. And he’d never admit-ted it to himself, but for him being mar-ried meant never having to be by him-self. But now Emily is saying that heshould socialize without her. He feelsas if she’s backing out of a fundamentalpart of their marriage contract. And hebelieves that something is indeedwrong with his wife.

Is something wrong with me? It’s not sur-prising that Emily asks herself thisquestion, or that Greg aims this chargeat her. Probably the most com-mon—and damaging—misunderstand-ing about personality type is that intro-verts are antisocial and extroverts are

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pro-social. But as we’ve seen, neitherformulation is correct; introverts andextroverts are differently social. Whatpsychologists call “the need for intim-acy” is present in introverts and extro-verts alike. In fact, people who valueintimacy highly don’t tend to be, as thenoted psychologist David Buss puts it,“the loud, outgoing, life-of-the-party ex-trovert.” They are more likely to besomeone with a select group of closefriends, who prefers “sincere and mean-ingful conversations over wild parties.”They are more likely to be someonelike Emily.

Conversely, extroverts do not neces-sarily seek closeness from their socializ-ing. “Extroverts seem to need people asa forum to fill needs for social impact,just as a general needs soldiers to fillhis or her need to lead,” the psycholo-gist William Graziano told me. “When

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extroverts show up at a party, everyoneknows they are present.”

Your degree of extroversion seems toinfluence how many friends you have,in other words, but not how good afriend you are. In a study of 132 collegestudents at Humboldt University in Ber-lin, the psychologists Jens Aspendorfand Susanne Wilpers set out to under-stand the effect of different personalitytraits on students’ relationships withtheir peers and families. They focusedon the so-called Big Five traits:Introversion-Extroversion; Agreeable-ness; Openness to Experience; Con-scientiousness; and Emotional Stability.(Many personality psychologists believethat human personality can be boileddown to these five characteristics.)

Aspendorf and Wilpers predicted thatthe extroverted students would have aneasier time striking up new friendships

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than the introverts, and this was indeedthe case. But if the introverts were trulyantisocial and extroverts pro-social,then you’d suppose that the studentswith the most harmonious relationshipswould also be highest in extroversion.And this was not the case at all. In-stead, the students whose relationshipswere freest of conflict had high scoresfor agreeableness. Agreeable people arewarm, supportive, and loving; personal-ity psychologists have found that if yousit them down in front of a computerscreen of words, they focus longer thanothers do on words like caring, console,and help, and a shorter time on wordslike abduct, assault, and harass. Intro-verts and extroverts are equally likelyto be agreeable; there is no correlationbetween extroversion and agreeable-ness. This explains why some extrovertslove the stimulation of socializing but

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don’t get along particularly well withthose closest to them.

It also helps explain why some intro-verts—like Emily, whose talent forfriendship suggests that she’s a highlyagreeable type herself—lavish attentionon their family and close friends butdislike small talk. So when Greg labelsEmily “antisocial,” he’s off base. Emilynurtures her marriage in just the waythat you’d expect an agreeable introvertto do, making Greg the center of her so-cial universe.

Except when she doesn’t. Emily has ademanding job, and sometimes whenshe gets home at night she has little en-ergy left. She’s always happy to seeGreg, but sometimes she’d rather sitnext to him reading than go out for din-ner or make animated conversation.Simply to be in his company is enough.For Emily, this is perfectly natural, but

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Greg feels hurt that she makes an effortfor her colleagues and not for him.

This was a painfully common dynam-ic in the introvert-extrovert couples Iinterviewed: the introverts desperatelycraving downtime and understandingfrom their partners, the extroverts long-ing for company, and resentful that oth-ers seemed to benefit from their part-ners’ “best” selves.

It can be hard for extroverts to un-derstand how badly introverts need torecharge at the end of a busy day. Weall empathize with a sleep-deprivedmate who comes home from work tootired to talk, but it’s harder to graspthat social overstimulation can be justas exhausting.

It’s also hard for introverts to under-stand just how hurtful their silence canbe. I interviewed a woman namedSarah, a bubbly and dynamic high

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school English teacher married to Bob,an introverted law school dean whospends his days fund-raising, then col-lapses when he gets home. Sarah criedtears of frustration and loneliness asshe told me about her marriage.

“When he’s on the job, he’s amaz-ingly engaging,” she said. “Everyonetells me that he’s so funny and I’m solucky to be married to him. And I wantto throttle them. Every night, as soon aswe’re done eating, he jumps up andcleans the kitchen. Then he wants toread the paper alone and work on hisphotography by himself. At aroundnine, he comes into the bedroom andwants to watch TV and be with me. Buthe’s not really with me even then. Hewants me to lay my head on hisshoulder while we stare at the TV. It’s agrownup version of parallel play.”Sarah is trying to convince Bob to make

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a career change. “I think we’d have agreat life if he had a job where he couldsit at the computer all day, but he’sconsistently fund-raising,” she says.

In couples where the man is introver-ted and the woman extroverted, as withSarah and Bob, we often mistake per-sonality conflicts for gender difference,then trot out the conventional wisdomthat “Mars” needs to retreat to his cavewhile “Venus” prefers to interact. Butwhatever the reason for these differ-ences in social needs—whether genderor temperament—what’s important isthat it’s possible to work through them.In The Audacity of Hope, for example,President Obama confides that early inhis marriage to Michelle, he was work-ing on his first book and “would oftenspend the evening holed up in my of-fice in the back of our railroad apart-ment; what I considered normal often

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left Michelle feeling lonely.” He attrib-utes his own style to the demands ofwriting and to having been raisedmostly as an only child, and then saysthat he and Michelle have learned overthe years to meet each other’s needs,and to see them as legitimate.

It can also be hard for introverts andextroverts to understand each other’sways of resolving differences. One ofmy clients was an immaculately dressedlawyer named Celia. Celia wanted a di-vorce, but dreaded letting her husbandknow. She had good reasons for her de-cision but anticipated that he wouldbeg her to stay and that she wouldcrumple with guilt. Above all, Celia

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wanted to deliver her newscompassionately.

We decided to role-play their discus-sion, with me acting as her husband.

“I want to end this marriage,” saidCelia. “I mean it this time.”

“I’ve been doing everything I can tohold things together,” I pleaded. “Howcan you do this to me?”

Celia thought for a minute.“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking this

through, and I believe this is the rightdecision,” she replied in a woodenvoice.

“What can I do to change yourmind?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Celia flatly.Feeling for a minute what her hus-

band would feel, I was dumbstruck. Shewas so rote, so dispassionate. She wasabout to divorce me—me, her husbandof eleven years! Didn’t she care?

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I asked Celia to try again, this timewith emotion in her voice.

“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t do it.”But she did. “I want to end this mar-

riage,” she repeated, her voice chokedwith sadness. She began to weepuncontrollably.

Celia’s problem was not lack of feel-ing. It was how to show her emotionswithout losing control. Reaching for atissue, she quickly gathered herself, andwent back into crisp, dispassionate law-yer mode. These were the two gears towhich she had ready access—over-whelming feelings or detached self-possession.

I tell you Celia’s story because inmany ways she’s a lot like Emily andmany introverts I’ve interviewed. Emilyis talking to Greg about dinner parties,not divorce, but her communicationstyle echoes Celia’s. When she and Greg

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disagree, her voice gets quiet and flat,her manner slightly distant. What she’strying to do is minimize aggres-sion—Emily is uncomfortable with an-ger—but she appears to be recedingemotionally. Meanwhile, Greg does justthe opposite, raising his voice andsounding belligerent as he gets evermore engaged in working out theirproblem. The more Emily seems towithdraw, the more alone, then hurt,then enraged Greg becomes; the angrierhe gets, the more hurt and distasteEmily feels, and the deeper she retreats.Pretty soon they’re locked in a destruct-ive cycle from which they can’t escape,partly because both spouses believethey’re arguing in an appropriatemanner.

This dynamic shouldn’t surprise any-one familiar with the relationshipbetween personality and conflict

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resolution style. Just as men and wo-men often have different ways ofresolving conflict, so do introverts andextroverts; studies suggest that theformer tend to be conflict-avoiders,while the latter are “confrontivecopers,” at ease with an up-front, evenargumentative style of disagreement.

These are diametrically opposite ap-proaches, so they’re bound to createfriction. If Emily didn’t mind conflict somuch, she might not react so stronglyto Greg’s head-on approach; if Gregwere milder-mannered, he might appre-ciate Emily’s attempt to keep a lid onthings. When people have compatiblestyles of conflict, a disagreement can bean occasion for each partner to affirmthe other’s point of view. But Greg andEmily seem to understand each other alittle less each time they argue in a waythat the other disapproves of.

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Do they also like each other a littleless, at least for the duration of thefight? An illuminating study by the psy-chologist William Graziano suggeststhat the answer to this question mightbe yes. Graziano divided a group ofsixty-one male students into teams toplay a simulated football game. Halfthe participants were assigned to a co-operative game, in which they weretold, “Football is useful to us because tobe successful in football, team membershave to work well together.” The otherhalf were assigned to a game emphasiz-ing competition between teams. Eachstudent was then shown slides and fab-ricated biographical information abouthis teammates and his competitors onthe other team, and asked to rate howhe felt about the other players.

The differences between introvertsand extroverts were remarkable. The

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introverts assigned to the cooperativegame rated all players—not just theircompetitors, but also their team-mates—more positively than the intro-verts who played the competitive game.The extroverts did just the opposite:they rated all players more positivelywhen they played the competitive ver-sion of the game. These findings sug-gest something very important: intro-verts like people they meet in friendlycontexts; extroverts prefer those theycompete with.

A very different study, in which ro-bots interacted with stroke patientsduring physical rehabilitation exercises,yielded strikingly similar results. Intro-verted patients responded better and in-teracted longer with robots that weredesigned to speak in a soothing, gentlemanner: “I know it is hard, but remem-ber that it’s for your own good,” and,

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“Very nice, keep up the good work.”Extroverts, on the other hand, workedharder for robots that used more bra-cing, aggressive language: “You can domore than that, I know it!” and “Con-centrate on your exercise!”

These findings suggest that Greg andEmily face an interesting challenge. IfGreg likes people more when they’rebehaving forcefully or competitively,and if Emily feels the same way aboutnurturing, cooperative people, thenhow can they reach a compromiseabout their dinner-party impasse—andget there in a loving way?

An intriguing answer comes from aUniversity of Michigan business schoolstudy, not of married couples with op-posite personality styles, but of negoti-ators from different cultures—in thiscase, Asians and Israelis. Seventy-sixMBA students from Hong Kong and

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Israel were asked to imagine they weregetting married in a few months andhad to finalize arrangements with a ca-tering company for the wedding recep-tion. This “meeting” took place byvideo.

Some of the students were shown avideo in which the business managerwas friendly and smiley; the others sawa video featuring an irritable and antag-onistic manager. But the caterer’s mes-sage was the same in both cases. Anoth-er couple was interested in the samewedding date. The price had gone up.Take it or leave it.

The students from Hong Kong re-acted very differently from the Israelistudents. The Asians were far morelikely to accept a proposal from thefriendly business manager than fromthe hostile one; only 14 percent werewilling to work with the difficult

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manager, while 71 percent accepted thedeal from the smiling caterer. But theIsraelis were just as likely to accept thedeal from either manager. In otherwords, for the Asian negotiators, stylecounted as well as substance, while theIsraelis were more focused on the in-formation being conveyed. They wereunmoved by a display of either sym-pathetic or hostile emotions.

The explanation for this stark differ-ence has to do with how the two cul-tures define respect. As we saw inchapter 8, many Asian people show es-teem by minimizing conflict. But Israel-is, say the researchers, “are not likely toview [disagreement] as a sign of dis-respect, but as a signal that the oppos-ing party is concerned and is passion-ately engaged in the task.”

We might say the same of Greg andEmily. When Emily lowers her voice

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and flattens her affect during fightswith Greg, she thinks she’s being re-spectful by taking the trouble not to lether negative emotions show. But Gregthinks she’s checking out or, worse,that she doesn’t give a damn. Similarly,when Greg lets his anger fly, he as-sumes that Emily feels, as he does, thatthis is a healthy and honest expressionof their deeply committed relationship.But to Emily, it’s as if Greg has sud-denly turned on her.

In her book Anger: The MisunderstoodEmotion, Carol Tavris recounts a storyabout a Bengali cobra that liked to bitepassing villagers. One day a swami—aman who has achieved self-mas-tery—convinces the snake that biting is

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wrong. The cobra vows to stop immedi-ately, and does. Before long, the villageboys grow unafraid of the snake andstart to abuse him. Battered and blood-ied, the snake complains to the swamithat this is what came of keeping hispromise.

“I told you not to bite,” said theswami, “but I did not tell you not tohiss.”

“Many people, like the swami’s co-bra, confuse the hiss with the bite,”writes Tavris.

Many people—like Greg and Emily.Both have much to learn from theswami’s story: Greg to stop biting,Emily that it’s OK for him—and forher—to hiss.

Greg can start by changing his as-sumptions about anger. He believes, asmost of us do, that venting anger letsoff steam. The “catharsis

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hypothesis”—that aggression builds upinside us until it’s healthily re-leased—dates back to the Greeks, wasrevived by Freud, and gained steamduring the “let it all hang out” 1960s ofpunching bags and primal screams. Butthe catharsis hypothesis is a myth—aplausible one, an elegant one, but amyth nonetheless. Scores of studieshave shown that venting doesn’t sootheanger; it fuels it.

We’re best off when we don’t allowourselves to go to our angry place.Amazingly, neuroscientists have evenfound that people who use Botox,which prevents them from makingangry faces, seem to be less anger-prone than those who don’t, becausethe very act of frowning triggers theamygdala to process negative emotions.And anger is not just damaging in themoment; for days afterward, venters

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have repair work to do with their part-ners. Despite the popular fantasy of fab-ulous sex after fighting, many couplessay that it takes time to feel lovingagain.

What can Greg do to calm downwhen he feels his fury mounting? Hecan take a deep breath. He can take aten-minute break. And he can ask him-self whether the thing that’s makinghim so angry is really that important. Ifnot, he might let it go. But if it is, thenhe’ll want to phrase his needs not aspersonal attacks but as neutral discus-sion items. “You’re so antisocial!” canbecome “Can we figure out a way to or-ganize our weekends that works for usboth?”

This advice would hold even if Emilyweren’t a sensitive introvert (no onelikes to feel dominated or disrespected),but it so happens that Greg’s married to

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a woman who is especially put off byanger. So he needs to respond to theconflict-avoidant wife he has, not theconfrontational one that he wishes, atleast in the heat of the moment, hewere married to.

Now let’s look at Emily’s side of theequation. What could she be doing dif-ferently? She’s right to protest whenGreg bites—when he attacks un-fairly—but what about when he hisses?Emily might address her own counter-productive reactions to anger, amongthem her tendency to slip into a cycleof guilt and defensiveness. We knowfrom chapter 6 that many introverts areprone from earliest childhood to strongguilt feelings; we also know that we alltend to project our own reactions ontoothers. Because conflict-avoidant Emilywould never “bite” or even hiss unlessGreg had done something truly

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horrible, on some level she processeshis bite to mean that she’s terriblyguilty—of something, anything, whoknows what? Emily’s guilt feels so in-tolerable that she tends to deny thevalidity of all of Greg’s claims—the le-gitimate ones along with those exagger-ated by anger. This, of course, leads toa vicious cycle in which she shuts downher natural empathy and Greg feelsunheard.

So Emily needs to accept that it’s OKto be in the wrong. At first she mayhave trouble puzzling out when she isand when she isn’t; the fact that Gregexpresses his grievances with such pas-sion makes it hard to sort this out. ButEmily must try not to get dragged intothis morass. When Greg makes legitim-ate points, she should acknowledgethem, not only to be a good partner toher husband, but also to teach herself

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that it’s OK to have transgressed. Thiswill make it easier for her not to feelhurt—and to fight back—when Greg’sclaims are unjustified.

Fight back? But Emily hates fighting.That’s OK. She needs to become more

comfortable with the sound of her ownhiss. Introverts may be hesitant tocause disharmony, but, like the passivesnake, they should be equally worriedabout encouraging vitriol from theirpartners. And fighting back may not in-vite retaliation, as Emily fears; insteadit may encourage Greg to back off. Sheneed not put on a huge display. Often,a firm “that’s not OK with me” will do.

Every once in a while, Emily mightalso want to step outside her usualcomfort zone and let her own anger fly.Remember, for Greg, heat means con-nection. In the same way that the extro-verted players in the football game

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study felt warmly toward their fellowcompetitors, so Greg may feel closer toEmily if she can take on just a little ofthe coloration of a pumped-up player,ready to take the field.

Emily can also overcome her owndistaste for Greg’s behavior by remind-ing herself that he’s not really as ag-gressive as he seems. John, an introvertI interviewed who has a great relation-ship with his fiery wife, describes howhe learned to do this after twenty-fiveyears of marriage:

When Jennifer’s after me aboutsomething, she’s really after me. If Iwent to bed without tidying the kit-chen, the next morning she’ll shoutat me, “This kitchen is filthy!” Icome in and look around the kit-chen. There are three or four cupsout; it’s not filthy. But the drama

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with which she imbues such mo-ments is natural to her. That’s herway of saying, Gee, when you get achance I’d appreciate it if you couldjust tidy up the kitchen a little more. Ifshe did say it that way to me, Iwould say, I’d be happy to, and I’msorry that I didn’t do it sooner. But be-cause she comes at me with thattwo-hundred-mile-per-hour freight-train energy, I want to bridle andsay, Too bad. The reason I don’t isbecause we’ve been married fortwenty-five years, and I’ve come tounderstand that Jennifer didn’t putme in a life-threatening situationwhen she spoke that way.

So what’s John’s secret for relating tohis forceful wife? He lets her know thather words were unacceptable, but healso tries to listen to their meaning. “I

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try to tap into my empathy,” he says. “Itake her tone out of the equation. I takeout the assault on my senses, and I tryto get to what she’s trying to say.”

And what Jennifer is trying to say,underneath her freight-train words, isoften quite simple: Respect me. Pay at-tention to me. Love me.

Greg and Emily now have valuableinsights about how to talk through theirdifferences. But there’s one more ques-tion they need to answer: Why exactlydo they experience those Friday-nightdinner parties so differently? We knowthat Emily’s nervous system probablygoes into overdrive when she enters aroom full of people. And we know thatGreg feels the opposite: propelled to-ward people, conversations, events,anything that gives him that dopamine-fueled, go-for-it sensation that extro-verts crave. But let’s dig a little deeper

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into the anatomy of cocktail-hour chat-ter. The key to bridging Greg andEmily’s differences lies in the details.

Some years ago, thirty-two pairs of in-troverts and extroverts, all of themstrangers to each other, chatted on thephone for a few minutes as part of anexperiment conducted by a neuroscient-ist named Dr. Matthew Lieberman, thena graduate student at Harvard. Whenthey hung up, they were asked to fillout detailed questionnaires, rating howthey’d felt and behaved during the con-versation. How much did you like yourconversational partner? How friendlywere you? How much would you like tointeract with this person again? Theywere also asked to put themselves in

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the shoes of their conversational part-ners: How much did your partner likeyou? How sensitive was she to you?How encouraging?

Lieberman and his team comparedthe answers and also listened in on theconversations and made their ownjudgments about how the parties feltabout each other. They found that theextroverts were a lot more accuratethan the introverts in assessing whethertheir partner liked talking to them.These findings suggest that extrovertsare better at decoding social cues thanintroverts. At first, this seems unsur-prising, writes Lieberman; it echoes thepopular assumption that extroverts arebetter at reading social situations. Theonly problem, as Lieberman showedthrough a further twist to his experi-ment, is that this assumption is notquite right.

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Lieberman and his team asked a se-lect group of participants to listen to atape of the conversations they’d justhad—before filling out the question-naire. In this group, he found, therewas no difference between introvertsand extroverts in their ability to readsocial cues. Why?

The answer is that the subjects wholistened to the tape recording were ableto decode social cues without having todo anything else at the same time. And in-troverts are pretty fine decoders, ac-cording to several studies predating theLieberman experiments. One of thesestudies actually found that introvertswere better decoders than extroverts.

But these studies measured how wellintroverts observe social dynamics, nothow well they participate in them. Par-ticipation places a very different set ofdemands on the brain than observing

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does. It requires a kind of mental multi-tasking: the ability to process a lot ofshort-term information at once withoutbecoming distracted or overly stressed.This is just the sort of brain functioningthat extroverts tend to be well suitedfor. In other words, extroverts are soci-able because their brains are good athandling competing demands on theirattention—which is just what dinner-party conversation involves. In con-trast, introverts often feel repelled bysocial events that force them to attendto many people at once.

Consider that the simplest social in-teraction between two people requiresperforming an astonishing array oftasks: interpreting what the other per-son is saying; reading body languageand facial expressions; smoothly takingturns talking and listening; respondingto what the other person said; assessing

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whether you’re being understood; de-termining whether you’re well re-ceived, and, if not, figuring out how toimprove or remove yourself from thesituation. Think of what it takes tojuggle all this at once! And that’s just aone-on-one conversation. Now imaginethe multitasking required in a groupsetting like a dinner party.

So when introverts assume the ob-server role, as when they write novels,or contemplate unified field theory—orfall quiet at dinner parties—they’re notdemonstrating a failure of will or a lackof energy. They’re simply doing whatthey’re constitutionally suited for.

The Lieberman experiment helps us un-derstand what trips up introverts

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socially. It doesn’t show us how theycan shine.

Consider the case of an unassuming-looking fellow named Jon Berghoff. Jonis a stereotypical introvert, right downto his physical appearance: lean, wirybody; sharply etched nose andcheekbones; thoughtful expression onhis bespectacled face. He’s not much ofa talker, but what he says is carefullyconsidered, especially when he’s in agroup: “If I’m in a room with tenpeople and I have a choice betweentalking and not talking,” he says, “I’mthe one not talking. When people ask,‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’ I’mthe guy they’re saying it to.”

Jon is also a standout salesman, andhas been ever since he was a teenager.In the summer of 1999, when he wasstill a junior in high school, he startedworking as an entry-level distributor,

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selling Cutco kitchen products. The jobhad him going into customers’ homes,selling knives. It was one of the mostintimate sales situations imaginable,not in a boardroom or a car dealership,but inside a potential client’s kitchen,selling them a product they’d use dailyto help put food on the table.

Within Jon’s first eight weeks on thejob, he sold $50,000 worth of knives.He went on to be the company’s toprepresentative from over 40,000 newrecruits that year. By the year 2000,when he was still a high school senior,Jon had generated more than $135,000in commissions and had broken morethan twenty-five national and regionalsales records. Meanwhile, back in highschool, he was still a socially awkwardguy who hid inside the library at lunch-time. But by 2002 he’d recruited, hired,and trained ninety other sales reps, and

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increased territory sales 500 percentover the previous year. Since then, Jonhas launched Global EmpowermentCoaching, his own personal coachingand sales training business. To date he’sgiven hundreds of speeches, trainingseminars, and private consultations tomore than 30,000 salespeople andmanagers.

What’s the secret of Jon’s success?One important clue comes from an ex-periment by the developmental psycho-logist Avril Thorne, now a professor atthe University of California, Santa Cruz.Thorne gathered fifty-two youngwomen—twenty-six introverts andtwenty-six extroverts—and assignedthem to two different conversationalpairings. Each person had one ten-minute conversation with a partner ofher own type and a second conversa-tion of equal length with her

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“dispositional opposite.” Thorne’s teamtaped the conversations and asked theparticipants to listen to a playbacktape.

This process revealed some surprisingfindings. The introverts and extrovertsparticipated about equally, giving thelie to the idea that introverts alwaystalk less. But the introvert pairs tendedto focus on one or two serious subjectsof conversation, while the extrovertpairs chose lighter-hearted and wider-ranging topics. Often the introverts dis-cussed problems or conflicts in theirlives: school, work, friendships, and soon. Perhaps because of this fondness for“problem talk,” they tended to adoptthe role of adviser, taking turns coun-seling each other on the problem athand. The extroverts, by contrast, weremore likely to offer casual informationabout themselves that established

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commonality with the other person:You have a new dog? That’s great. Afriend of mine has an amazing tank ofsaltwater fish!

But the most interesting part ofThorne’s experiment was how much thetwo types appreciated each other. Intro-verts talking to extroverts chose cheeri-er topics, reported making conversationmore easily, and described conversingwith extroverts as a “breath of freshair.” In contrast, the extroverts felt thatthey could relax more with introvertpartners and were freer to confide theirproblems. They didn’t feel pressure tobe falsely upbeat.

These are useful pieces of social in-formation. Introverts and extrovertssometimes feel mutually put off, butThorne’s research suggests how mucheach has to offer the other. Extrovertsneed to know that introverts—who

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often seem to disdain the superfi-cial—may be only too happy to betugged along to a more lightheartedplace; and introverts, who sometimesfeel as if their propensity for problemtalk makes them a drag, should knowthat they make it safe for others to getserious.

Thorne’s research also helps us to un-derstand Jon Berghoff’s astonishingsuccess at sales. He has turned his affin-ity for serious conversation, and for ad-opting an advisory role rather than apersuasive one, into a kind of therapyfor his prospects. “I discovered early onthat people don’t buy from me becausethey understand what I’m selling,” ex-plains Jon. “They buy because they feelunderstood.”

Jon also benefits from his naturaltendency to ask a lot of questions andto listen closely to the answers. “I got

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to the point where I could walk intosomeone’s house and instead of tryingto sell them some knives, I’d ask a hun-dred questions in a row. I could man-age the entire conversation just by ask-ing the right questions.” Today, in hiscoaching business, Jon does the samething. “I try to tune in to the radio sta-tion of the person I’m working with. Ipay attention to the energy they exude.It’s easy for me to do that because I’min my head a lot, anyways.”

But doesn’t salesmanship require theability to get excited, to pump peopleup? Not according to Jon. “A lot ofpeople believe that selling requires be-ing a fast talker, or knowing how to usecharisma to persuade. Those things dorequire an extroverted way of commu-nicating. But in sales there’s a truismthat ‘we have two ears and one mouthand we should use them

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proportionately.’ I believe that’s whatmakes someone really good at selling orconsulting—the number-one thing isthey’ve got to really listen well. When Ilook at the top salespeople in my or-ganization, none of those extrovertedqualities are the key to their success.”

And now back to Greg and Emily’s im-passe. We’ve just acquired two crucialpieces of information: first, Emily’s dis-taste for conversational multitasking isreal and explicable; and second, whenintroverts are able to experience con-versations in their own way, they makedeep and enjoyable connections withothers.

It was only once they accepted thesetwo realities that Greg and Emily found

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a way to break their stalemate. Insteadof focusing on the number of dinnerparties they’d give, they started talkingabout the format of the parties. Insteadof seating everyone around a big table,which would require the kind of all-hands conversational multitaskingEmily dislikes so much, why not servedinner buffet style, with people eatingin small, casual conversational group-ings on the sofas and floor pillows?This would allow Greg to gravitate tohis usual spot at the center of the roomand Emily to hers on the outskirts,where she could have the kind ofintimate, one-on-one conversations sheenjoys.

This issue solved, the couple wasnow free to address the thornier ques-tion of how many parties to give. Aftersome back-and-forth, they agreed ontwo evenings a month—twenty-four

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dinners a year—instead of fifty-two.Emily still doesn’t look forward to theseevents. But she sometimes enjoys themin spite of herself. And Greg gets tohost the evenings he enjoys so much, tohold on to his identity, and to be withthe person he most adores—all at thesame time.

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11ON COBBLERS AND GENERALS

How to Cultivate Quiet Kids in a WorldThat Can’t Hear Them

With anything young and tender the mostimportant part of the task is the begin-ning of it; for that is the time at which

the character is being formed and the de-sired impression more readily taken.

—PLATO, THE REPUBLIC

Mark Twain once told a story about aman who scoured the planet looking forthe greatest general who ever lived.When the man was informed that theperson he sought had already died andgone to heaven, he made a trip to the

Pearly Gates to look for him. SaintPeter pointed at a regular-looking Joe.

“That isn’t the greatest of all gener-als,” protested the man. “I knew thatperson when he lived on Earth, and hewas only a cobbler.”

“I know that,” said Saint Peter, “butif he had been a general, he would havebeen the greatest of them all.”

We should all look out for cobblerswho might have been great generals.Which means focusing on introvertedchildren, whose talents are too oftenstifled, whether at home, at school, oron the playground.

Consider this cautionary tale, told tome by Dr. Jerry Miller, a child psycho-logist and the director of the Center forthe Child and the Family at theUniversity of Michigan. Dr. Miller had apatient named Ethan, whose parentsbrought him for treatment on four

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separate occasions. Each time, the par-ents voiced the same fears thatsomething was wrong with their child.Each time, Dr. Miller assured them thatEthan was perfectly fine.

The reason for their initial concernwas simple enough. Ethan was seven,and his four-year-old brother hadbeaten him up several times. Ethandidn’t fight back. His parents—both ofthem outgoing, take-charge types withhigh-powered corporate jobs and a pas-sion for competitive golf and ten-nis—were OK with their younger son’saggression, but worried that Ethan’spassivity was “going to be the story ofhis life.”

As Ethan grew older, his parents triedin vain to instill “fighting spirit” in him.They sent him onto the baseball dia-mond and the soccer field, but Ethanjust wanted to go home and read. He

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wasn’t even competitive at school.Though very bright, he was a B student.He could have done better, but pre-ferred to focus on his hobbies, espe-cially building model cars. He had afew close friends, but was never in thethick of classroom social life. Unable toaccount for his puzzling behavior,Ethan’s parents thought he might bedepressed.

But Ethan’s problem, says Dr. Miller,was not depression but a classic case ofpoor “parent-child fit.” Ethan was tall,skinny, and unathletic; he looked like astereotypical nerd. His parents were so-ciable, assertive people, who were “al-ways smiling, always talking to peoplewhile dragging Ethan along behindthem.”

Compare their worries about Ethanto Dr. Miller’s assessment: “He was likethe classic Harry Potter kid—he was

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always reading,” says Dr. Miller enthu-siastically. “He enjoyed any form ofimaginative play. He loved to buildthings. He had so many things hewanted to tell you about. He had moreacceptance of his parents than they hadof him. He didn’t define them as patho-logical, just as different from himself.That same kid in a different homewould be a model child.”

But Ethan’s own parents never founda way to see him in that light. The lastthing Dr. Miller heard was that his par-ents finally consulted with another psy-chologist who agreed to “treat” theirson. And now Dr. Miller is the onewho’s worried about Ethan.

“This is a clear case of an ‘iatrogenic’problem,’ ” he says. “That’s when thetreatment makes you sick. The classicexample is when you use treatment totry to make a gay child into a straight

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one. I worry for that kid. These parentsare very caring and well-meaningpeople. They feel that without treat-ment, they’re not preparing their sonfor society. That he needs more fire inhim. Maybe there’s truth to that lastpart; I don’t know. But whether there isor not, I firmly believe that it’s im-possible to change that kid. I worry thatthey’re taking a perfectly healthy boyand damaging his sense of self.”

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a badfit when extroverted parents have anintroverted child. With a little mindful-ness and understanding, any parent canhave a good fit with any kind of child,says Dr. Miller. But parents need to stepback from their own preferences andsee what the world looks like to theirquiet children.

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Take the case of Joyce and her seven-year-old daughter, Isabel. Isabel is anelfin second grader who likes to wearglittery sandals and colorful rubberbracelets snaking up her skinny arms.She has several best friends with whomshe exchanges confidences, and she getsalong with most of the kids in her class.She’s the type to throw her armsaround a classmate who’s had a badday; she even gives her birthdaypresents away to charity. That’s whyher mother, Joyce, an attractive, good-natured woman with a wisecrackingsense of humor and a bring-it-on de-meanor, was so confused by Isabel’sproblems at school.

In first grade, Isabel often camehome consumed with worry over the

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class bully, who hurled mean commentsat anyone sensitive enough to feelbruised by them. Even though the bullyusually picked on other kids, Isabelspent hours dissecting the meaning ofthe bully’s words, what her true inten-tions had been, even what the bullymight be suffering at home that couldpossibly motivate her to behave sodreadfully at school.

By second grade, Isabel started ask-ing her mother not to arrange playdates without checking with her first.Usually she preferred to stay home.When Joyce picked up Isabel fromschool, she often found the other girlsgathered into groups and Isabel off onthe playground, shooting baskets byherself. “She just wasn’t in the mix. Ihad to stop doing pickups for a while,”recalls Joyce. “It was just too upsettingfor me to watch.” Joyce couldn’t

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understand why her sweet, lovingdaughter wanted to spend so muchtime alone. She worried that somethingwas wrong with Isabel. Despite whatshe’d always thought about her daugh-ter’s empathetic nature, might Isabellack the ability to relate with others?

It was only when I suggested thatJoyce’s daughter might be an introvert,and explained what that was, thatJoyce started thinking differently aboutIsabel’s experiences at school. And fromIsabel’s perspective, things didn’t soundalarming at all. “I need a break afterschool,” she told me later. “School ishard because a lot of people are in theroom, so you get tired. I freak out if mymom plans a play date without tellingme, because I don’t want to hurt myfriends’ feelings. But I’d rather stayhome. At a friend’s house you have todo the things other people want to do. I

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like hanging out with my mom afterschool because I can learn from her.She’s been alive longer than me. Wehave thoughtful conversations. I likehaving thoughtful conversations be-cause they make people happy.”*

Isabel is telling us, in all her second-grade wisdom, that introverts relate toother people. Of course they do. Theyjust do it in their own way.

Now that Joyce understands Isabel’sneeds, mother and daughter brainstormhappily, figuring out strategies to helpIsabel navigate her school day. “Before,I would have had Isabel going out andseeing people all the time, packing hertime after school full of activities,” saysJoyce. “Now I understand that it’s verystressful for her to be in school, so wefigure out together how much socializ-ing makes sense and when it shouldhappen.” Joyce doesn’t mind when

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Isabel wants to hang out alone in herroom after school or leave a birthdayparty a little earlier than the other kids.She also understands that since Isabeldoesn’t see any of this as a problem,there’s no reason that she should.

Joyce has also gained insight intohow to help her daughter manage play-ground politics. Once, Isabel was wor-ried about how to divide her timeamong three friends who didn’t getalong with each other. “My initial in-stinct,” says Joyce, “would be to say,Don’t worry about it! Just play with themall! But now I understand that Isabel’s adifferent kind of person. She hastrouble strategizing about how tohandle all these people simultaneouslyon the playground. So we talk aboutwho she’s going to play with and when,and we rehearse things she can tell herfriends to smooth the situation over.”

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Another time, when Isabel was alittle older, she felt upset because herfriends sat at two different tables in thelunch room. One table was populatedwith her quieter friends, the other withthe class extroverts. Isabel describedthe second group as “loud, talking allthe time, sitting on top of each oth-er—ugh!” But she was sad because herbest friend Amanda loved to sit at the“crazy table,” even though she was alsofriends with the girls at the “more re-laxed and chill table.” Isabel felt torn.Where should she sit?

Joyce’s first thought was that the“crazy table” sounded like more fun.But she asked Isabel what she preferred.Isabel thought for a minute and said,“Maybe every now and then I’ll sit withAmanda, but I do like being quieter andtaking a break at lunch fromeverything.”

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Why would you want to do that?thought Joyce. But she caught herselfbefore she said it out loud. “Soundsgood to me,” she told Isabel. “AndAmanda still loves you. She just reallylikes that other table. But it doesn’tmean she doesn’t like you. And youshould get yourself the peaceful timeyou need.”

Understanding introversion, saysJoyce, has changed the way she par-ents—and she can’t believe it took herso long. “When I see Isabel being herwonderful self, I value it even if theworld may tell her she should want tobe at that other table. In fact, lookingat that table through her eyes, it helpsme reflect on how I might be perceivedby others and how I need to be awareand manage my extroverted ‘default’ soas not to miss the company of otherslike my sweet daughter.”

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Joyce has also come to appreciateIsabel’s sensitive ways. “Isabel is an oldsoul,” she says. “You forget that she’sonly a child. When I talk to her, I’m nottempted to use that special tone ofvoice that people reserve for children,and I don’t adapt my vocabulary. I talkto her the way I would to any adult.She’s very sensitive, very caring. Sheworries about other people’s well-be-ing. She can be easily overwhelmed,but all these things go together and Ilove this about my daughter.”

Joyce is as caring a mother as I’ve seen,but she had a steep learning curve asparent to her daughter because of theirdifference in temperaments. Would shehave enjoyed a more natural parent-

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child fit if she’d been an introvert her-self? Not necessarily. Introverted par-ents can face challenges of their own.Sometimes painful childhood memoriescan get in the way.

Emily Miller, a clinical social workerin Ann Arbor, Michigan, told me abouta little girl she treated, Ava, whose shy-ness was so extreme that it preventedher from making friends or from con-centrating in class. Recently she sobbedwhen asked to join a group singing infront of the classroom, and her mother,Sarah, decided to seek Miller’s help.When Miller asked Sarah, a successfulbusiness journalist, to act as a partnerin Ava’s treatment, Sarah burst intotears. She’d been a shy child, too, andfelt guilty that she’d passed on to Avaher terrible burden.

“I hide it better now, but I’m still justlike my daughter,” she explained. “I

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can approach anyone, but only as longas I’m behind a journalist’s notebook.”

Sarah’s reaction is not unusual forthe pseudo-extrovert parent of a shychild, says Miller. Not only is Sarah re-living her own childhood, but she’s pro-jecting onto Ava the worst of her ownmemories. But Sarah needs to under-stand that she and Ava are not thesame person, even if they do seem tohave inherited similar temperaments.For one thing, Ava is influenced by herfather, too, and by any number of en-vironmental factors, so her tempera-ment is bound to have a different ex-pression. Sarah’s own distress need notbe her daughter’s, and it does Ava agreat disservice to assume that it willbe. With the right guidance, Ava mayget to the point where her shyness isnothing more than a small and infre-quent annoyance.

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But even parents who still have workto do on their own self-esteem can beenormously helpful to their kids, ac-cording to Miller. Advice from a parentwho appreciates how a child feels is in-herently validating. If your son isnervous on the first day of school, ithelps to tell him that you felt the sameway when you started school and stilldo sometimes at work, but that it getseasier with time. Even if he doesn’t be-lieve you, you’ll signal that you under-stand and accept him.

You can also use your empathy tohelp you judge when to encourage himto face his fears, and when this wouldbe too overwhelming. For example,Sarah might know that singing in frontof the classroom really is too big a stepto ask Ava to take all at once. But shemight also sense that singing in privatewith a small and simpatico group, or

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with one trusted friend, is a manage-able first step, even if Ava protests atfirst. She can, in other words, sensewhen to push Ava, and how much.

The psychologist Elaine Aron, whosework on sensitivity I described inchapter 6, offers insight into thesequestions when she writes about Jim,one of the best fathers she knows. Jimis a carefree extrovert with two youngdaughters. The first daughter, Betsy, isjust like him, but the second daughter,Lily, is more sensitive—a keen butanxious observer of her world. Jim is afriend of Aron’s, so he knew all aboutsensitivity and introversion. He em-braced Lily’s way of being, but at the

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same time he didn’t want her to growup shy.

So, writes Aron, he “became determ-ined to introduce her to every poten-tially pleasurable opportunity in life,from ocean waves, tree climbing, andnew foods to family reunions, soccer,and varying her clothes rather thanwearing one comfortable uniform. Inalmost every instance, Lily initiallythought these novel experiences werenot such good ideas, and Jim always re-spected her opinion. He never forcedher, although he could be very persuas-ive. He simply shared his view of a situ-ation with her—the safety and pleas-ures involved, the similarities to thingsshe already liked. He would wait forthat little gleam in her eye that said shewanted to join in with the others, evenif she couldn’t yet.

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“Jim always assessed these situationscarefully to ensure that she would notultimately be frightened, but rather beable to experience pleasure and success.Sometimes he held her back until shewas overly ready. Above all, he kept itan internal conflict, not a conflictbetween him and her.… And if she oranyone else comments on her quietnessor hesitancy, Jim’s prompt reply is,‘That’s just your style. Other peoplehave different styles. But this is yours.You like to take your time and be sure.’Jim also knows that part of her style isbefriending anyone whom others tease,doing careful work, noticing everythinggoing on in the family, and being thebest soccer strategist in her league.”

One of the best things you can do foran introverted child is to work withhim on his reaction to novelty. Remem-ber that introverts react not only to

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new people, but also to new places andevents. So don’t mistake your child’scaution in new situations for an inabil-ity to relate to others. He’s recoilingfrom novelty or overstimulation, not fromhuman contact. As we saw in the lastchapter, introversion-extroversionlevels are not correlated with eitheragreeableness or the enjoyment of in-timacy. Introverts are just as likely asthe next kid to seek others’ company,though often in smaller doses.

The key is to expose your childgradually to new situations andpeople—taking care to respect his lim-its, even when they seem extreme. Thisproduces more-confident kids thaneither overprotection or pushing toohard. Let him know that his feelings arenormal and natural, but also thatthere’s nothing to be afraid of: “I knowit can feel funny to play with someone

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you’ve never met, but I bet that boywould love to play trucks with you ifyou asked him.” Go at your child’space; don’t rush him. If he’s young,make the initial introductions with theother little boy if you have to. And stickaround in the background—or, whenhe’s really little, with a gentle, support-ive hand on his back—for as long as heseems to benefit from your presence.When he takes social risks, let himknow you admire his efforts: “I saw yougo up to those new kids yesterday. Iknow that can be difficult, and I’mproud of you.”

The same goes for new situations.Imagine a child who’s more afraid ofthe ocean than are other kids the sameage. Thoughtful parents recognize thatthis fear is natural and even wise; theocean is indeed dangerous. But theydon’t allow her to spend the summer on

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the safety of the dunes, and neither dothey drop her in the water and expecther to swim. Instead they signal thatthey understand her unease, while ur-ging her to take small steps. Maybethey play in the sand for a few dayswith the ocean waves crashing at a safedistance. Then one day they approachthe water’s edge, perhaps with the childriding on a parent’s shoulders. Theywait for calm weather, or low tide, toimmerse a toe, then a foot, then a knee.They don’t rush; every small step is agiant stride in a child’s world. When ul-timately she learns to swim like a fish,she has reached a crucial turning pointin her relationship not only with waterbut also with fear.

Slowly your child will see that it’sworth punching through her wall ofdiscomfort to get to the fun on the oth-er side. She’ll learn how to do the

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punching by herself. As Dr. KennethRubin, the director of the Center forChildren, Relationships and Culture atthe University of Maryland, writes, “Ifyou’re consistent in helping your youngchild learn to regulate his or her emo-tions and behaviors in soothing andsupportive ways, something rather ma-gical will begin to happen: in time, youmight watch your daughter seem to besilently reassuring herself: ‘Those kidsare having fun, I can go over there.’ Heor she is learning to self-regulate fear-fulness and wariness.”

If you want your child to learn theseskills, don’t let her hear you call her“shy”: she’ll believe the label and ex-perience her nervousness as a fixedtrait rather than an emotion she cancontrol. She also knows full well that“shy” is a negative word in our society.

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Above all, do not shame her for hershyness.

If you can, it’s best to teach yourchild self-coaxing skills while he’s stillvery young, when there’s less stigmaassociated with social hesitancy. Be arole model by greeting strangers in acalm and friendly way, and by gettingtogether with your own friends. Simil-arly, invite some of his classmates toyour house. Let him know gently thatwhen you’re together with others, it’snot OK to whisper or tug at your pantsleg to communicate his needs; he needsto speak up. Make sure that his socialencounters are pleasant by selectingkids who aren’t overly aggressive andplaygroups that have a friendly feel tothem. Have your child play with young-er kids if this gives him confidence,older kids if they inspire him.

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If he’s not clicking with a particularchild, don’t force it; you want most ofhis early social experiences to be posit-ive. Arrange for him to enter new socialsituations as gradually as possible.When you’re going to a birthday party,for example, talk in advance aboutwhat the party will be like and how thechild might greet her peers (“First I’llsay ‘Happy birthday, Joey,’ and then I’llsay ‘Hi, Sabrina.’). And make sure toget there early. It’s much easier to beone of the earlier guests, so your childfeels as if other people are joining himin a space that he “owns,” rather thanhaving to break into a preexistinggroup.

Similarly, if your child is nervous be-fore school starts for the year, bringhim to see his classroom and, ideally, tomeet the teacher one-on-one, as well asother friendly-looking adults, such as

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principals and guidance counselors, jan-itors and cafeteria workers. You can besubtle about this: “I’ve never seen yournew classroom, why don’t we drive byand take a look?” Figure out togetherwhere the bathroom is, what the policyis for going there, the route from theclassroom to the cafeteria, and wherethe school bus will pick him up at day’send. Arrange playdates during the sum-mer with compatible kids from hisclass.

You can also teach your child simplesocial strategies to get him through un-comfortable moments. Encourage himto look confident even if he’s not feel-ing it. Three simple reminders go a longway: smile, stand up straight, and makeeye contact. Teach him to look forfriendly faces in a crowd. Bobby, athree-year-old, didn’t like going to hiscity preschool because at recess the

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class left the safe confines of theclassroom and played on the roof withthe bigger kids in the older classes. Hefelt so intimidated that he wanted to goto school only on rainy days whenthere was no roof time. His parentshelped him figure out which kids hefelt comfortable playing with, and tounderstand that a noisy group of olderboys didn’t have to spoil his fun.

If you think that you’re not up to allthis, or that your child could use extrapractice, ask a pediatrician for help loc-ating a social skills workshop in yourarea. These workshops teach kids howto enter groups, introduce themselvesto new peers, and read body languageand facial expressions. And they canhelp your child navigate what for manyintroverted kids is the trickiest part oftheir social lives: the school day.

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It’s a Tuesday morning in October, andthe fifth-grade class at a public schoolin New York City is settling down for alesson on the three branches of Americ-an government. The kids sit cross-legged on a rug in a brightly lit cornerof the room while their teacher,perched on a chair with a textbook inher lap, takes a few minutes to explainthe basic concepts. Then it’s time for agroup activity applying the lesson.

“This classroom gets so messy afterlunch,” says the teacher. “There’sbubble gum under the tables, foodwrappers everywhere, and Cheese Nipsall over the floor. We don’t like ourroom to be so messy, do we?”

The students shake their heads no.

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“Today we’re going to do somethingabout this problem—together,” says theteacher.

She divides the class into threegroups of seven kids each: a legislativegroup, tasked with enacting a law toregulate lunchtime behavior; an execut-ive group, which must decide how toenforce the law; and a judicial branch,which has to come up with a system foradjudicating messy eaters.

The kids break excitedly into theirgroups, seating themselves in threelarge clusters. There’s no need to moveany furniture. Since so much of the cur-riculum is designed for group work, theclassroom desks are already arranged inpods of seven desks each. The roomerupts in a merry din. Some of the kidswho’d looked deathly bored during theten-minute lecture are now chatteringwith their peers.

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But not all of them. When you seethe kids as one big mass, they look likea room full of joyfully squirming pup-pies. But when you focus on individualchildren—like Maya, a redhead with aponytail, wire-rimmed glasses, and adreamy expression on her face—youget a strikingly different picture.

In Maya’s group, the “executivebranch,” everyone is talking at once.Maya hangs back. Samantha, tall andplump in a purple T-shirt, takes charge.She pulls a sandwich bag from herknapsack and announces, “Whoever’sholding the plastic bag gets to talk!”The students pass around the bag, eachcontributing a thought in turn. They re-mind me of the kids in The Lord of theFlies civic-mindedly passing aroundtheir conch shell, at least until all hellbreaks loose.

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Maya looks overwhelmed when thebag makes its way to her.

“I agree,” she says, handing it like ahot potato to the next person.

The bag circles the table severaltimes. Each time Maya passes it to herneighbor, saying nothing. Finally thediscussion is done. Maya lookstroubled. She’s embarrassed, I’m guess-ing, that she hasn’t participated. Sam-antha reads from her notebook a list ofenforcement mechanisms that thegroup has brainstormed.

“Rule Number 1,” she says. “If youbreak the laws, you miss recess.…”

“Wait!” interrupts Maya. “I have anidea!”

“Go ahead,” says Samantha, a littleimpatiently. But Maya, who like manysensitive introverts seems attuned tothe subtlest cues for disapproval, no-tices the sharpness in Samantha’s voice.

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She opens her mouth to speak, butlowers her eyes, only managingsomething rambling and unintelligible.No one can hear her. No one tries. Thecool girl in the group—light-yearsahead of the rest in her slinkiness andfashion-forward clothes—sighs dramat-ically. Maya peters off in confusion,and the cool girl says, “OK, Samantha,you can keep reading the rules now.”

The teacher asks the executivebranch for a recap of its work. Every-one vies for airtime. Everyone exceptMaya. Samantha takes charge as usual,her voice carrying over everyone else’s,until the rest of the group falls silent.Her report doesn’t make a lot of sense,but she’s so confident and good-naturedthat it doesn’t seem to matter.

Maya, for her part, sits curled up atthe periphery of the group, writing hername over and over again in her

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notebook, in big block letters, as if toreassert her identity. At least to herself.

Earlier, Maya’s teacher had told methat she’s an intellectually alive studentwho shines in her essay-writing. She’s agifted softball player. And she’s kind toothers, offering to tutor other childrenwho lag behind academically. But noneof Maya’s positive attributes were evid-ent that morning.

Any parent would be dismayed to thinkthat this was their child’s experience oflearning, of socializing, and of herself.Maya is an introvert; she is out of herelement in a noisy and overstimulatingclassroom where lessons are taught inlarge groups. Her teacher told me thatshe’d do much better in a school with a

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calm atmosphere where she could workwith other kids who are “equally hard-working and attentive to detail,” andwhere a larger portion of the day wouldinvolve independent work. Maya needsto learn to assert herself in groups, ofcourse, but will experiences like theone I witnessed teach her this skill?

The truth is that many schools aredesigned for extroverts. Introverts needdifferent kinds of instruction from ex-troverts, write College of William andMary education scholars Jill Burrussand Lisa Kaenzig. And too often, “verylittle is made available to that learnerexcept constant advice on becomingmore social and gregarious.”

We tend to forget that there’s nothingsacrosanct about learning in largegroup classrooms, and that we organizestudents this way not because it’s thebest way to learn but because it’s cost-

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efficient, and what else would we dowith our children while the grown-upsare at work? If your child prefers towork autonomously and socialize one-on-one, there’s nothing wrong with her;she just happens not to fit the prevail-ing model. The purpose of schoolshould be to prepare kids for the rest oftheir lives, but too often what kids needto be prepared for is surviving theschool day itself.

The school environment can behighly unnatural, especially from theperspective of an introverted child wholoves to work intensely on projects hecares about, and hang out with one ortwo friends at a time. In the morning,the door to the bus opens and dis-charges its occupants in a noisy, jost-ling mass. Academic classes are domin-ated by group discussions in which ateacher prods him to speak up. He eats

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lunch in the cacophonous din of thecafeteria, where he has to jockey for aplace at a crowded table. Worst of all,there’s little time to think or create.The structure of the day is almost guar-anteed to sap his energy rather thanstimulate it.

Why do we accept this one-size-fits-all situation as a given when we knowperfectly well that adults don’t organizethemselves this way? We often marvelat how introverted, geeky kids “blos-som” into secure and happy adults. Weliken it to a metamorphosis. However,maybe it’s not the children who changebut their environments. As adults, theyget to select the careers, spouses, andsocial circles that suit them. They don’thave to live in whatever culture they’replunked into. Research from a fieldknown as “person-environment fit”shows that people flourish when, in the

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words of psychologist Brian Little,they’re “engaged in occupations, rolesor settings that are concordant withtheir personalities.” The inverse is alsotrue: kids stop learning when they feelemotionally threatened.

No one knows this better thanLouAnne Johnson, a tough-talkingformer marine and schoolteacherwidely recognized for educating someof the most troubled teens in the Cali-fornia public school system (MichellePfeiffer played her in the movie Danger-ous Minds). I visited Johnson at herhome in Truth or Consequences, NewMexico, to find out more about her ex-perience teaching children of all stripes.

Johnson happens to be skilled atworking with very shy children—whichis no accident. One of her techniques isto share with her students how timidshe herself used to be. Her earliest

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school memory is of being made tostand on a stool in kindergarten be-cause she preferred to sit in the cornerand read books, and the teacher wantedher to “interact.” “Many shy childrenare thrilled to discover that their teach-er had been as shy as they were,” shetold me. “I remember one very shy girlin my high school English class whosemother thanked me for telling herdaughter that I believed she wouldpeak much later in life, so not to worrythat she didn’t shine in high school. Shesaid that one comment had changedher daughter’s entire outlook on life.Imagine—one offhand comment madesuch an impact on a tender child.”

When encouraging shy children tospeak, says Johnson, it helps to makethe topic so compelling that they forgettheir inhibitions. She advises askingstudents to discuss hot-button subjects

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like “Boys have life a lot easier thangirls do.” Johnson, who is a frequentpublic speaker on education despite alifelong public speaking phobia, knowsfirsthand how well this works. “Ihaven’t overcome my shyness,” shesays. “It is sitting in the corner, callingto me. But I am passionate about chan-ging our schools, so my passion over-comes my shyness once I get started ona speech. If you find something thatarouses your passion or provides a wel-come challenge, you forget yourself fora while. It’s like an emotionalvacation.”

But don’t risk having children make aspeech to the class unless you’veprovided them with the tools to knowwith reasonable confidence that it willgo well. Have kids practice with a part-ner and in small groups, and if they’restill too terrified, don’t force it. Experts

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believe that negative public speakingexperiences in childhood can leave chil-dren with a lifelong terror of thepodium.

So, what kind of school environmentwould work best for the Mayas of theworld? First, some thoughts forteachers:

• Don’t think of introversion assomething that needs to becured. If an introverted childneeds help with social skills,teach her or recommend train-ing outside class, just as you’ddo for a student who needs ex-tra attention in math or reading.But celebrate these kids for whothey are. “The typical commenton many children’s report cardsis, ‘I wish Molly would talkmore in class,’ ” Pat Adams, the

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former head of the EmersonSchool for gifted students inAnn Arbor, Michigan, told me.“But here we have an under-standing that many kids are in-trospective. We try to bringthem out, but we don’t make ita big deal. We think about in-troverted kids as having a dif-ferent learning style.”

• Studies show that one third toone half of us are introverts.This means that you have moreintroverted kids in your classthan you think. Even at a youngage, some introverts become ad-ept at acting like extroverts,making it tough to spot them.Balance teaching methods toserve all the kids in your class.Extroverts tend to like

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movement, stimulation, collab-orative work. Introverts preferlectures, downtime, and inde-pendent projects. Mix it upfairly.

• Introverts often have one or twodeep interests that are not ne-cessarily shared by their peers.Sometimes they’re made to feelfreaky for the force of these pas-sions, when in fact studies showthat this sort of intensity is aprerequisite to talent develop-ment. Praise these kids for theirinterests, encourage them, andhelp them find like-mindedfriends, if not in the classroom,then outside it.

• Some collaborative work is finefor introverts, even beneficial.

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But it should take place in smallgroups—pairs or three-somes—and be carefully struc-tured so that each child knowsher role. Roger Johnson, co-dir-ector of the Cooperative Learn-ing Center at the University ofMinnesota, says that shy or in-troverted kids benefit especiallyfrom well-managed small-groupwork because “they are usuallyvery comfortable talking withone or two of their classmatesto answer a question or com-plete a task, but would neverthink of raising their hand andaddressing the whole class. It isvery important that these stu-dents get a chance to translatetheir thoughts into language.”Imagine how different Maya’sexperience would have been if

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her group had been smaller andsomeone had taken the time tosay, “Samantha, you’re incharge of keeping the discussionon track. Maya, your job is totake notes and read them backto the group.”

• On the other hand, rememberAnders Ericsson’s research onDeliberate Practice from chapter3. In many fields, it’s impossibleto gain mastery without know-ing how to work on one’s own.Have your extroverted studentstake a page from their introver-ted peers’ playbooks. Teach allkids to work independently.

• Don’t seat quiet kids in “high-interaction” areas of theclassroom, says communications

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professor James McCroskey.They won’t talk more in thoseareas; they’ll feel morethreatened and will havetrouble concentrating. Make iteasy for introverted kids to par-ticipate in class, but don’t insist.“Forcing highly apprehensiveyoung people to perform orallyis harmful,” writes McCroskey.“It will increase apprehensionand reduce self-esteem.”

• If your school has a selectiveadmissions policy, think twicebefore basing your admissionsdecisions on children’s perform-ance in a playgroup setting.Many introverted kids clam upin groups of strangers, and youwill not get even a glimpse of

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what these kids are like oncethey’re relaxed and comfortable.

And here are some thoughts for par-ents. If you’re lucky enough to havecontrol over where your child goes toschool, whether by scouting out a mag-net school, moving to a neighborhoodwhose public schools you like, or send-ing your kids to private or parochialschool, you can look for a school that

• prizes independent interests andemphasizes autonomy

• conducts group activities inmoderation and in small, care-fully managed groups

• values kindness, caring, em-pathy, good citizenship

• insists on orderly classroomsand hallways

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• is organized into small, quietclasses

• chooses teachers who seem tounderstand the shy/serious/in-troverted/sensitivetemperament

• focuses its academic/athletic/extracurricular activities on sub-jects that are particularly inter-esting to your child

• strongly enforces an anti-bully-ing program

• emphasizes a tolerant, down-to-earth culture

• attracts like-minded peers, forexample intellectual kids, orartistic or athletic ones, depend-ing on your child’s preference

Handpicking a school may be unreal-istic for many families. But whateverthe school, there’s much you can do to

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help your introverted child thrive. Fig-ure out which subjects energize himmost, and let him run with them, eitherwith outside tutors, or extra program-ming like science fairs or creative writ-ing classes. As for group activities,coach him to look for comfortable roleswithin larger groups. One of the ad-vantages of group work, even for intro-verts, is that it often offers many differ-ent niches. Urge your child to take theinitiative, and claim for himself the re-sponsibility of note-taker, picture-draw-er, or whatever role interests him most.Participation will feel more comfortablewhen he knows what his contribution issupposed to be.

You can also help him practice speak-ing up. Let him know that it’s OK totake his time to gather his thoughts be-fore he speaks, even if it seems as ifeveryone else is jumping into the fray.

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At the same time, advise him that con-tributing earlier in a discussion is a loteasier than waiting until everyone elsehas talked and letting the tension buildas he waits to take his turn. If he’s notsure what to say, or is uncomfortablemaking assertions, help him play to hisstrengths. Does he tend to ask thought-ful questions? Praise this quality, andteach him that good questions are oftenmore useful than proposing answers.Does he tend to look at things from hisown unique point of view? Teach himhow valuable this is, and discuss howhe might share his outlook with others.

Explore real-life scenarios: for ex-ample, Maya’s parents could sit downwith her and figure out how she mighthave handled the executive-group exer-cise differently. Try role-playing, insituations that are as specific as pos-sible. Maya could rehearse in her own

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words what it’s like to say “I’ll be thenote-taker!” or “What if we make a rulethat anyone who throws wrappers onthe floor has to spend the last tenminutes of lunch picking up litter?”

The catch is that this depends on get-ting Maya to open up and tell you whathappened during her school day. Evenif they’re generally forthcoming, manykids won’t share experiences that madethem feel ashamed. The younger yourchild is, the more likely she is to openup, so you should start this process asearly in her school career as possible.Ask your child for information in agentle, nonjudgmental way, with spe-cific, clear questions. Instead of “Howwas your day?” try “What did you do inmath class today?” Instead of “Do youlike your teacher?” ask “What do youlike about your teacher?” Or “What doyou not like so much?” Let her take her

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time to answer. Try to avoid asking, inthe overly bright voice of parentseverywhere, “Did you have fun inschool today?!” She’ll sense how im-portant it is that the answer be yes.

If she still doesn’t want to talk, waitfor her. Sometimes she’ll need to de-compress for hours before she’s ready.You may find that she’ll open up onlyduring cozy, relaxed moments, likebathtime or bedtime. If that’s the case,make sure to build these situations intothe day. And if she’ll talk to others, likea trusted babysitter, aunt, or older sib-ling, but not to you, swallow your prideand enlist help.

Finally, try not to worry if all signssuggest that your introverted child isnot the most popular kid at school. It’scritically important for his emotionaland social development that he haveone or two solid friendships, child

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development experts tell us, but beingpopular isn’t necessary. Many introver-ted kids grow up to have excellent so-cial skills, although they tend to joingroups in their own way—waiting awhile before they plunge in, or particip-ating only for short periods. That’s OK.Your child needs to acquire social skillsand make friends, not turn into themost gregarious student in school. Thisdoesn’t mean that popularity isn’t a lotof fun. You’ll probably wish it for him,just as you might wish that he havegood looks, a quick wit, or athletic tal-ent. But make sure you’re not imposingyour own longings, and remember thatthere are many paths to a satisfyinglife.

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Many of those paths will be found inpassions outside the classroom. Whileextroverts are more likely to skate fromone hobby or activity to another, intro-verts often stick with their enthusiasms.This gives them a major advantage asthey grow, because true self-esteemcomes from competence, not the otherway around. Researchers have foundthat intense engagement in and com-mitment to an activity is a proven routeto happiness and well-being. Well-de-veloped talents and interests can be agreat source of confidence for yourchild, no matter how different he mightfeel from his peers.

For example, Maya, the girl who wassuch a quiet member of the “executivebranch,” loves to go home every dayafter school and read. But she also lovessoftball, with all of its social and per-formance pressures. She still recalls the

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day she made the team after participat-ing in tryouts. Maya was scared stiff,but she also felt strong—capable of hit-ting the ball with a good, powerfulwhack. “I guess all those drills finallypaid off,” she reflected later. “I justkept smiling. I was so excited andproud—and that feeling never wentaway.”

For parents, however, it’s not alwayseasy to orchestrate situations wherethese deep feelings of satisfaction arise.You might feel, for example, that youshould encourage your introvertedchild to play whichever sport is theticket to friendship and esteem in yourtown. And that’s fine, if he enjoys thatsport and is good at it, as Maya is withsoftball. Team sports can be a greatboon for anyone, especially for kidswho otherwise feel uncomfortable join-ing groups. But let your child take the

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lead in picking the activities he likesbest. He may not like any team sports,and that’s OK. Help him look for activ-ities where he’ll meet other kids, butalso have plenty of his own space. Cul-tivate the strengths of his disposition. Ifhis passions seem too solitary for yourtaste, remember that even solo activit-ies like painting, engineering, or creat-ive writing can lead to communities offellow enthusiasts.

“I have known children who foundothers,” says Dr. Miller, “by sharing im-portant interests: chess, elaborate role-playing games, even discussing deep in-terests like math or history.” RebeccaWallace-Segall, who teaches creative-writing workshops for kids and teens asdirector of Writopia Lab in New YorkCity, says that the students who sign upfor her classes “are often not the kidswho are willing to talk for hours about

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fashion and celebrity. Those kids areless likely to come, perhaps becausethey’re less inclined to analyze and digdeep—that’s not their comfort zone.The so-called shy kids are often hungryto brainstorm ideas, deconstruct them,and act on them, and, paradoxically,when they’re allowed to interact thisway, they’re not shy at all. They’re con-necting with each other, but in a deep-er zone, in a place that’s consideredboring or tiresome by some of theirpeers.” And these kids do “come out”when they’re ready; most of the Writo-pia kids read their works at local book-stores, and a staggering number winprestigious national writingcompetitions.

If your child is prone to overstimula-tion, then it’s also a good idea for herto pick activities like art or long-dis-tance running, that depend less on

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performing under pressure. If she’sdrawn to activities that require per-formance, though, you can help herthrive.

When I was a kid, I loved figure skat-ing. I could spend hours on the rink,tracing figure eights, spinning happily,or flying through the air. But on theday of my competitions, I was a wreck.I hadn’t slept the night before andwould often fall during moves that Ihad sailed through in practice. At first Ibelieved what people told me—that Ihad the jitters, just like everybody else.But then I saw a TV interview with theOlympic gold medalist Katarina Witt.She said that pre-competition nervesgave her the adrenaline she needed towin the gold.

I knew then that Katarina and I wereutterly different creatures, but it tookme decades to figure out why. Her

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nerves were so mild that they simplyenergized her, while mine were con-stricting enough to make me choke. Atthe time, my very supportive motherquizzed the other skating moms abouthow their own daughters handled pre-competition anxiety, and came backwith insights that she hoped wouldmake me feel better. Kristen’s nervoustoo, she reported. Renée’s mom says she’sscared the night before a competition. ButI knew Kristen and Renée well, and Iwas certain that they weren’t asfrightened as I was.

I think it might have helped if I’d un-derstood myself better back then. Ifyou’re the parent of a would-be figureskater, help her to accept that she hasheavy-duty jitters without giving herthe idea that they’re fatal to success.What she’s most afraid of is failing pub-licly. She needs to desensitize herself to

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this fear by getting used to competing,and even to failing. Encourage her toenter low-stakes competitions far awayfrom home, where she feels anonymousand no one will know if she falls. Makesure she has rehearsed thoroughly. Ifshe’s planning to compete on an unfa-miliar rink, try to have her practicethere a few times first. Talk about whatmight go wrong and how to handle it:OK, so what if you do fall and come inlast place, will life still go on? And helpher visualize what it will feel like toperform her moves smoothly.

Unleashing a passion can transform alife, not just for the space of time thatyour child’s in elementary or middle orhigh school, but way beyond. Consider

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the story of David Weiss, a drummerand music journalist. David is a goodexample of someone who grew up feel-ing like Charlie Brown and went on tobuild a life of creativity, productivity,and meaning. He loves his wife andbaby son. He relishes his work. He hasa wide and interesting circle of friends,and lives in New York City, which heconsiders the most vibrant place in theworld for a music enthusiast. If youmeasure a life by the classic barometersof love and work, then David is a blaz-ing success.

But it wasn’t always clear, at leastnot to David, that his life would unfoldas well as it did. As a kid, he was shyand awkward. The things that inter-ested him, music and writing, held novalue for the people who mattered mostback then: his peers. “People would al-ways tell me, ‘These are the best years

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of your life,’ ” he recalls. “And I wouldthink to myself, I hope not! I hatedschool. I remember thinking, I’ve gottaget out of here. I was in sixth gradewhen Revenge of the Nerds came out,and I looked like I stepped out of thecast. I knew I was intelligent, but Igrew up in suburban Detroit, which islike ninety-nine percent of the rest ofthe country: if you’re a good-lookingperson and an athlete, you’re not gonnaget hassled. But if you seem too smart,that’s not something that kids respectyou for. They’re more likely to try andbeat you down for it. It was my best at-tribute, and I definitely enjoyed usingit, but it was something you also had totry and keep in check.”

So how did he get from there tohere? The key for David was playingthe drums. “At one point,” David says,“I totally overcame all my childhood

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stuff. And I know exactly how: I startedplaying the drums. Drums are my muse.They’re my Yoda. When I was inmiddle school, the high school jazzband came and performed for us, and Ithought that the coolest one by a longshot was the kid playing the drum set.To me, drummers were kind of like ath-letes, but musical athletes, and I lovedmusic.”

At first, for David, drumming wasmostly about social validation; hestopped getting kicked out of parties byjocks twice his size. But soon it becamesomething much deeper: “I suddenlyrealized this was a form of creative ex-pression, and it totally blew my mind. Iwas fifteen. That’s when I became com-mitted to sticking with it. My entire lifechanged because of my drums, and ithasn’t stopped, to this day.”

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David still remembers acutely what itwas like to be his nine-year-old self. “Ifeel like I’m in touch with that persontoday,” he says. “Whenever I’m doingsomething that I think is cool, like ifI’m in New York City in a room full ofpeople, interviewing Alicia Keys orsomething, I send a message back tothat person and let him know thateverything turned out OK. I feel likewhen I was nine, I was receiving thatsignal from the future, which is one ofthe things that gave me the strength tohang in there. I was able to create thisloop between who I am now and who Iwas then.”

The other thing that gave Davidstrength was his parents. They focusedless on developing his confidence thanon making sure that he found ways tobe productive. It didn’t matter what hewas interested in, so long as he pursued

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it and enjoyed himself. His father wasan avid football fan, David recalls, but“the last person to say, ‘How comeyou’re not out on the football field?’ ”For a while David took up piano, thencello. When he announced that hewanted to switch to drumming, his par-ents were surprised, but never wavered.They embraced his new passion. It wastheir way of embracing their son.

If David Weiss’s tale of transformationresonates for you, there’s a good reas-on. It’s a perfect example of what thepsychologist Dan McAdams calls a re-demptive life story—and a sign of men-tal health and well-being.

At the Foley Center for the Study ofLives at Northwestern University,

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McAdams studies the stories thatpeople tell about themselves. We allwrite our life stories as if we were nov-elists, McAdams believes, with begin-nings, conflicts, turning points, andendings. And the way we characterizeour past setbacks profoundly influenceshow satisfied we are with our currentlives. Unhappy people tend to see set-backs as contaminants that ruined anotherwise good thing (“I was never thesame again after my wife left me”),while generative adults see them asblessings in disguise (“The divorce wasthe most painful thing that everhappened to me, but I’m so much hap-pier with my new wife”). Those wholive the most fully realized lives—giv-ing back to their families, societies, andultimately themselves—tend to findmeaning in their obstacles. In a sense,McAdams has breathed new life into

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one of the great insights of Westernmythology: that where we stumble iswhere our treasure lies.

For many introverts like David, ad-olescence is the great stumbling place,the dark and tangled thicket of low self-esteem and social unease. In middleand high school, the main currency isvivacity and gregariousness; attributeslike depth and sensitivity don’t countfor much. But many introverts succeedin composing life stories much likeDavid’s: our Charlie Brown momentsare the price we have to pay to bangour drums happily through the decades.* Some who read this book before publicationcommented that the quote from Isabel couldn’tpossibly be accurate—“no second grader talksthat way!” But this is what she said.

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CONCLUSION

Wonderland

Our culture made a virtue of living onlyas extroverts. We discouraged the inner

journey, the quest for a center. So we lostour center and have to find it again.

—ANAÏS NIN

Whether you’re an introvert yourself oran extrovert who loves or works withone, I hope you’ll benefit personallyfrom the insights in this book. Here is ablueprint to take with you:

Love is essential; gregariousness isoptional. Cherish your nearest anddearest. Work with colleagues you likeand respect. Scan new acquaintances

for those who might fall into the formercategories or whose company you enjoyfor its own sake. And don’t worry aboutsocializing with everyone else. Rela-tionships make everyone happier, intro-verts included, but think quality overquantity.

The secret to life is to put yourself inthe right lighting. For some it’s aBroadway spotlight; for others, a lamp-lit desk. Use your natural powers—ofpersistence, concentration, insight, andsensitivity—to do work you love andwork that matters. Solve problems,make art, think deeply.

Figure out what you are meant tocontribute to the world and make sureyou contribute it. If this requires publicspeaking or networking or other activit-ies that make you uncomfortable, dothem anyway. But accept that they’redifficult, get the training you need to

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make them easier, and reward yourselfwhen you’re done.

Quit your job as a TV anchor and geta degree in library science. But if TVanchoring is what you love, then createan extroverted persona to get yourselfthrough the day. Here’s a rule of thumbfor networking events: one new honest-to-goodness relationship is worth tenfistfuls of business cards. Rush home af-terward and kick back on your sofa.Carve out restorative niches.

Respect your loved ones’ need for so-cializing and your own for solitude(and vice versa if you’re an extrovert).

Spend your free time the way youlike, not the way you think you’re sup-posed to. Stay home on New Year’s Eveif that’s what makes you happy. Skipthe committee meeting. Cross the streetto avoid making aimless chitchat withrandom acquaintances. Read. Cook.

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Run. Write a story. Make a deal withyourself that you’ll attend a set numberof social events in exchange for notfeeling guilty when you beg off.

If your children are quiet, help themmake peace with new situations andnew people, but otherwise let them bethemselves. Delight in the originality oftheir minds. Take pride in the strengthof their consciences and the loyalty oftheir friendships. Don’t expect them tofollow the gang. Encourage them to fol-low their passions instead. Throw con-fetti when they claim the fruits of thosepassions, whether it’s on the drummer’sthrone, on the softball field, or on thepage.

If you’re a teacher, enjoy yourgregarious and participatory students.But don’t forget to cultivate the shy, thegentle, the autonomous, the ones withsingle-minded enthusiasms for

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chemistry sets or parrot taxonomy ornineteenth-century art. They are theartists, engineers, and thinkers oftomorrow.

If you’re a manager, remember thatone third to one half of your workforceis probably introverted, whether theyappear that way or not. Think twiceabout how you design your organiza-tion’s office space. Don’t expect intro-verts to get jazzed up about open officeplans or, for that matter, lunchtimebirthday parties or team-building re-treats. Make the most of introverts’strengths—these are the people whocan help you think deeply, strategize,solve complex problems, and spot ca-naries in your coal mine.

Also, remember the dangers of theNew Groupthink. If it’s creativity you’reafter, ask your employees to solve prob-lems alone before sharing their ideas. If

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you want the wisdom of the crowd,gather it electronically, or in writing,and make sure people can’t see eachother’s ideas until everyone’s had achance to contribute. Face-to-face con-tact is important because it builds trust,but group dynamics contain unavoid-able impediments to creative thinking.Arrange for people to interact one-on-one and in small, casual groups. Don’tmistake assertiveness or eloquence forgood ideas. If you have a proactivework force (and I hope you do), re-member that they may perform betterunder an introverted leader than underan extroverted or charismatic one.

Whoever you are, bear in mind thatappearance is not reality. Some peopleact like extroverts, but the effort coststhem in energy, authenticity, and evenphysical health. Others seem aloof orself-contained, but their inner

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landscapes are rich and full of drama.So the next time you see a person witha composed face and a soft voice, re-member that inside her mind she mightbe solving an equation, composing asonnet, designing a hat. She might, thatis, be deploying the powers of quiet.

We know from myths and fairy talesthat there are many different kinds ofpowers in this world. One child is givena light saber, another a wizard’s educa-tion. The trick is not to amass all thedifferent kinds of available power, butto use well the kind you’ve been gran-ted. Introverts are offered keys toprivate gardens full of riches. To pos-sess such a key is to tumble like Alicedown her rabbit hole. She didn’t chooseto go to Wonderland—but she made ofit an adventure that was fresh and fant-astic and very much her own.

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Lewis Carroll was an introvert, too,by the way. Without him, there wouldbe no Alice in Wonderland. And by now,this shouldn’t surprise us.

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A Note on the Dedication

My grandfather was a soft-spoken manwith sympathetic blue eyes, and a pas-sion for books and ideas. He alwaysdressed in a suit, and had a courtly wayof exclaiming over whatever was ex-claimable in people, especially in chil-dren. In the Brooklyn neighborhoodwhere he served as a rabbi, the side-walks were filled with men in blackhats, women in skirts that hid theirknees, and improbably well-behavedkids. On his way to synagogue, mygrandfather would greet the passersby,gently praising this child’s brains, thatone’s height, the other’s command ofcurrent events. Kids adored him, busi-nessmen respected him, lost souls clungto him.

But what he loved to do best wasread. In his small apartment, where as awidower he’d lived alone for decades,all the furniture had yielded its originalfunction to serve as a surface for pilesof books: gold-leafed Hebrew textsjumbled together with Margaret At-wood and Milan Kundera. My grand-father would sit beneath a halo-shapedfluorescent light at his tiny kitchentable, sipping Lipton tea and snackingon marble cake, a book propped openon the white cotton tablecloth. In hissermons, each a tapestry of ancient andhumanist thought, he’d share with hiscongregation the fruits of that week’sstudy. He was a shy person who hadtrouble making eye contact with theaudience, but he was so bold in hisspiritual and intellectual explorationsthat when he spoke the congregationswelled to standing-room-only.

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The rest of my family took its cuefrom him. In our house, reading wasthe primary group activity. OnSaturday afternoons we curled up withour books in the den. It was the best ofboth worlds: you had the animalwarmth of your family right next toyou, but you also got to roam aroundthe adventure-land inside your ownhead.

Yet as a preteen I began to wonderwhether all this reading had markedme as “out of it,” a suspicion thatseemed confirmed when I went away tosummer camp at the age of ten andwatched as a girl with thick glasses anda high forehead refused to put downher book on the all-important first dayof camp and instantly became a pariah,her days and nights a hell of social ex-clusion. I longed to read, too, but leftmy own paperbacks untouched in my

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suitcase (though I felt guilty about this,as if the books needed me and I wasforsaking them). I saw that the girl whokept reading was considered bookishand shy, the very things that I was, too,and knew that I must hide.

After that summer, I felt less comfort-able about my desire to be alone with abook. In high school, in college, and asa young lawyer, I tried to make myselfappear more extroverted and less egg-heady than I truly was.

But as I grew older, I drew inspira-tion from my grandfather’s example. Hewas a quiet man, and a great one.When he died at the age of ninety-four,after sixty-two years at the pulpit, theNYPD had to close the streets of hisneighborhood to accommodate thethrongs of mourners. He would havebeen surprised to know this. Today, I

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think that one of the best things abouthim was his humility.

This book is dedicated, with love, tomy childhood family. To my mother,with her endless enthusiasm for quietkitchen-table chats; she gave us chil-dren the gift of intimacy. I was so luckyto have such a devoted mother. To myfather, a dedicated physician whotaught by example the joys of sitting forhours at a desk, hunting for knowledge,but who also came up for air to intro-duce me to his favorite poems and sci-ence experiments. To my brother andsister, who share to this day thewarmth and affection of having grownup in our small family and householdfull of literature. To my grandmother,for her pluck, grit, and caring.

And in memory of my grandfather,who spoke so eloquently the languageof quiet.

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A Note on the Words Introvert andExtrovert

This book is about introversion as seenfrom a cultural point of view. Itsprimary concern is the age-old dicho-tomy between the “man of action” andthe “man of contemplation,” and howwe could improve the world if onlythere were a greater balance of powerbetween the two types. It focuses onthe person who recognizes him- or her-self somewhere in the following con-stellation of attributes: reflective, cereb-ral, bookish, unassuming, sensitive,thoughtful, serious, contemplative,subtle, introspective, inner-directed,gentle, calm, modest, solitude-seeking,shy, risk-averse, thin-skinned. Quiet isalso about this person’s opposite

number: the “man of action” who isebullient, expansive, sociable, gregari-ous, excitable, dominant, assertive,active, risk-taking, thick-skinned, outer-directed, lighthearted, bold, and com-fortable in the spotlight.

These are broad categories, of course.Few individuals identify fully with onlyone or the other. But most of us recog-nize these types immediately, becausethey play meaningful roles in ourculture.

Contemporary personality psycholo-gists may have a conception of intro-version and extroversion that differsfrom the one I use in this book. Adher-ents of the Big Five taxonomy oftenview such characteristics as the tend-ency to have a cerebral nature, a richinner life, a strong conscience, some de-gree of anxiety (especially shyness),and a risk-averse nature as belonging to

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categories quite separate from introver-sion. To them, these traits may fall un-der “openness to experience,” “con-scientiousness,” and “neuroticism.”

My use of the word introvert is delib-erately broader, drawing on the in-sights of Big Five psychology, but alsoencompassing Jungian thinking on theintrovert’s inner world of “inexhaust-ible charm” and subjective experience;Jerome Kagan’s research on high react-ivity and anxiety (see chapters 4 and5); Elaine Aron’s work on sensory pro-cessing sensitivity and its relationshipto conscientiousness, intense feeling,inner-directedness, and depth of pro-cessing (see chapter 6); and various re-search on the persistence and concen-tration that introverts bring to problem-solving, much of it summarized won-derfully in Gerald Matthews’s work (seechapter 7).

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Indeed, for over three thousandyears, Western culture has linked thequalities in the above constellations ofadjectives. As the anthropologist C. A.Valentine once wrote:

Western cultural traditions include aconception of individual variabilitywhich appears to be old, wide-spread, and persistent. In popularform this is the familiar notion ofthe man of action, practical man,realist, or sociable person as op-posed to the thinker, dreamer, ideal-ist, or shy individual. The mostwidely used labels associated withthis tradition are the type designa-tions extrovert and introvert.

Valentine’s concept of introversion in-cludes traits that contemporary psycho-logy would classify as openness to

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experience (“thinker, dreamer”), con-scientiousness (“idealist”), and neur-oticism (“shy individual”).

A long line of poets, scientists, andphilosophers have also tended to groupthese traits together. All the way backin Genesis, the earliest book of theBible, we had cerebral Jacob (a “quietman dwelling in tents” who later be-comes “Israel,” meaning one whowrestles inwardly with God) squaringoff in sibling rivalry with his brother,the swashbuckling Esau (a “skillfulhunter” and “man of the field”). In clas-sical antiquity, the physicians Hippo-crates and Galen famously proposedthat our temperaments—and des-tinies—were a function of our bodilyfluids, with extra blood and “yellowbile” making us sanguine or choleric(stable or neurotic extroversion), andan excess of phlegm and “black bile”

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making us calm or melancholic (stableor neurotic introversion). Aristotlenoted that the melancholic tempera-ment was associated with eminence inphilosophy, poetry, and the arts (todaywe might classify this as openness toexperience). The seventeenth-centuryEnglish poet John Milton wrote IlPenseroso (“The Thinker”) and L’Allegro(“The Merry One”), comparing “thehappy person” who frolics in the coun-tryside and revels in the city with “thethoughtful person” who walks meditat-ively through the nighttime woods andstudies in a “lonely Towr.” (Again,today the description of Il Penserosowould apply not only to introversionbut also to openness to experience andneuroticism.) The nineteenth-centuryGerman philosopher Schopenhauercontrasted “good-spirited” people (en-ergetic, active, and easily bored) with

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his preferred type, “intelligent people”(sensitive, imaginative, and melanchol-ic). “Mark this well, ye proud men ofaction!” declared his countryman Hein-rich Heine. “Ye are, after all, nothingbut unconscious instruments of the menof thought.”

Because of this definitional complex-ity, I originally planned to invent myown terms for these constellations oftraits. I decided against this, again forcultural reasons: the words introvert andextrovert have the advantage of beingwell known and highly evocative. Everytime I uttered them at a dinner party orto a seatmate on an airplane, they eli-cited a torrent of confessions and reflec-tions. For similar reasons, I’ve used thelayperson’s spelling of extrovert ratherthan the extravert one finds throughoutthe research literature.

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Acknowledgments

I could not have written Quiet withoutthe help of countless friends, familymembers, and colleagues, including:Richard Pine, otherwise known (to me)as Super-Agent RSP: the smartest, sav-viest, and menschiest literary agent thatany writer could hope to work with.Richard believed unswervingly in Quiet,even before I did. Then he kept on be-lieving, all the way through the fiveyears it took me to research and writeit. I consider him not only an agent buta partner in my career. I also enjoyedworking with the whole team atInkWell Management, including EthanBassoff, Lyndsey Blessing, and CharlieOlsen.

At Crown Publishers, it has been myprivilege to work with the remarkableMolly Stern and her all-star team.Rachel Klayman has got to be the mostbrilliant and dedicated editor in thebusiness. She has been there at two inthe afternoon and at two in the morn-ing, spotting flaws in my reasoning andclunkers in my prose, and championingthis book indefatigably. I also appreci-ate how generous Mary Choteborskyand Jenna Ciongoli were with their ed-itorial talents. And I was fortunate towork with outside editor Peter Guz-zardi, who has terrific instincts and aknack for making criticism sound de-lightful. My heartfelt thanks to all ofyou. This book would be a shadow ofitself without your efforts.

Special thanks too to Rachel Rokickiand Julie Cepler for the creativity andenthusiasm they brought to the Quiet

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cause. And thanks to Patty Berg, MarkBirkey, Chris Brand, Stephanie Chan,Tina Constable, Laura Duffy, SongheeKim, Kyle Kolker, Rachel Meier, Anns-ley Rosner, and everyone else on theteam at Crown.

I have also been very lucky to workwith Joel Rickett, Kate Barker, and therest of the crackerjack group at Viking/Penguin U.K.

The marvelous people at TED em-braced the ideas in this book andoffered me a chance to talk about themat the TED Long Beach conference in2012. I am grateful to Chris Anderson,Kelly Stoetzel, June Cohen, Tom Rielly,Michael Glass, Nicholas Weinberg, andthe entire TED team.

Brian Little, whose work I profiled inchapter 9, has become an extraordinarymentor and friend. I met Brian early inmy research process, when I asked for

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an interview. He gave me not only theinterview but also, over the years, myown personal graduate seminar in per-sonality psychology. I am proud to beone of his many disciples and friends.

Elaine Aron, whose research I pro-filed in chapter 6, inspired me with herlife’s work and gave generously of hertime, knowledge, and life story.

I relied on the support and advice ofinnumerable friends, including: MarciAlboher, Gina Bianchini, Tara Bracco,Janis Brody, Greg Bylinksy, David Cal-lahan, Helen Churko, Mark Colodny,Estie Dallett, Ben Dattner, Ben Falchuk,Christy Fletcher, Margo Flug, JenniferGandin Le, Rhonda Garelick, MichaelGlass, Vishwa Goohya, Leeat Granek,Amy Gutman, Hillary Hazan-Glass,Wende Jaeger-Hyman, Mahima Joishy,Emily Klein, Chris Le, Rachel Lehmann-Haupt, Lori Lesser, Margot Magowan,

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Courtney Martin, Fran and Jerry Mar-ton, Furaha Norton, Elizabeth O’Neill,Wendy Paris, Leanne Paluck Reiss,Marta Renzi, Gina Rudan, HowardSackstein, Marisol Simard, DaphnaStern, Robin Stern, Tim Stock, JillianStraus, Sam Sugiura, Tom Sugiura, Jen-nifer Taub, Kate Tedesco, Ruti Teitel,Seinenu Thein, Jacquette Timmons,Marie Lena Tupot, Sam Walker, DanielWolff, and Cali Yost. A special, super-duper thanks to Anna Beltran, MaritzaFlores, and Eliza Simpson.

I am especially grateful for the for-bearance of some of my oldest anddearest friends: Mark Colodny, Jeff Ka-plan, Hitomi Komatsu, Cathy Lankenau-Weeks, Lawrence Mendenhall, Jonath-an Sichel, Brande Stellings, Judith vander Reis, Rebecca and Jeremy Wallace-Segall, and Naomi Wolf, who remainclose even though we barely had time

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to talk, let alone visit, during the yearsI wrote this book and gave birth to mytwo children.

Thank you, too, to my fellow mem-bers of the Invisible Institute, who in-spire and astonish me on a regularbasis: Gary Bass, Elizabeth Devita-Rae-burn, Abby Ellin, Randi Epstein, SheriFink, Christine Kenneally, JudithMatloff, Katie Orenstein, Annie MurphyPaul, Pamela Paul, Joshua Prager,Alissa Quart, Paul Raeburn, Kathy Rich,Gretchen Rubin, Lauren Sandler, De-borah Siegel, Rebecca Skloot, DebbieStier, Stacy Sullivan, Maia Szalavitz,Harriet Washington, and Tom Zoellner.

For inspiration that I would bottleand sell if I could, I thank the owners ofthe cottage in Amagansett: Alison(Sunny) Warriner and JeanneMclemore. The same goes for Evelynand Michael Polesny, proprietors of the

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magical Doma Café in Greenwich Vil-lage, where I wrote most of this book.

Thanks also to those who helpedwith various aspects of getting Quiet offthe ground: Nancy Ancowitz, Mark Co-lodny, Bill Cunningham, Ben Dattner,Aaron Fedor, Boris Fishman, DavidGallo, Christopher Glazek, SuzyHansen, Jayme Johnson, Jennifer Kah-weiler, David Lavin, Ko-Shin Mandell,Andres Richner, JillEllyn Riley,Gretchen Rubin, Gregory Samanez-Lar-kin, Stephen Schueller, Sree Sreenivas-an, Robert Stelmack, Linda Stone, JohnThompson, Charles Yao, Helen Wan,Georgia Weinberg, and Naomi Wolf.

I owe a special debt to the people Iwrote about or quoted, some of whomhave become friends: Michel Anteby,Jay Belsky, Jon Berghoff, Wayne Cas-cio, Hung Wei Chien, Boykin Curry,Tom DeMarco, Richard Depue, Dr.

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Janice Dorn, Anders Ericsson, JasonFried, Francesca Gino, Adam Grant,William Graziano, Stephen Harvill,David Hofmann, Richard Howard,Jadzia Jagiellowicz, Roger Johnson,Jerry Kagan, Guy Kawasaki, CameliaKuhnen, Tiffany Liao, Richard Lippa,Joanna Lipper, Adam McHugh, MikeMika, Emily Miller, Jerry Miller, QuinnMills, Purvi Modi, Joseph Newman,Preston Ni, Carl Schwartz, Dave Smith,Mark Snyder, Jacqueline Strickland,Avril Thorne, David Weiss, Mike Wei,and Shoya Zichy.

There are many, many others whoaren’t mentioned by name in Quiet butwho gave generously of their time andwisdom, via interviews and the like,and who dramatically informed mythinking: Marco Acevedo, Anna Allan-brook, Andrew Ayre, Dawn RiversBaker, Susan Blew, Jonathan Cheek,

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Jeremy Chua, Dave Coleman, BenDattner, Matthew Davis, Scott Derue,Carl Elliott, Brad Feld, Kurt Fischer,Alex Forbes, Donna Genyk, CaroleGrand, Stephen Gerras, Lenny Guc-ciardi, Anne Harrington, Naomi Karten,James McElroy, Richard McNally, GregOldham, Christopher Peterson, LiseQuintana, Lena Roy, Chris Scher-penseel, Hersh Shefrin, Nancy Snidman,Sandy Tinkler, Virginia Vitzthum, E. O.Wilson, David Winter, and Patti Woll-man. Thank you, all.

Most of all I thank my family:Lawrence and Gail Horowitz, BarbaraSchnipper, and Mitchell Horowitz,whom I wrote about in the dedication;Lois, Murray, and Steve Schnipper, whomake the world a warmer place; Steveand Gina Cain, my wonderful WestCoast siblings; and the inimitable HeidiPostlewait.

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Special thanks and love to Al andBobbi Cain, who lent me their advice,contacts, and professional counsel as Iresearched and wrote, and who con-stantly cause me to hope that one day Iwill be as devoted and supportive anin-law to some young person as theyare to me.

And to my beloved Gonzo (a.k.a.Ken), who may just be the most gener-ous person on earth, and the most dash-ing. During the years I wrote this book,he edited my drafts, sharpened myideas, made me tea, made me laugh,brought me chocolate, seeded ourgarden, turned his world upside downso I had time to write, kept our livescolorful and exciting, and got us thehell out of the Berkshires. He also, ofcourse, gave us Sammy and Elishku,who have filled our house with trucksand our hearts with love.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION: THE NORTH AND SOUTH OFTEMPERAMENT

1. Montgomery, Alabama. December 1,1955: For an excellent biography of RosaParks, see Douglas Brinkley, Rosa Parks: ALife (New York: Penguin, 2000). Most ofthe material in Quiet about Parks is drawnfrom this work.

A note about Parks: Some have ques-tioned the singularity of her actions, point-ing out that she’d had plenty of civil rightstraining before boarding that bus. Whilethis is true, there’s no evidence, accordingto Brinkley, that Parks acted in a premedit-ated manner that evening, or even as anactivist; she was simply being herself. Moreimportant for Quiet’s purposes, her

personality did not prevent her from beingpowerful; on the contrary, it made her anatural at nonviolent resistance.

2. “north and south of temperament”: Wini-fred Gallagher (quoting J. D. Higley), “HowWe Become What We Are,” The AtlanticMonthly, September 1994. (Higley was talk-ing about boldness and inhibition, not ex-troversion and introversion per se, but theconcepts overlap in many ways.)

3. governs how likely we are to exercise:Robert M. Stelmack, “On Personality andArousal: A Historical Perspective onEysenck and Zuckerman,” in Marvin Zuck-erman and Robert M. Stelmack, eds., On thePsychobiology of Personality: Essays in Honorof Marvin Zuckerman (San Diego: Elsevier,2004), 22. See also Caroline Davis et al.,“Motivations to Exercise as a Function ofPersonality Characteristics, Age, andGender,” Personality and Individual Differ-ences 19, no. 2 (1995): 165–74.

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4. commit adultery: Daniel Nettle, Personal-ity: What Makes You the Way You Are (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2007), p.100. See also David P. Schmitt, “The BigFive Related to Risky Sexual BehaviourAcross 10 World Regions: Differential Per-sonality Associations of Sexual Promiscuityand Relationship Infidelity,” EuropeanJournal of Personality 18, no. 4 (2004):301–19.

5. function well without sleep: William D. S.Killgore et al., “The Trait of Introversion-Extraversion Predicts Vulnerability to SleepDeprivation,” Journal of Sleep Research 16,no. 4 (2007): 354–63. See also DanielTaylor and Robert M. McFatter, “CognitivePerformance After Sleep Deprivation: DoesPersonality Make a Difference?” Personalityand Individual Differences 34, no. 7 (2003):1179–93; and Andrew Smith and AndreaMaben, “Effects of Sleep Deprivation,Lunch, and Personality on Performance,

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Mood, and Cardiovascular Function,”Physiology and Behavior 54, no. 5 (1993):967–72.

6. learn from our mistakes: See chapter 7.7. place big bets in the stock market: See

chapter 7.8. be a good leader: See chapter 2.9. and ask “what if”: See chapters 3 and 7.

10. exhaustively researched subjects: As ofMay 2, 2010, in the PSYCINFO database,there were 9,194 entries on “extraversion,”6,111 on “introversion,” and 12,494 on theoverlapping subject of “neuroticism.” Therewere fewer entries for the other “Big 5”personality traits: openness to experience,conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Sim-ilarly, as of June 14, 2010, a Google schol-ar search found about 64,700 articles on“extraversion,” 30,600 on “extroversion,”55,900 on “introversion,” and 53,300 on“neuroticism.” The psychologist William

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Graziano, in an e-mail dated July 31, 2010,refers to introversion/extroversion as “the300 lb. gorilla of personality, meaning thatit is big and cannot be ignored easily.”

11. in the Bible: See “A Note on Terminology.”12. some evolutionary psychologists: See

chapter 6.13. one third to one half of Americans are

introverts: Rowan Bayne, in The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: A Critical Review andPractical Guide (London: Chapman and Hall,1995), 47, finds the incidence of introver-sion at 36 percent, which is in turn determ-ined from Isabel Myers’s own study from1985. A more recent study, published bythe Center for Applications of PsychologicalType Research Services in 1996, sampled914,219 people and found that 49.3 per-cent were extroverts and 50.7 percent wereintroverts. See “Estimated Frequencies ofthe Types in the United States Population,”

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a brochure published by the Center for Ap-plication of Psychological Type (CAPT) in1996 and 2003. That the percentage of in-troverts found by these studies rose from 36percent to 50.7 percent doesn’t necessarilymean that there are now more introverts inthe United States, according to CAPT. Itmay be “simply a reflection of the popula-tions sampled and included.” In fact, awholly separate survey, this one using theEysenck Personality Inventory and EysenckPersonality Questionnaire rather than theMyers-Briggs test, indicates that extraver-sion scores have increased over time (from1966 to 1993) for both men and women:see Jean M. Twenge, “Birth Cohort Changesin Extraversion: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis, 1966–1993,” Personality and Indi-vidual Differences 30 (2001): 735–48.

14. United States is among the most extro-verted of nations: This has been noted intwo studies: (1) Juri Allik and Robert R.

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McCrae, “Toward a Geography of Personal-ity Traits: Patterns of Profiles Across 36Cultures,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psycho-logy 35 (2004): 13–28; and (2) Robert R.McCrae and Antonio Terracciano, “Person-ality Profiles of Cultures: Aggregate Person-ality Traits,” Journal of Personality and So-cial Psychology 89:3 (2005): 407–25.

15. Talkative people, for example: William B.Swann Jr. and Peter J. Rentfrow, “Blirta-tiousness: Cognitive, Behavioral, andPhysiological Consequences of RapidResponding,” Journal of Personality and So-cial Psychology 81, no. 6 (2001): 1160–75.

16. Velocity of speech counts: Howard Gilesand Richard L. Street Jr., “CommunicatorCharacteristics and Behavior,” in M. L.Knapp and G. R. Miller, eds., Handbook ofInterpersonal Communication, 2nd ed. (Thou-sand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 103–61. (Butnote some good news for introverts: slow

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speech can be perceived as honest and be-nevolent, according to other studies.)

17. the voluble are considered smarter: Del-roy L. Paulhus and Kathy L. Morgan, “Per-ceptions of Intelligence in LeaderlessGroups: The Dynamic Effects of Shynessand Acquaintance,” Journal of Personalityand Social Psychology 72, no. 3 (1997):581–91.

18. one informal study: Laurie Helgoe, Intro-vert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hid-den Strength (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks,2008), 3–4.

19. the theory of gravity: Gale E. Christianson,Isaac Newton (Oxford University Press,Lives and Legacies Series, 2005).

20. the theory of relativity: Walter Isaacson,Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Si-mon & Schuster, 2007), 4, 12, 18, 2, 31,etc.

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21. W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”: Mi-chael Fitzgerald, The Genesis of ArtisticCreativity: Asperger’s Syndrome and the Arts(London: Jessica Kingsley, 2005), 69. Seealso Ira Progoff, Jung’s Psychology and ItsSocial Meaning (London: Routledge, 1999),111–12.

22. Chopin’s nocturnes: Tad Szulc, Chopin inParis: The Life and Times of the RomanticComposer (New York: Simon & Schuster,2000), 69.

23. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Alain deBotton, How Proust Can Change Your Life(New York: Vintage International), 1997.

24. Peter Pan: Lisa Chaney, Hide-and-Seek withAngels: A Life of J. M. Barrie (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 2005), 2.

25. Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm: Fitzger-ald, The Genesis of Artistic Creativity, 89.

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26. Charlie Brown: David Michaelis, Schulzand Peanuts: A Biography (New York: Harp-er, 2007).

27. Schindler’s List, E.T., and Close Encoun-ters of the Third Kind: Joseph McBride,Steven Spielberg: A Biography (New York: Si-mon & Schuster, 1997), 57, 68.

28. Google: Ken Auletta, Googled: The End ofthe World as We Know It (New York: Pen-guin, 2009), 32

29. Harry Potter: Interview of J. K. Rowling byShelagh Rogers and Lauren McCormick, Ca-nadian Broadcasting Corp., October 26,2000.

30. “Neither E=mc2 nor Paradise Lost”: Wini-fred Gallagher, I.D.: How Heredity and Ex-perience Make You Who You Are (New York:Random House, 1996), 26.

31. vast majority of teachers believe: CharlesMeisgeier et al., “Implications and Applica-tions of Psychological Type to Educational

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Reform and Renewal,” Proceedings of theFirst Biennial International Conference onEducation of the Center for Applications ofPsychological Type (Gainesville, FL: Centerfor Applications of Psychological Type,1994), 263–71.

32. Carl Jung had published a bombshell:Carl G. Jung, Psychological Types(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1971; originally published in German asPsychologische Typen [Zurich: Rascher Ver-lag, 1921]), see esp. 330–37.

33. the majority of universities and Fortune100 companies: E-mail to the author,dated July 9, 2010, from Leah L. Walling,director, Marketing Communications andProduct Marketing, CPP, Inc.

34. introverts and extroverts differ in thelevel of outside stimulation … Manyhave a horror of small talk: See Part Two:“Your Biology, Your Self?”

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35. introvert is not a synonym for hermit: In-troversion is also very different from Asper-ger’s syndrome, the autism spectrum dis-order that involves difficulties with socialinteractions such as reading facial expres-sions and body language. Introversion andAsperger’s both can involve feeling over-whelmed in social settings. But unlikepeople with Asperger’s, introverts oftenhave strong social skills. Compared withthe one third to one half of Americans whoare introverts, only one in five thousandpeople has Asperger’s. See National Insti-tute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke,Asperger Syndrome Fact Sheet, ht-tp://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/asper-ger/detail_asperger.htm.

36. the distinctly introverted E. M. Forster:Sunil Kumar, A Companion to E. M. Forster,vol. 1 (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers andDistributors, 2007).

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37. “human love at its height”: E. M. Forster,Howards End (London: Edward Arnold,1910).

38. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval:Elaine N. Aron et al., “Adult Shyness: TheInteraction of Temperamental Sensitivityand an Adverse Childhood Environment,”Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31(2005): 181–97.

39. they sometimes overlap: Many articles ad-dress this question. See, for example, Steph-en R. Briggs, “Shyness: Introversion orNeuroticism?” Journal of Research in Person-ality 22, no. 3 (1988): 290–307.

40. “Such a man would be in the lunaticasylum”: William McGuire and R. F. C.Hall, C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and En-counters (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1977), 304.

41. Finland is a famously introverted nation:Aino Sallinen-Kuparinen et al., Willingness

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to Communicate, Communication Apprehen-sion, Introversion, and Self-Reported Commu-nication Competence: Finnish and AmericanComparisons. Communication Research Re-ports, 8 (1991): 57.

42. Many introverts are also “highly sensit-ive”: See chapter 6.

CHAPTER 1: THE RISE OF THE “MIGHTY LIKEABLEFELLOW”

1. The date: 1902 … held him back as ayoung man: Giles Kemp and Ed

2. ward Claflin, Dale Carnegie: The Man WhoInfluenced Millions (New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1989). The 1902 date is an estimatebased on the rough contours of Carnegie’sbiography.

3. “In the days when pianos and bathroomswere luxuries”: Dale Carnegie, The Quickand Easy Way to Effective Speaking (NewYork: Pocket Books, 1962; revised by

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Dorothy Carnegie from Public Speaking andInfluencing Men in Business, by DaleCarnegie).

4. a Culture of Character to a Culture ofPersonality: Warren Susman, Culture asHistory: The Transformation of American So-ciety in the Twentieth Century (Washington,DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003),271–85. See also Ian A. M. Nicholson, “Gor-don Allport, Character, and the ‘Culture ofPersonality,’ 1897–1937,” History of Psycho-logy 1, no. 1 (1998): 52–68.

5. The word personality didn’t exist: Sus-man, Culture as History, 277: The modernidea of personality emerged in the earlytwentieth century and came into its ownonly in the post–World War I period. By1930, according to the early personalitypsychologist Gordon W. Allport, interest inpersonality had reached “astonishing pro-portions.” See also Sol Cohen, “The MentalHygiene Movement, the Development of

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Personality and the School: The Medicaliza-tion of American Education,” History ofEducation Quarterly 32, no. 2 (1983),123–49.

6. In 1790, only 3 percent … a third of thecountry were urbanites: Alan Berger, TheCity: Urban Communities and Their Problems(Dubuque, IA: William C. Brown Co.,1978). See also Warren Simpson Thompsonet al., Population Trends in the United States(New York: Gordon and Breach SciencePublishers, 1969).

7. “We cannot all live in cities”: David E.Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and HighThinking in American Culture (Athens, GA:University of Georgia Press, 1985), 154.

8. “The reasons why one man gained a pro-motion”: Roland Marchand, Advertising theAmerican Dream: Making Way for Modernity,1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 1985), 209.

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9. The Pilgrim’s Progress: John Bunyan, ThePilgrim’s Progress (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2003). See also ElizabethHaiken, Venus Envy: A History of CosmeticSurgery (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1997), 99.

10. a modest man who did not … “offend bysuperiority”: Amy Henderson, “Media andthe Rise of Celebrity Culture,” Organizationof American Historians Magazine of History 6(Spring 1992).

11. A popular 1899 manual: Orison SwettMarden, Character: The Grandest Thing in theWorld (1899; reprint, Kessinger Publishing,2003), 13.

12. But by 1920, popular self-helpguides … “That is the beginning of a

13. reputation for personality”: Susman, Cul-ture as History, 271–85.

14. Success magazine and The Saturday Even-ing Post: Carl Elliott, Better Than Well:

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American Medicine Meets the AmericanDream (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003),61.

15. a mysterious quality called“fascination”: Susman, 279.

16. “People who pass us on the street”: HazelRawson Cades, “A Twelve-to-Twenty Talk,”Women’s Home Companion, September1925: 71 (cited by Haiken, p. 91).

17. Americans became obsessed with moviestars: In 1907 there were five thousandmovie theaters in the United States; by1914 there were 180,000 theaters andcounting. The first films appeared in 1894,and though the identities of screen actorswere originally kept secret by the film stu-dios (in keeping with the ethos of a moreprivate era), by 1910 the notion of a“movie star” was born. Between 1910 and1915 the influential filmmaker D. W. Grif-fith made movies in which he juxtaposed

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close-ups of the stars with crowd scenes.His message was clear: here was the suc-cessful personality, standing out in all itsglory against the undifferentiated nobodiesof the world. Americans absorbed thesemessages enthusiastically. The vast major-ity of biographical profiles published in TheSaturday Evening Post and Collier’s at thedawn of the twentieth century were aboutpoliticians, businessmen, and professionals.But by the 1920s and 1930s, most profileswere written about entertainers like GloriaSwanson and Charlie Chaplin. (See Susmanand Henderson; see also Charles Musser,The Emergence of Cinema: The AmericanScreen to 1907 [Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1994], 81; and DanielCzitrom, Media and the American Mind:From Morse to McLuhan [Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1982, p.42].)

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18. “EATON’S HIGHLAND LINEN”: Marchand,Advertising the American Dream, 11.

19. “ALL AROUND YOU PEOPLE ARE JUDGINGYOU SILENTLY”: Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticu-late Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal,Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Cul-ture (Routledge, 1995), 209.

20. “CRITICAL EYES ARE SIZING YOU UP RIGHTNOW”: Marchand, Advertising the AmericanDream, 213.

21. “EVER TRIED SELLING YOURSELF TO YOU?”:Marchand, 209.

22. “LET YOUR FACE REFLECT CONFIDENCE,NOT WORRY!”: Marchand, Advertising theAmerican Dream, 213.

23. “longed to be successful, gay, tri-umphant”: This ad ran in Cosmopolitan,August 1921: 24.

24. “How can I make myself more popu-lar?”: Rita Barnard, The Great Depression

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and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fear-ing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the1930s (Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1995), 188. See alsoMarchand, Advertising the American Dream,210.

25.–both genders displayed some re-serve … sometimes called “frigid”: Patri-cia 26 A. McDaniel, Shrinking Violets andCaspar Milquetoasts: Shyness, Power, and In-timacy in the United States, 1950–1995 (NewYork: New York University Press, 2003),33–43.

26. In the 1920s an influential psycholo-gist … “Our current civilization … seemsto place a premium upon the aggressiveperson”: Nicholson, “Gordon Allport, Char-acter, and the Culture of Personality,1897–1937,” 52–68. See also Gordon All-port, “A Test for Ascendance-Submission,”Journal of Abnormal & Social Psychology 23(1928): 118–36. Allport, often referred to

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as a founding figure of personality psycho-logy, published “Personality Traits: TheirClassification and Measurement” in 1921,the same year Jung published PsychologicalTypes. He began teaching his course “Per-sonality: Its Psychological and SocialAspects” at Harvard University in 1924; itwas probably the first course in personalityever taught in the United States.

27. Jung himself … “all the current preju-dices against this type”: C. G. Jung, Psy-chological Types (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1990; reprint of 1921 edi-tion), 403–5.

28.–The IC, as it became known … “thebackbone along with it”: Haiken, 27Venus Envy, 111–14.

29. Despite the hopeful tone of thispiece … “A healthy personality for everychild”: McDaniel, Shrinking Violets, 43–44.

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30. Well-meaning parents … agreed: Encyclo-pedia of Children and Childhood in Historyand Society: “Shyness,” ht-tp://www.faqs.org/childhood/Re-So/Shy-ness.html.

31. Some discouraged their chil-dren … learning to socialize: David Ries-man, The Lonely Crowd (Garden City, NY:Doubleday Anchor, reprinted by arrange-ment with Yale University Press, 1953),esp. 79–85 and 91. See also “The People:Freedom—New Style,” Time, September 27,1954.

32. Introverted children … “suburban ab-normalities”: William H. Whyte, The Or-ganization Man (New York: Simon &Schuster, 1956; reprint, Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002),382, 384.

33. Harvard’s provost Paul Buck: Jerome Ka-rabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of

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Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale,and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,2005), 185, 223.

34. “ ‘We see little use for the “brilliant” in-trovert’ ”: Whyte, The Organization Man,105.

35. This college dean … “it helps if theymake a good impression”: Whyte, The Or-ganization Man, 212.

36. “We’re selling, just selling, IBM”: HankWhittemore, “IBM in Westchester—TheLow Profile of the True Believers.” NewYork, May 22, 1972. The singing ended inthe 1950s, according to this article. For thefull words to “Selling IBM,” see ht-tp://www.digibarn.com/collections/songs/ibm-songs.

37. The rest of the organization men … readthe Equanil ad: Louis Menand, “HeadCase: Can Psychiatry Be a Science?” TheNew Yorker, March 1, 2010.

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38. The 1960s tranquilizer Serentil: Elliott,Better Than Well, xv.

39. Extroversion is in our DNA: Kenneth R.Olson, “Why Do Geographic Differences Ex-ist in the Worldwide Distribution of Extra-version and Openness to Experience? TheHistory of Human Emigration as an Explan-ation,” Individual Differences Research 5, no.4 (2007): 275–88. See also ChuanshengChen, “Population Migration and the Vari-ation of Dopamine D4 Receptor (DRD4) Al-lele Frequencies Around the Globe,” Evolu-tion and Human Behavior 20 (1999):309–24.

40. the Romans, for whom the worst pos-sible punishment: Mihalyi Csikszentmi-halyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Exper-ience (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990),165.

41. Even the Christianity of early Americanreligious revivals: Long before that silver-

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tongued Chautauqua speaker turned DaleCarnegie’s world upside down, religious re-vivals were taking place under huge tentsall over the country. Chautauqua itself wasinspired by these “Great Awakenings,” thefirst in the 1730s and 1740s, and thesecond in the early decades of the nine-teenth century. The Christianity on offer inthe Awakenings was new and theatrical; itsleaders were sales-oriented, focused onpacking followers under their great tents.Ministers’ reputations depended on how ex-uberant they were in speech and gesture.

The star system dominated Christianitylong before the concept of movie stars evenexisted. The dominant evangelist of theFirst Great Awakening was a British show-man named George Whitefield who drewstanding-room-only crowds with his dra-matic impersonations of biblical figures andunabashed weeping, shouting, and cryingout. But where the First Great Awakening

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balanced drama with intellect and gavebirth to universities like Princeton andDartmouth, the Second Great Awakeningwas even more personality-driven; its lead-ers focused purely on drawing crowds. Be-lieving, as many megachurch pastors dotoday, that too academic an approachwould fail to pack tents, many evangelicalleaders gave up on intellectual values alto-gether and embraced their roles as sales-men and entertainers. “My theology! Ididn’t know I had any!” exclaimed thenineteenth-century evangelist D. L. Moody.

This kind of oratory affected not onlystyles of worship, but also people’s ideas ofwho Jesus was. A 1925 advertising execut-ive named Bruce Fairchild Barton publisheda book called The Man Nobody Knows. Itpresented Jesus as a superstar sales guywho “forged twelve men from the bottomranks of business into an organization thatconquered the world.” This Jesus was no

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lamb; this was “the world’s greatest busi-ness executive” and “The Founder ofModern Business.” The notion of Jesus as arole model for business leadership fell onextraordinarily receptive ears. The ManNobody Knows became one of the best-selling nonfiction books of the twentiethcentury, according to Powell’s Books. SeeAdam S. McHugh, Introverts in the Church:Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture(Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2009),23–25. See also Neal Gabler, Life: TheMovie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality(New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 25–26.

42. early Americans revered action: RichardHofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in AmericanLife (New York: Vintage Books, 1962); see,for example, pp. 51 and 256–57.

43. The 1828 presidential campaign: NealGabler, Life: The Movie, 28.

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44. John Quincy Adams, incidentally: StevenJ. Rubenzer et al., “Assessing the U.S. Pres-idents Using the Revised NEO PersonalityInventory,” Assessment 7, no. 4 (2000):403–20.

45. “Respect for individual human personal-ity”: Harold Stearns, America and the YoungIntellectual (New York: George H. DuranCo., 1921).

46. “It is remarkable how much attention”:Henderson, “Media and the Rise ofCelebrity Culture.”

47. wandered lonely as a cloud: WilliamWordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as aCloud,” 1802.

48. repaired in solitude to Walden Pond:Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854.

49. Americans who considered themselvesshy: Bernardo Carducci and Philip G. Zim-bardo, “Are You Shy?” Psychology Today,November 1, 1995.

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50. “Social anxiety disorder” … one in fiveof us: M. B. Stein, J. R. Walker, and D. R.Forde, “Setting Diagnostic Thresholds forSocial Phobia: Considerations from a Com-munity Survey of Social Anxiety,” AmericanJournal of Psychiatry 151 (1994): 408–42.

51. The most recent version of the Diagnosticand Statistical Manual: American Psychiat-ric Association, Diagnostic and StatisticalManual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (DSM-IV), 2000. See 300.23, “Social Phobia (So-cial Anxiety Disorder)”: “The diagnosis isappropriate only if the avoidance, fear, oranxious anticipation of encountering the so-cial or performance situation interferes sig-nificantly with the person’s daily routine,occupational functioning, or social life, or ifthe person is markedly distressed abouthaving the phobia.… In feared social orperformance situations, individuals withSocial Phobia experience concerns aboutembarrassment and are afraid that others

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will judge them to be anxious, weak,‘crazy,’ or stupid. They may fear publicspeaking because of concern that otherswill notice their trembling hands or voiceor they may experience extreme anxietywhen conversing with others because offear that they will appear inarticulate.…The fear or avoidance must interfere signi-ficantly with the person’s normal routine,occupational or academic functioning, orsocial activities or relationships, or the per-son must experience marked distress abouthaving the phobia. For example, a personwho is afraid of speaking in public wouldnot receive a diagnosis of Social Phobia ifthis activity is not routinely encountered onthe job or in the classroom and the personis not particularly distressed about it.”

52. “It’s not enough … to be able to sit atyour computer”: Daniel Goleman, Workingwith Emotional Intelligence (New York: Ban-tam, 2000), 32.

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53. a staple of airport bookshelves and busi-ness best-seller lists: See, for example, ht-tp://www.nationalpost.com/Busi-ness+Bestsellers/3927572/story.html.

54. “all talking is selling and all selling in-volves talking”: Michael Erard, Um: Slips,Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and WhatThey Mean (New York: Pantheon, 2007),156.

55. more than 12,500 chapters in 113 coun-tries: http://www.toastmasters.org/MainMenuCategories/WhatisToastmas-ters.aspx (accessed September 10, 2010).

56. The promotional video: http://www.toast-masters.org/DVDclips.aspx (accessed July29, 2010). Click on “Welcome to Toastmas-ters! The entire 15 minute story.”

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CHAPTER 2: THE MYTH OF CHARISMATICLEADERSHIP

1. President Clinton … 50 million otherpeople: These names and statistics are ac-cording to Tony Robbins’s website and oth-er promotional materials as of December19, 2009.

2. some $11 billion a year: Melanie Lindner,“What People Are Still Willing to Pay For,”Forbes, January 15, 2009. The $11 billionfigure is for 2008 and is, according to Mar-ketdata Enterprises, a research firm. Thisamount was forecast to grow by 6.2 percentannually through 2012.

3. chairman of seven privately held com-panies: This figure is according to Rob-bins’s website.

4. “hyperthymic” temperament: Hagop S.Akiskal, “The Evolutionary Significance ofAffective Temperaments,” Medscape CME,

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published June 12, 2003, updated June 24,2003.

5. superhuman physical size: Steve Salernomade this point in his book Sham (NewYork: Crown Publishers, 2005), 75. He alsomade the later point about Robbins’s re-mark that he was once so poor that he kepthis dishes in the bathtub.

6. Founded in 1908 … “educating leaderswho make a difference in the world”:Harvard Business School website, Septem-ber 11, 2010.

7. President George W. Bush … were HBSgrads: Philip Delves Broughton, Ahead ofthe Curve: Two Years at Harvard BusinessSchool (New York: Penguin, 2008), 2. Seealso www.reuters.com, Factbox: JeffreySkilling, June 24, 2010.

8. will graduate into a business culture:Stanford Business School professor of ap-plied psychology Thomas Harrell tracked

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Stanford MBAs who graduated between1961 and 1965, and published a series ofstudies about them. He found that highearners and general managers tended to beoutgoing and extroverted. See, e.g., ThomasW. Harrell and Bernard Alpert, “Attributesof Successful MBAs: A 20-Year LongitudinalStudy,” Human Performance 2, no. 4 (1989):301-322.

9. “ ‘Here everyone knows that it’s import-ant to be an extrovert’ ”: Reggie Garrisonet al., “Managing Introversion and Extro-version in the Workplace,” Wharton Pro-gram for Working Professionals (WPWP)(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania,Spring 2006).

10. BOSS TO TED AND ALICE: Here I must apolo-gize: I can’t recall the company that ranthis ad, and haven’t been able to locate it.

11. “DEPART FROM YOUR INHIBITIONS”: ht-tp://www.advertolog.com/amtrak/print-

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outdoor/depart-from-your-inhibition-s-2110505/ (accessed September 11, 2010).

12. a series of ads for the psychotropic drugPaxil: Christopher Lane, How Normal Beha-vior Became a Sickness (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 2007), 127, 131.

13. We perceive talkers as smarter: Delroy L.Paulhus and Kathy L. Morgan, “Perceptionsof Intelligence in Leaderless Groups: TheDynamic Effects of Shyness and Acquaint-ance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psy-chology 72, no. 3 (1997): 581–91. See alsoCameron Anderson and Gavin Kilduff,“Why Do Dominant Personalities Attain In-fluence in Face-to-Face Groups? The Com-petence Signaling Effects of Trait Domin-ance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psy-chology 96, no. 2 (2009): 491–503.

14. two strangers met over the phone: Willi-am B. Swann Jr. and Peter J. Rentfrow,“Blirtatiousness: Cognitive, Behavioral, and

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Physiological Consequences of RapidResponding,” Journal of Personality and So-cial Psychology 81, no. 6 (2001): 1160–75.

15. We also see talkers as leaders: SimonTaggar et al., “Leadership Emergence inAutonomous Work Teams: Antecedents andOutcomes,” Personnel Psychology 52, no. 4(Winter 1999): 899–926. (“The person thatspeaks most is likely to be perceived as theleader.”)

16. The more a person talks, the more othergroup members: James Surowiecki, TheWisdom of Crowds (New York: DoubledayAnchor, 2005), 187.

17. It also helps to speak fast: Howard Gilesand Richard L. Street Jr., “CommunicatorCharacteristics and Behavior,” in M. L.Knapp and G. R. Miller, eds., Handbook ofInterpersonal Communication, 2nd ed. (Thou-sand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 103–61.

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18. college students were asked to solvemath problems: Cameron Anderson andGavin Kilduff, “Why Do Dominant Person-alities Attain Influence in Face-to-FaceGroups? The Competence-Signaling Effectsof Trait Dominance.”

19. A well-known study out of UC Berkeley:Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,2006).

20. “the Bus to Abilene”: Kathrin Day Lassila,“A Brief History of Groupthink: Why Two,Three or Many Heads Aren’t Always BetterThan One,” Yale Alumni Magazine, January/February 2008.

21. Schwab … Tohmatsu: Del Jones, “Not AllSuccessful CEOs Are Extroverts,” USAToday, June 7, 2006.

22. “some locked themselves into their of-fice”: Peter F. Drucker, The Leader of theFuture 2: New Visions, Strategies, and

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Practices for the Next Era, edited by FrancesHesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, andRichard Beckhard (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006), xi–xii.

23. those considered charismatic by theirtop executives: Bradley Agle et al., “DoesCEO Charisma Matter? An Empirical Ana-lysis of the Relationships Among Organiza-tional Performance, Environmental Uncer-tainty, and Top Management Team Percep-tions of CEO Charisma,” Academy of Man-agement Journal 49, no. 1 (2006): 161–74.See also Del Jones, “Not All SuccessfulCEOs Are Extroverts.” For an excellentbook on this topic, see Rakesh Khurana,Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irra-tional Quest for Charismatic CEOs(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,2002).

24. the influential management theorist JimCollins: Jim Collins, Good to Great: WhySome Companies Make the Leap—and Others

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Don’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).Note that some have questioned whetherthe companies Collins profiled are as“great” as he claimed. See Bruce Niendorfand Kristine Beck, “Good to Great, or JustGood?” Academy of Management Perspectives22, no. 4 (2008): 13–20. See also BruceResnick and Timothy Smunt, “Good toGreat to …?” Academy of Management Per-spectives 22, no. 4 (2008): 6–12.

25. correlation between extroversion andleadership: Timothy Judge et al., “Person-ality and Leadership: A Qualitative andQuantitative Review,” Journal of AppliedPsychology 87, no. 4 (2002): 765–80. Seealso David Brooks, “In Praise of Dullness,”New York Times, May 18, 2009, citingSteven Kaplan et al., “Which CEO Charac-teristics and Abilities Matter?” National Bur-eau of Economic Research Working Paper No.14195, July 2008, a study finding that CEOsuccess is more strongly related to

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“execution skills” than to “team-relatedskills.” Brooks also cited another study byMurray Barrick, Michael Mount, andTimothy Judge, surveying a century’sworth of research into business leadershipand finding that extroversion did not cor-relate well with CEO success, but that con-scientiousness did.

26. In the first study … fold more shirts:Adam M. Grant et al., “Reversing 57 the Ex-traverted Leadership Advantage: The Roleof Employee Proactivity,” Academy of Man-agement Journal 54, no. 3 (June 2011).

27. “Often the leaders end up doing a lot ofthe talking”: Carmen Nobel, “Introverts:The Best Leaders for Proactive Employees,”Harvard Business School Working Knowledge:A First Look at Faculty Research, October 4,2010.

28. For years before the day in December1955: I drew largely on Douglas Brinkley’s

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excellent biography, Rosa Parks: A Life(New York: Penguin Books, 2000). Note:Unlike King, Parks did come to believe thatviolence was sometimes a justifiableweapon of the oppressed.

29. Moses, for example, was not: My analysisof Moses is based on my own reading of Ex-odus, especially 3:11, 4:1, 4:3, 4:10,4:12–17, 6:12, 6:30, and Numbers 12:3.Others have made similar analyses; see, forexample, http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/showthread.php?t=50284. Seealso Doug Ward, “The Meanings of Moses’Meekness,” http://godward.org/Hebrew%20Roots/meanings_of_moses.htm.Also see Marissa Brostoff, “Rabbis Focus onProfessional Development,” ht-tp://www.forward.com/articles/13971/(accessed August 13, 2008).

30. a “classic Connector” named RobertHorchow: Malcolm Gladwell, The TippingPoint (New York: Back Bay Books, 2002;

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originally published by Little, Brown,March 2000), 42–46.

31. As of May 28, 2011: Craigslist fact sheet,available on its website,www.craigslist.com (accessed May 28,2010). Other information about Craigslistcomes from (1) phone interview betweenCraig Newmark and the author, December4, 2006, (2) Idelle Davidson, “The CraigslistPhenomenon,” Los Angeles Times, June 13,2004, and (3) Philip Weiss, “A Guy NamedCraig,” New York magazine, January 8,2006.

32. “Guy Kawasaki an introvert?”: MariaNiles, post on Blogher, a blogging com-munity for women, August 19, 2008. Seehttp://www.blogher.com/social-media-introverts.

33. “Wouldn’t it be a great irony”: Pete Cash-more, “Irony Alert: Social Media Intro-verts?” mashable.com, August 2008. See

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http://mashable.com/2008/08/15/irony-alert-social-media-introverts/.

34. introverts are more likely than extro-verts: Yair Amichai-Hamburger, “Personal-ity and the Internet,” in The Social Net:Understanding Human Behavior in Cyber-space, edited by Yair Amichai-Hamburger(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005):27–56. See also Emily S. Orr et al., “The In-fluence of Shyness on the Use of Facebookin an Undergraduate Sample,” CyberPsycho-logy and Behavior 12, no. 3 (2009); Levi R.Baker, “Shyness and Online Social Net-working Services,” Journal of Social and Per-sonal Relationships 27, no. 8 (2010). RichardN. Landers and John W. Lounsbury, “An In-vestigation of Big Five and Narrow Person-ality Traits in Relation to Internet Usage,”Computers in Human Behavior 22 (2006):283–93. See also Luigi Anolli et al., “Per-sonality of People Using Chat: An On-LineResearch,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 8,

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no. 1 (2005). But note that extroverts tendto have more Facebook friends than do in-troverts: Pavica Sheldon, “The RelationshipBetween Unwillingness-to-Communicateand Students’ Facebook Use,” Journal ofMedia Psychology 20, no. 2, (2008): 67–75.This is unsurprising, as Facebook has cometo be a place where people collect largequantities of friends.

35. an average weekly attendance of 22,000:Pastor Rick and Kay Warren, Online News-room, http://www.rickwarrennews.com/(accessed September 12, 2010).

36. Contemporary evangelicalism says: Forbackground on evangelicalism, I conducteda series of fascinating interviews with,among others, the effortlessly articulateLauren Sandler, author of Righteous: Dis-patches from the Evangelical Youth Movement(New York: Viking, 2006).

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37. “cry from the heart wondering how to fitin”: Mark Byron, “Evangelism for Intro-verts,” http://markbyron.typepad.com/main/2005/06/evangalism_for_.html (ac-cessed June 27, 2005).

38. “not serve on a parish committee”: JimMoore, “I Want to Serve the Lord—But NotServe on a Parish Committee,” ht-tp://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christian-ity/Catholic/2000/07/I-Want-To-Serve-The-Lord-But-Not-Serve-On-A-Parish-Com-mittee.aspx

39. “that fruitful miracle”: Jean Autret, Willi-am Burford, and Phillip J. Wolfe, trans. anded., Marcel Proust on Reading Ruskin (NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).

CHAPTER 3: WHEN COLLABORATION KILLSCREATIVITY

1. “I am a horse for a single harness”: Al-bert Einstein, in “Forum and Century,” vol.

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84, pp. 193–94 (the thirteenth in the Forumseries Living Philosophies, a collection of per-sonal philosophies of famous people, pub-lished in 1931).

2. “March 5, 1975”: The story of StephenWozniak throughout this chapter is drawnlargely from his autobiography, iWoz (NewYork: W. W. Norton, 2006). The descriptionof Woz as being the “nerd soul” of Applecomes from http://valleywag.gawker.com/220602/wozniak-jobs-design-role-overstated.

3. a series of studies on the nature of cre-ativity: Donald W. MacKinnon, “TheNature and Nurture of Creative Talent”(Walter Van Dyke Bingham Lecture givenat Yale University, New Haven, Connectic-ut, April 11, 1962). See also MacKinnon,“Personality and the Realization of CreativePotential,” Presidential Address presentedat Western Psychological Association, Port-land, Oregon, April 1964.

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4. One of the most interesting findings: See,for example, (1) Gregory J. Feist, “A Meta-Analysis of Personality in Scientific andArtistic Creativity,” Personality and SocialPsychology Review 2, no. 4 (1998): 290–309;(2) Feist, “Autonomy and Independence,”Encyclopedia of Creativity, vol. 1 (San Diego,CA: Academic Press, 1999), 157–63; and(3) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity:Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and In-vention (New York: Harper Perennial,1996), 65–68. There are some studies show-ing a correlation between extroversion andcreativity, but in contrast to the studies byMacKinnon, Csikszentmihalyi, and Feist,which followed people whose careers hadproven them to be exceptionally creative“in real life,” these tend to be studies of col-lege students measuring subjects’ creativityin more casual ways, for example by ana-lyzing their personal hobbies or by askingthem to play creativity games like writing a

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story about a picture. It’s likely that extro-verts would do better in high-arousal set-tings like these. It’s also possible, as thepsychologist Uwe Wolfradt suggests, thatthe relationship between introversion andcreativity is “discernable at a higher levelof creativity only.” (Uwe Wolfradt, “Indi-vidual Differences in Creativity: Personal-ity, Story Writing, and Hobbies,” EuropeanJournal of Personality 15, no. 4, [July/August 2001]: 297–310.)

5. Hans Eysenck: Hans J. Eysenck, Genius:The Natural History of Creativity (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1995).

6. “Innovation—the heart of the knowledgeeconomy”: Malcolm Gladwell, “Why YourBosses Want to Turn Your New Office intoGreenwich Village,” The New Yorker,December 11, 2000.

7. “None of us is as smart as all of us”: War-ren Bennis, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of

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Creative Collaboration (New York: BasicBooks, 1997).

8. “Michelangelo had assistants”: ClayShirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power ofOrganizing Without Organizations (NewYork: Penguin, 2008).

9. organize workforces into teams: SteveKoslowski and Daniel Ilgen, “Enhancing theEffectiveness of Work Groups and Teams,”Psychological Science in the Public Interest 7,no. 3 (2006): 77–124.

10. By 2000 an estimated half: Dennis J. Dev-ine, “Teams in Organizations: Prevalence,Characteristics, and Effectiveness,” SmallGroup Research 20 (1999): 678–711.

11. today virtually all of them do: FrederickMorgeson et al., “Leadership in Teams: AFunctional Approach to UnderstandingLeadership Structures and Processes,”Journal of Management 36, no. 1 (2010):5–39.

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12. 91 percent of high-level managers: Ibid.13. The consultant Stephen Harvill told me:

Author interview, October 26, 2010.14. over 70 percent of today’s employees:

Davis, “The Physical Environment of theOffice.” See also James C. McElroy andPaula C. Morrow, “Employee Reactions toOffice Redesign: A Naturally OccurringQuasi-Field Experiment in a Multi-Genera-tional Setting,” Human Relations 63, no. 5(2010): 609–36. See also Davis, “The Phys-ical Environment of the Office”: open-planoffices are “the most popular office design”today. See also Joyce Gannon, “FirmsBetting Open-Office Design, Amenities Leadto Happier, More Productive Workers,”Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh), February 9, 2003.See also Stephen Beacham, Real EstateWeekly, July 6, 2005. The first company touse an open plan in a high-rise buildingwas Owens Corning, in 1969. Today, manycompanies use them, including Proctor &

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Gamble, Ernst & Young, GlaxoSmithKline,Alcoa, and H. J. Heinz. http://www.owens-corning.com/acquainted/about/history/1960.asp. See also Matthew Davis et al.,“The Physical Environment of the Office:Contemporary and Emerging Issues,” in G.P. Hodgkinson and J. K. Ford, eds., Interna-tional Review of Industrial and OrganizationalPsychology, vol. 26 (Chichester, UK: Wiley,2011), 193–235: “… there was a ‘wide-spread introduction of open-plan and land-scaped offices in North America in the1960s and 1970s.’ ” But see Jennifer AnnMcCusker, “Individuals and Open Space Of-fice Design: The Relationship Between Per-sonality and Satisfaction in an Open SpaceWork Environment,” dissertation, Organiza-tional Studies, Alliant InternationalUniversity, April 12, 2002 (“the concept ofopen space design began in the mid 1960swith a group of German management con-sultants,” citing Karen A. Edelman, “Take

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Down the Walls,” Across the Board 34, no. 3[1997]: 32–38).

15. The amount of space per employeeshrank: Roger Vincent, “Office Walls AreClosing in on Corporate Workers,” LosAngeles Times, December 15, 2010.

16. “There has been a shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’work”: Paul B. Brown, “The Case forDesign,” Fast Company, June 2005.

17. Rival office manufacturer HermanMiller, Inc.: “New Executive Office-scapes:Moving from Private Offices to Open Envir-onments,” Herman Miller Inc., 2003.

18. In 2006, the Ross School of Business:Dave Gershman, “Building Is ‘Heart andSoul’ of the Ross School of Business,”mlive.com, January 24, 2009. See also KyleSwanson, “Business School Offers Previewof New Home, Slated to Open NextSemester,” Michigan Daily, September 15,2008.

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19. According to a 2002 nationwide survey:Christopher Barnes, “What Do TeachersTeach? A Survey of America’s Fourth andEighth Grade Teachers,” conducted by theCenter for Survey Research and Analysis,University of Connecticut, Civic Report no.28, September 2002. See also Robert E.Slavin, “Research on Cooperative Learningand Achievement: What We Know, WhatWe Need to Know,” Contemporary Educa-tional Psychology 21, no. 1 (1996): 43–69(citing 1993 national survey findings that79 percent of elementary school teachersand 62 percent of middle school teachersmade sustained use of cooperative learn-ing). Note that in “real life,” many teachersare simply throwing students into groupsbut not using “cooperative learning” per se,which involves a highly specific set of pro-cedures, according to an e-mail sent to theauthor by Roger Johnson of the

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Cooperative Learning Center at theUniversity of Minnesota.

20. “Cooperative learning”: Bruce Williams,Cooperative Learning: A Standard for HighAchievement (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin,2004), 3–4.

21. Janet Farrall and Leonie Kronborg: JanetFarrall and Leonie Kronborg, “LeadershipDevelopment for the Gifted and Talented,”in Fusing Talent—Giftedness in AustralianSchools, edited by M. McCann and F. South-ern (Adelaide: The Australian Associationof Mathematics Teachers, 1996).

22. “Employees are putting their whole livesup”: Radio interview with Kai Ryssdal,“Are Cubicles Going Extinct?”, Marketplace,from American Public Media, December 15,2010.

23. A significant majority of the earliestcomputer enthusiasts: Sarah Holmes andPhilip L. Kerr, “The IT Crowd: The Type

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Distribution in a Group of InformationTechnology Graduates,” Australian Psycho-logical Type Review 9, no. 1 (2007): 31–38.See also Yair Amichai-Hamburger et al.,“ ‘On the Internet No One Knows I’m an In-trovert’: Extraversion, Neuroticism, and In-ternet Interaction,” CyberPsychology and Be-havior 5, no. 2 (2002): 125–28.

24. “It’s a truism in tech”: Dave W. Smith, e-mail to the author, October 20, 2010.

25. “Why could that boy, whom I hadbeaten so easily”: See Daniel Coyle, TheTalent Code (New York: Bantam Dell,2009), 48.

26. three groups of expert violinists: K.Anders Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliber-ate Practice in the Acquisition of ExpertPerformance,” Psychological Review 100, no.3 (1993): 363–406.

27. “Serious study alone”: Neil Charness etal., “The Role of Deliberate Practice in

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Chess Expertise,” Applied Cognitive Psycho-logy 19 (2005): 151–65.

28. College students who tend to studyalone: David Glenn, “New Book Lays Fail-ure to Learn on Colleges’ Doorsteps,” TheChronicle of Higher Education, January 18,2001.

29. Even elite athletes in team sports: Starkesand Ericsson, “Expert Performance inSports: Advances in Research on Sports Ex-pertise,” Human Kinetics (2003): 67–71.

30. In many fields, Ericsson told me: Inter-view with the author, April 13, 2010.

31. ten thousand hours of DeliberatePractice: By the age of eighteen, the bestviolinists in the Berlin Music Academystudy had spent an average of over 7,000hours practicing alone, about 2,000 hoursmore than the good violinists, and 4,000hours more than the music teachers.

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32. “intense curiosity or focused interestseems odd to their peers”: Csikszentmi-halyi, Creativity, 177.

33. “because practicing music or studyingmath”: Ibid., 65.

34. Madeleine L’Engle: Ibid., 253–54.35. “My dear Mr. Babbage”: Charles Darwin,

The Correspondence of Charles DarwinVolume 2: 1837–1843 (Cambridge, England:Cambridge University Press, 1987), 67.

36. the Coding War Games: These are de-scribed in Tom DeMarco and TimothyLister, Peopleware: Productive Projects andTeams (New York: Dorset House, 1987).

37. A mountain of recent data on open-planoffices: See, for example, the following: (1)Vinesh Oommen et al., “Should Health Ser-vice Managers Embrace Open Plan WorkEnvironments? A Review,” Asia PacificJournal of Health Management 3, no. 2(2008). (2) Aoife Brennan et al.,

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“Traditional Versus Open Office Design: ALongitudinal Field Study,” Environment andBehavior 34 (2002): 279. (3) James C McEl-roy and Paula Morrow, “Employee Reac-tions to Office Redesign: A NaturallyOccurring Quasi-Field Experiment in aMulti-Generational Setting,” Human Rela-tions 63 (2010): 609. (4) Einar De Croon etal., “The Effect of Office Concepts on Work-er Health and Performance: A SystematicReview of the Literature,” Ergonomics, 48,no. 2 (2005): 119–34. (5) J. Pejtersen et al.,“Indoor Climate, Psychosocial Work Envir-onment and Symptoms in Open-Plan Of-fices,” Indoor Air 16, no. 5 (2006):392–401. (6) Herman Miller Research Sum-mary, 2007, “It’s All About Me: The Bene-fits of Personal Control at Work.” (7) PaulBell et al., Environmental Psychology(Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 162. (8) Davis,“The Physical Environment of the Office.”

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38. people learn better after a quiet stroll:Marc G. Berman et al., “The CognitiveBenefits of Interacting with Nature,” Psy-chological Science 19, no. 12 (2008):1207–12. See also Stephen Kaplan andMarc Berman, “Directed Attention as aCommon Resource for Executive Function-ing and Self-Regulation,” Perspectives onPsychological Science 5, no. 1 (2010): 43–57.

39. Another study, of 38,000 knowledgeworkers: Davis et al., “The Physical Envir-onment of the Office.”

40. Even multitasking … a myth: John Med-ina, Brain Rules (Seattle, WA: Pear Press,2008), 87.

41. Backbone Entertainment: Mike Mika, in-terview with the author, July 12, 2006.

42. Reebok International: Kimberly Blanton,“Design It Yourself: Pleasing Offices LaidOut by the Workers Who Use Them Can Be

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a Big Advantage When Companies Competefor Talent,” Boston Globe, March 1, 2005.

43. For ten years, beginning in 2000: TEDxMidwest Talk, October 15, 2010. Also, e-mail to the author, November 5, 2010.

44. Kafka, for example: Anthony Storr,Solitude: A Return to the Self (New York:Free Press, 2005), 103.

45. considerably more cheerful TheodorGeisel: Judith Morgan and Neil Morgan,Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel: A Biography (NewYork: DaCapo, 1996).

46. legendary advertising man Alex Osborn:Alex Osborn, Your Creative Power (W. La-fayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1948).

47. group brainstorming doesn’t actuallywork: Marvin D. Dunnette et al., “The Ef-fect of Group Participation on Brainstorm-ing Effectiveness for Two IndustrialSamples,” Journal of Applied Psychology 47,no. 1 (1963): 30–37.

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48. some forty years of research: See, for ex-ample, Paul A. Mongeau and Mary ClaireMorr, “Reconsidering Brainstorming,”Group Facilitation 1, no. 1 (1999): 14. Seealso Karan Girotra et al., “Idea Generationand the Quality of the Best Idea,” Manage-ment Science 56, no. 4 (April 2010):591–605. (The highest level innovationcomes from a hybrid process in whichpeople brainstorm on their own beforesharing ideas with colleagues.)

49. “business people must be insane”: AdrianFurnham, “The Brainstorming Myth,” Busi-ness Strategy Review 11, no. 4 (2000):21–28.

50. Groups brainstorming electronically:Paul Mongeau and Mary Claire Morr, “Re-considering Brainstorming.”

51. The same is true of academic research:Charlan Nemeth and Jack Goncalo, “Creat-ive Collaborations from Afar: The Benefits

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of Independent Authors,” Creativity Re-search Journal 17, no. 1 (2005): 1–8.

52. usually believe that their group per-formed much better: Keith Sawyer, GroupGenius: The Creative Power of Collaboration(New York: Basic Books, 2007), 66.

53. the fear of public humiliation: Susan K.Opt and Donald A. Loffredo, “RethinkingCommunication Apprehension: A Myers-Briggs Perspective,” Journal of Psychology134, no. 5 (2000): 556–70.

54. two NCAA basketball teams: James C.Moore and Jody A. Brylinsky, “SpectatorEffect on Team Performance in College Bas-ketball,” Journal of Sport Behavior 16, no. 2(1993): 77.

55. behavioral economist Dan Ariely: DanAriely, “What’s the Value of a Big Bonus?”New York Times, November 19, 2008.

56. Gregory Berns: The Solomon Asch andGregory Berns experiments are described in

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Gregory Berns, Iconoclast: A NeuroscientistReveals How to Think Differently (Boston,MA: Harvard Business Press, 2008), 59–81.See also Sandra Blakeslee, “What OtherPeople Say May Change What You See,”New York Times, June 28, 2005. And seeGregory S. Berns et al., “NeurobiologicalCorrelates of Social Conformity andIndependence During Mental Rotation,” Bi-ological Psychiatry 58 (2005): 245–53.

57. heightened activation in the amygdala:In fact, in some iterations of the experi-ment, where the volunteers played with agroup of computers rather than with agroup of people, their amygdalae stayedquiet even when they disagreed with thecomputers. This suggests that people whodon’t conform suffer not so much the fearof being wrong as the anxiety of being ex-cluded from the group.

58. face-to-face interactions create trust:Belinda Luscombe, “Why E-Mail May Be

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Hurting Off-Line Relationships,” Time, June22, 2010.

59. population density is correlated with in-novation: Jonah Lehrer, “How the CityHurts Your Brain,” Boston Globe, January 2,2009.

60. creating “flexible” open plans: Davis etal., “The Physical Environment of theOffice.”

61. At Pixar Animation Studios: Bill Ca-podagli, “Magic in the Workplace: How Pix-ar and Disney Unleash the Creative Talentof Their Workforce,” Effectif, September/October 2010: 43–45.

62. Similarly, at Microsoft: Michelle Conlin,“Microsoft’s Meet-My-Mood Offices,”Bloomberg Businessweek, September 10,2007.

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CHAPTER 4: IS TEMPERAMENT DESTINY?A general note on this chapter: Chapter

4 discusses the psychologist Jerome Kagan’swork on high reactivity, which some con-temporary psychologists would consider tolie at the intersection of introversion andanother trait known as “neuroticism.” Forthe sake of readability, I have not elucid-ated that distinction in the text.

1. For one of those studies, launched in1989: This study is discussed at length inJerome Kagan and Nancy Snidman, TheLong Shadow of Temperament (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

2. “Carl Jung’s descriptions of the introvertand extrovert”: Ibid., 218.

3. reserved Tom and extroverted Ralph:Jerome Kagan, Galen’s Prophecy (New York:Basic Books, 1998), 158–61.

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4. Some say that temperament is the found-ation: See http://www.selfgrowth.com/art-icles/Warfield3.html.

5. potent organ: Kagan and Snidman, TheLong Shadow of Temperament, 10.

6. When the Frisbee looks like it’s headedstraight for your nose: This image comesfrom an online video with Joseph Ledoux, ascientist at NYU who studies the neuralbasis of emotions, especially fear and anxi-ety. See “Fearful Brain in an AnxiousWorld,” Science & the City, ht-tp://www.nyas.org/Podcasts/Atom.axd (ac-cessed November 20, 2008).

7. “alert attention”: Elaine N. Aron, Psycho-therapy and the Highly Sensitive Person (NewYork: Routledge, 2010), 14.

8. They literally use more eye movements:Various studies have documented thesetendencies in high-reactive children. See,for example, Jerome Kagan, “Reflection-

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Impulsivity and Reading Ability in PrimaryGrade Children,” Child Development 363, no.3 (1965): 609–28. See also Ellen Siegelman,“Reflective and Impulsive Observing Beha-vior,” Child Development 40, no. 4 (1969):1213–22. These studies use the term “re-flective” rather than “high-reactive,” butit’s a safe bet that they’re talking about thesame group of children. Siegelman de-scribes them as “preferring low-risk situ-ations generally but choosing harder, moresolitary intellectual tasks … less motoric-ally active, and more cautious” (p. 1214).(Similar studies have been done on adults;see chapters 6 and 7.)

9. High-reactive kids also tend to think andfeel deeply: Elaine Aron, The Highly Sensit-ive Child: Helping Our Children Thrive Whenthe World Overwhelms Them (New York:Broadway Books), 2002.

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10. If a high-reactive toddler breaks anotherchild’s toy: See the studies by GrazynaKochanska referred to in chapter 6.

11. how a group of kids should share acoveted toy: Winifred Gallagher (quotingKagan), “How We Become What We Are.”The Atlantic Monthly, September 1994.

12. blue eyes, allergies, and hayfever … thin body and narrow face:Kagan, Galen’s Prophecy, 160–61.

13. Take Disney movies: Ibid., 161.14. extroversion and introversion are

physiologically: David G. Winter, Personal-ity: Analysis and Interpretation of Lives (NewYork: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 511–16.

15. 40 to 50 percent heritable: Thomas J.Bouchard Jr. and Matt McGue, “Geneticand Environmental Influences on HumanPsychological Differences,” Journal ofNeurobiology 54 (2003): 4–5.

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16. Nazi eugenics and white supremacism:This has been written about in variousplaces including, for example, Peter D.Kramer, Listening to Prozac (New York: Pen-guin, 1993), 150.

17. “I have been dragged, kicking andscreaming”: Gallagher (quoting Kagan),“How We Become What We Are.”

18. The publication of his early findings:Kramer, Listening to Prozac, 154.

19. Kagan ushers me inside: I conducted aseries of interviews with Jerome Kaganbetween 2006 and 2010.

20. describes himself as having been ananxious: Jerome Kagan, An Argument forMind (New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 2006), 4, 7.

21. public speaking is the number-one fear:Victoria Cunningham, Morty Lefkoe, andLee Sechrest, “Eliminating Fears: An Inter-vention that Permanently Eliminates the

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Fear of Public Speaking,” Clinical Psycho-logy and Psychotherapy 13 (2006): 183–93.

22. Public speaking phobia has many causes:Gregory Berns, Iconoclast: A NeuroscientistReveals How to Think Differently (Boston,MA: Harvard Business Press, 2008), 59–81.

23. introverts are significantly more likely:Susan K. Opt and Donald A. Loffredo, “Re-thinking Communication Apprehension: AMyers-Briggs Perspective,” Journal of Psy-chology 134, no. 5 (2000): 556–70. See alsoMichael J. Beatty, James C. McCroskey, andAlan D. Heisel, “Communication Apprehen-sion as Temperamental Expression: A Com-munibiological Paradigm,” CommunicationMonographs 65 (1998): 197–219. See alsoPeter D. Macintyre and Kimly A. Thivierge,“The Effects of Speaker Personality on Anti-cipated Reactions to Public Speaking,”Communication Research Reports 12, no. 2(1995): 125–33.

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24. in a group of people, on average half ofthe variability: David G. Winter, Personal-ity, 512.

25. temperature or humidity: NatashaMitchell, “Jerome Kagan: The Father ofTemperament,” radio interview withMitchell on ABC Radio International, August26, 2006 (accessed at ht-tp://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stor-ies/2006/1722388.htm).

26. “climb a few fences … danger and ex-citement”: Gallagher (quoting Lykken),“How We Become What We Are.”

27. “The university is filled with introverts”:Interview with the author, June 15, 2006.

28. if raised by attentive families in safe en-vironments … “twigs on the same genet-ic branch”: Winifred Gallagher, I.D.: HowHeredity and Experience Make You Who YouAre (New York: Random House, 1996), 29,

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46–50. See also Kagan and Snidman, TheLong Shadow of Temperament, 5.

29. kids acquire their sense of right andwrong: Grazyna Kochanska and R. A.Thompson, “The Emergence and Develop-ment of Conscience in Toddlerhood andEarly Childhood,” in Parenting and Chil-dren’s Internalization of Values, edited by J.E. Grusec and L. Kucynski (New York: JohnWiley and Sons), 61. See also GrazynaKochanska, “Toward a Synthesis of ParentalSocialization and Child Temperament inEarly Development of Conscience,” ChildDevelopment 64 no. 2 (1993): 325–47;Grazyna Kochanska and Nazan Aksan,“Children’s Conscience and Self-Regula-tion,” Journal of Personality 74, no. 6(2006): 1587–1617; Grazyna Kochanska etal., “Guilt and Effortful Control: Two Mech-anisms That Prevent Disruptive Develop-mental Trajectories,” Journal of Personality

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and Social Psychology 97, no. 2 (2009):322–33.

30. tragedy of a bold and exuberant tem-perament: Gallagher, I.D., 46–50.

31. dubbed “the orchid hypothesis”: DavidDobbs, “The Science of Success,” The At-lantic magazine, 2009. See also Jay Belskyet al., “Vulnerability Genes or PlasticityGenes?” Molecular Psychiatry, 2009: 1–9;Michael Pluess and Jay Belsky, “DifferentialSusceptibility to Rearing Experience: TheCase of Childcare,” The Journal of Child Psy-chology and Psychiatry 50, no. 4 (2009):396–404; Pluess and Belsky, “DifferentialSusceptibility to Rearing Experience: Par-enting and Quality Child Care,” Develop-mental Psychology 46, no. 2 (2010): 379–90;Jay Belsky and Michael Pluess, “BeyondDiathesis Stress: Differential Susceptibilityto Environmental Influences,” PsychologicalBulletin 135, no. 6 (2009): 885–908; BruceJ. Ellis and W. Thomas Boyce, “Biological

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Sensitivity to Context,” Current Directions inPsychological Science 17, no. 3 (2008):183–87.

32. with depression, anxiety, and shyness:Aron, Psychotherapy and the Highly SensitivePerson, 3. See also A. Engfer, “Antecedentsand Consequences of Shyness in Boys andGirls: A 6-year Longitudinal Study,” in So-cial Withdrawal, Inhibition, and Shyness inChildhood, edited by K. H. Rubin and J. B.Asendorpf (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erl-baum, 1993), 49–79; W. T. Boyce et al.,“Psychobiologic Reactivity to Stress andChildhood Respiratory Illnesses: Results ofTwo Prospective Studies,” PsychosomaticMedicine 57 (1995): 411–22; L. Gannon etal., “The Mediating Effects of Psycho-physiological Reactivity and Recovery onthe Relationship Between EnvironmentalStress and Illness,” Journal of PsychosomaticResearch 33 (1989): 165–75.

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33. Indeed, about a quarter of Kagan’s high-reactive kids: E-mail from Kagan to the au-thor, June 22, 2010.

34. good parenting, child care, and a stablehome environment: See, for example, Bel-sky et al., “Vulnerability Genes or PlasticityGenes?”, 5. See also Pluess and Belsky,“Differential Susceptibility to Rearing Ex-perience: The Case of Childcare,” 397.

35. kind, conscientious: Aron, The Highly Sens-itive Child.

36. They don’t necessarily turn into classpresidents: Author interview with Jay Bel-sky, April 28, 2010.

37. world of rhesus monkeys: Stephen J.Suomi, “Early Determinants of Behaviour:Evidence from Primate Studies,” BritishMedical Bulletin 53, no. 1 (1997): 170–84(“high-reactive infants cross-fostered tonurturant females actually appeared to bebehaviourally precocious.… These

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individuals became especially adept at re-cruiting and retaining other group membersas allies in response to agonistic encountersand, perhaps as a consequence, they sub-sequently rose to and maintained top posi-tions in the group’s dominance hierarchy.…Clearly, high-reactivity need not always beassociated with adverse short- and long-term outcomes,” p. 180). See also this videoon the Atlantic Monthly website:(http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/the-science-of-success/7761/), in which Suomi tells us that “themonkeys who had that same short alleleand grew up with good mothers had noproblems whatsoever. They turned out aswell or better than monkeys who had theother version of this gene.” (Note also thatthe link between the short allele of theSERT gene and depression in humans iswell discussed but somewhatcontroversial.)

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38. thought to be associated with high react-ivity and introversion: Seth J. Gillihan etal., “Association Between Serotonin Trans-porter Genotype and Extraversion,” Psychi-atric Genetics 17, no. 6 (2007): 351–54. Seealso M. R. Munafo et al., “Genetic Poly-morphisms and Personality in HealthyAdults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Ana-lysis,” Molecular Psychiatry 8 (2003):471–84. And see Cecilie L. Licht et al., “As-sociation Between Sensory Processing Sens-itivity and the 5-HTTLPR Short/ShortGenotype.”

39. has speculated that these high-reactivemonkeys: Dobbs, “The Science of Success.”

40. adolescent girls with the short allele ofthe SERT gene … less anxiety on calmdays: Belsky et al., “Vulnerability Genes orPlasticity Genes?”

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41. this difference remains at age five: ElaineAron, Psychotherapy and the Highly SensitivePerson, 240–41.

42. even more resistant than other kids:Boyce, “Psychobiologic Reactivity to Stressand Childhood Respiratory Illnesses: Res-ults of Two Prospective Studies.” See alsoW. Thomas Boyce and Bruce J. Ellis, “Biolo-gical Sensitivity to Context: I. Evolutionary-Developmental Theory of the Origins andFunctions of Stress Reactivity,” Developmentand Psychopathology 27 (2005): 283.

43. The short allele of the SERT gene: SeeJudith R. Homberg and Klaus-Peter Lesch,“Looking on the Bright Side of SerotoninTransporter Gene Variation,” Biological Psy-chiatry, 2010.

44. “sailors are so busy—and wisely—look-ing under the water line”: Belsky et al.,“Vulnerability Genes or Plasticity Genes?”

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45. “The time and effort they invest”: Authorinterview with Jay Belsky, April 28, 2010.

CHAPTER 5: BEYOND TEMPERAMENT1. “Enjoyment appears at the boundary”:

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psycho-logy of Optimal Experience (New York: Harp-er Perennial, 1990), 52.

2. windowless room with Dr. CarlSchwartz: I conducted a series of inter-views with Dr. Schwartz between 2006 and2010.

3. the footprint of a high- or low-reactivetemperament: Carl Schwartz et al., “Inhib-ited and Uninhibited Infants ‘Grown Up’:Adult Amygdalar Response to Novelty,”Science 300, no. 5627 (2003): 1952–53.

4. If you were a high-reactive baby: For agood overview of the relationship betweenthe amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, seeJoseph Ledoux, The Emotional Brain: The

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Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996),chapters 6 and 8. See also Gregory Berns,Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How toThink Differently (Boston, MA: HarvardBusiness Press, 2008), 59–81.

5. self-talk to reassess upsetting situations:Kevin N. Ochsner et al., “Rethinking Feel-ings: An fMRI Study of the Cognitive Regu-lation of Emotion,” Journal of CognitiveNeuroscience 14, no. 8 (2002): 1215–29.

6. scientists conditioned a rat: Ledoux, TheEmotional Brain, 248–49.

7. Hans Eysenck: David C. Funder, The Per-sonality Puzzle (New York: W. W. Norton,2010), 280–83.

8. high arousal levels in the brain: E-mailfrom Jerome Kagan to the author, June 23,2010.

9. many different kinds of arousal: E-mailfrom Carl Schwartz to the author, August

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16, 2010. Also note that introverts seemnot to be in a baseline state of high arousalso much as susceptible to tipping over intothat state.

10. excited fans at a soccer game: E-mailfrom Jerome Kagan to the author, June 23,2010.

11. a host of evidence that introverts aremore sensitive: This has been writtenabout in many places. See, for example,Robert Stelmack, “On Personality andArousal: A Historical Perspective onEysenck and Zuckerman,” in On the Psycho-biology of Personality: Essays in Honor ofMarvin Zuckerman, edited by Marvin Zuck-erman and Robert Stelmack (Pergamon,2005), 17–28. See also Gerald Matthews etal., Personality Traits (Cambridge, UK: Cam-bridge University Press, 2003), 169–70,186–89, 329–42. See also Randy J. Larsenand David M. Buss, Personality Psychology:

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Domains of Knowledge About Human Nature(New York: McGraw Hill, 2005), 202–6.

12. lemon juice: Funder, The Personality Puzzle,281.

13. noise level preferred by the extroverts:Russell G. Geen, “Preferred StimulationLevels in Introverts and Extroverts: Effectson Arousal and Performance,” Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology 46, no. 6(1984): 1303–12.

14. They can hunt for homes: This idea comesfrom Winifred Gallagher, House Thinking: ARoom-by-Room Look at How We Live (NewYork: Harper Collins, 2006).

15. introverts function better than extro-verts when sleep deprived: William Kil-gore et al., “The Trait of Introversion-Extra-version Predicts Vulnerability to SleepDeprivation,” Journal of Sleep Research 16,no. 4 (2007): 354–63.

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16. Drowsy extroverts behind the wheel:Matthews, Personality Traits, 337.

17. Overarousal interferes with attention:Gerald Matthews and Lisa Dorn, “Cognitiveand Attentional Processes in Personalityand Intelligence,” in International Handbookof Personality and Intelligence, edited byDonald H. Saklofske and Moshe Zeidner(New York: Plenum Press, 1995): 367–96.Or, as the psychologist Brian Little puts it,“extraverts often find that they are able tohandle cramming for speeches or briefingsin a way that would be disastrous forintroverts.”

18. a cycle of dread, fear, and shame: Berns,Iconoclast, 59–81.

CHAPTER 6: “FRANKLIN WAS A POLITICIAN, BUTELEANOR SPOKE OUT OF CONSCIENCE”

1. “A shy man no doubt dreads the notice”:Charles Darwin, The Expressions of the

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Emotions in Man and Animals (Charleston,SC: BiblioBazaar, 2007), 259.

2. Easter Sunday, 1939. The Lincoln Me-morial: My description of the concert isbased on film footage of the event.

3. And it wouldn’t have, without EleanorRoosevelt … to sing at the Lincoln Me-morial: Allida M. Black, Casting Her OwnShadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping ofPostwar Liberalism (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1996), 41–44.

4. “This was something unique”: The Amer-ican Experience: Eleanor Roosevelt (PublicBroadcasting System, Ambrica Productions,2000). See transcript: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eleanor/filmmore/transcript/transcript1.html.

5. They met when he was twenty: BlancheWiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, VolumeOne: 1884–1933 (New York: Viking

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Penguin, 1992), esp. 125–236. See also TheAmerican Experience: Eleanor Roosevelt.

6. her first scientific publication in 1997:Elaine N. Aron and Arthur Aron, “Sensory-Processing Sensitivity and Its Relation toIntroversion and Emotionality,” Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology 3, no. 2(1997): 345–68.

7. When she was a girl … She decided tofind out: The biographical informationabout Aron comes from (1) interview withthe author, August 21, 2008; (2) Elaine N.Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person: How toThrive When the World Overwhelms You(New York: Broadway Books, 1996); (3)Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Personin Love: Understanding and Managing Rela-tionships When the World Overwhelms You(New York: Broadway Books, 2000).

8. First Aron interviewed thirty-ninepeople … lightbulb burning a touch too

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brightly: Aron and Aron, “Sensory-Pro-cessing Sensitivity.” See also E. N. Aron,“Revisiting Jung’s Concept of Innate Sensit-iveness,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 49(2004): 337–67. See also Aron, The HighlySensitive Person.

9. They feel exceptionally strong emotions:In laboratory studies, looking at picturesdesigned to create strong positive or negat-ive emotions, they reported feeling moreemotionally aroused than nonsensitivepeople. See B. Acevedo, A. Aron, and E.Aron, “Sensory Processing Sensitivity andNeural Responses to Strangers’ EmotionalStates,” in A. Aron (Chair), High Sensitivity,a Personality/Temperament Trait: Lifting theShadow of Psychopathology, symposiumpresented at the Annual Meeting of theAmerican Psychological Association, SanDiego, California, 2010. See also Jadzia Ja-giellowicz, Arthur Aron, Elaine Aron, andTurhan Canli, “Faster and More Intense:

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Emotion Processing and Attentional Mech-anisms in Individuals with Sensory Pro-cessing Sensitivity,” in Aron, HighSensitivity.

10. scientists at Stony Brook University:Jadzia Jagiellowicz et al., “Sensory Pro-cessing Sensitivity and Neural Responses toChanges in Visual Scenes,” Social Cognitiveand Affective Neuroscience, 2010,doi.10.1093/scan/nsq001.

11. echoes Jerome Kagan’s findings: JeromeKagan, “Reflection-Impulsivity and ReadingAbility in Primary Grade Children,” ChildDevelopment 363, no. 3 (1965): 609–28. Seealso Ellen Siegelman, “Reflective and Im-pulsive Observing Behavior,” Child Develop-ment 40, no. 4 (1969): 1213–22.

12. “If you’re thinking in more complicatedways”: Interview with the author, May 8,2010.

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13. highly empathic: Aron and Aron,“Sensory-Processing Sensitivity.” See alsoAron, “Revisiting Jung’s Concept of InnateSensitiveness.” See also Aron, The HighlySensitive Person. And see the following fMRIstudies: Acevedo, “Sensory Processing Sens-itivity and Neural Responses to Strangers’Emotional States.” And see Jadzia Jagiel-lowicz, “Faster and More Intense: EmotionProcessing and Attentional Mechanisms inIndividuals with Sensory Processing Sensit-ivity.” Note that many personality psycho-logists who subscribe to the “Big 5” theoryof personality associate empathy not withsensitivity (a construct that is gaining at-tention, but is relatively less well knownthan the Big 5), but with a trait known as“Agreeableness” and even extroversion.Aron’s work does not challenge these asso-ciations, but expands them. One of themost valuable aspects of Aron’s work is

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how radically, and fruitfully, she reinter-prets personality psychology.

14. tentatively associated with sensitivity:Seth J. Gillihan et al., “Association BetweenSerotonin Transporter Genotype and Extra-version,” Psychiatric Genetics 17, no. 6(2007): 351–54. See also M. R. Munafo etal., “Genetic Polymorphisms and Personal-ity in Healthy Adults: A Systematic Reviewand Meta-Analysis,” Molecular Psychiatry 8(2003): 471–84.

15. show them pictures of scared faces:David C. Funder, The Personality Puzzle(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), citing A.R. Hariri et al., “Serotonin Transporter Gen-etic Variation and the Response of the Hu-man Amygdala,” Science 297 (2002):400–403.

16. faces of people experiencing strong feel-ings: Acevedo, “Sensory Processing Sensit-ivity and Neural Responses to Strangers’

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Emotional States.” See also Jadzia Jagiel-lowicz, “Faster and More Intense: EmotionProcessing and Attentional Mechanisms inIndividuals with Sensory ProcessingSensitivity.”

17. In 1921, FDR contracted polio … howsuffering Americans felt: Cook, EleanorRoosevelt, Volume One, 125–236. See alsoThe American Experience: Eleanor Roosevelt.

18. A kind woman hands a toy to a tod-dler … “prosocial relationships withparents, teachers, and friends”: GrazynaKochanska et al., “Guilt in Young Children:Development, Determinants, and Relationswith a Broader System of Standards,” ChildDevelopment 73, no. 2 (March/April 2002):461–82. See also Grazyna Kochanska andNazan Aksan, “Children’s Conscience andSelf-Regulation,” Journal of Personality 74,no. 6 (2006): 1587–1617. See also GrazynaKochanska et al., “Guilt and Effortful Con-trol: Two Mechanisms That Prevent

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Disruptive Developmental Trajectories,”Journal of Personality and Social Psychology97, no. 2 (2009): 322–33.

19. a 2010 University of Michigan study: S.H. Konrath et al., “Changes in DispositionalEmpathy in American College StudentsOver Time: A Meta-Analysis,” Personalityand Social Psychology Review, August 2010,e-publication ahead of print (accessed at ht-tp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20688954).

20. related to the prevalence of social me-dia: Pamela Paul, “From Students, LessKindness for Strangers?” New York Times,June 25, 2010.

21. when her peers were teased: Elaine Aron,The Highly Sensitive Child (New York: Ran-dom House, 2002), 18, 282–83.

22. the novelist Eric Malpass: Eric Malpass,The Long Long Dances (London: Corgi,1978).

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23. High-reactive introverts sweat more: V.De Pascalis, “On the Psychophysiology ofExtraversion,” in On the Psychobiology ofPersonality: Essays in Honor of Marvin Zuck-erman, edited by Marvin Zuckerman andRobert M. Stelmack (San Diego: Elsevier,2004), 22. See also Randy J. Larsen andDavid M. Buss, Personality Psychology: Do-mains of Knowledge About Human Nature(New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005),199.

24. sociopaths lie at the extreme end: Van K.Tharp et al., “Autonomic Activity DuringAnticipation of an Averse Tone in Noninsti-tutionalized Sociopaths,” Psychophysiology17, no. 2 (1980): 123–28. See also JosephNewman et al., “Validating a DistinctionBetween Primary and Secondary Psycho-pathy with Measures of Gray’s BIS and BASConstructs,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology114 (2005): 319–23.

25. sociopaths have damaged amygdalae:Yaling Yang et al., “Localization of

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Deformations Within the Amygdala in Indi-viduals with Psychopathy,” Archives of Gen-eral Psychiatry 66, no. 9 (2009), 986–94.

26. Lie detectors … are partially skin con-ductance tests: They also measure breath-ing, pulse rate, and blood pressure.

27. supercool pulse rate during liftoff: Wini-fred Gallagher, I.D.: How Heredity and Ex-perience Make You Who You Are (New York:Random House, 1996), 24.

28. Corine Dijk: Corine Dijk and Peter J. DeJong, “The Remedial Value of Blushing inthe Context of Transgressions andMishaps,” Emotion 9, no. 2 (2009): 287–91.

29. “A blush comes online in two or threeseconds”: Benedict Carey, “Hold YourHead Up: A Blush Just Shows You Care,”New York Times, June 2, 2009: D5.

30. “Because it is impossible to control”:Ibid.

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31. Keltner has tracked the roots of humanembarrassment … than to mind toolittle: Dacher Keltner, Born to Be Good: TheScience of a Meaningful Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 74–96.

32. “The type that is ‘sensitive’ or‘reactive.’ … ‘opportunity only knocksonce’ ”: Elaine Aron, “Revisiting Jung’sConcept of Innate Sensitiveness,” 337–67.

33. twenty-seven attributes associated:Author interview with Elaine Aron, August21, 2008.

34. other 30 percent are extroverts: Aron,Psychotherapy and the Highly Sensitive Per-son, 5.

35. More than a hundred species … what’sgoing on around them: Max Wolf et al.,“Evolutionary Emergence of Responsiveand Unresponsive Personalities,” Proceed-ings of the National Academy of Sciences 105,no. 41 (2008): 15825–30. See also Aron,

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Psychotherapy and the Highly Sensitive Per-son, 2.

36. animals had parties: David Sloan Wilson,Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s TheoryCan Change the Way We Think About OurLives (New York: Bantam Dell, 2007), 110.

37. trade-off theory of evolution: DanielNettle, “The Evolution of Personality Vari-ation in Humans and Other Animals,”American Psychologist 61, no. 6 (2006):622–31.

38. When Wilson dropped metal traps:Wilson, Evolution for Everyone, 100–114.

39. Trinidadian guppies: Nettle, “The Evolu-tion of Personality Variation in Humansand Other Animals,” 624. See also ShyrilO’Steen et al., “Rapid Evolution of EscapeAbility in Trinidadian Guppies,” Evolution56, no. 4 (2002): 776–84. Note that anoth-er study found that bold fish do better withpredators (but these were cichlids in fish

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tanks, not pike in streams): Brian R. Smithand Daniel T. Blumstein, “Behavioral Typesas Predictors of Survival in TrinidadianGuppies,” Behavioral Ecology 21, no. 5(2010): 65–73.

40. nomads who inherited: Dan Eisenberg etal., “Dopamine Receptor Genetic Poly-morphisms and Body Composition inUndernourished Pastoralists: An Explora-tion of Nutrition Indices Among Nomadicand Recently Settled Ariaal Men of North-ern Kenya,” BMC Evolutionary Biology 8, no.173 (2008), doi:10.1186/1471-2148-8-173.See also: http://machineslikeus.com/news/adhd-advantage-nomadic-tribesmen.

41. extroverts have more sex part-ners … commit more crimes. Nettle, “TheEvolution of Personality Variation in Hu-mans and Other Animals,” 625. See alsoDaniel Nettle, Personality: What Makes Youthe Way You Are (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007).

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42. As Jung speculated almost a centuryago: Carl Jung, Psychological Types, vol. 6of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Prin-ceton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1971), 559.

43. whose traits promote group survival:See, for example, Nicholas Wade, “TheEvolution of the God Gene,” New YorkTimes, November 15, 2009.

44. “Suppose a herd of antelope”: ElaineAron, “Book Review: Unto Others: TheEvolution and Psychology of Unselfish Be-havior,” January 2007, Comfort Zone On-line: http://www.hsperson.com/pages/3Fe-b07.htm.

45. “hawk” and “dove” members: ElaineAron, “A Future Headline: ‘HSPs, the Key toHuman Survival?’ ” August 2007, ComfortZone Online: http://www.hsperson.com/pages/1Aug07.htm.

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46. Great tit birds: Nettle, “The Evolution ofPersonality Variation in Humans and OtherAnimals,” 624–25. See also Sloan Wilson,Evolution for Everyone, 110.

47. “If you send an introvert into a recep-tion”: David Remnick, “The WildernessCampaign,” The New Yorker, September 13,2004.

48. “Most people in politics draw energy”:John Heilemann, “The Comeback Kid,” NewYork magazine, May 21, 2006.

49. “It’s about the survival of the planet”:Benjamin Svetkey, “Changing the Climate,”Entertainment Weekly, July 14, 2006.

50. “warrior kings” and “priestly advisers”:Aron, “Revisiting Jung’s Concept of InnateSensitiveness.”

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CHAPTER 7: WHY DID WALL STREET CRASH ANDWARREN BUFFETT PROSPER?

1. Just after 7:30 a.m.: Alan’s story and thedescription of Dorn and her house arebased on a series of telephone and e-mailinterviews with the author, conductedbetween 2008 and 2010.

2. Financial history is full of examples:There are also many examples from milit-ary history. “Hurrah, boys, we’ve gotthem!” General Custer famously shouted atthe battle of Little Bighorn in 1876—justbefore his entire unit of two hundred menwas wiped out by three thousand Sioux andCheyenne. General MacArthur advanced inthe face of repeated Chinese threats of at-tack during the Korean War, costing almost2 million lives with little strategic gain.Stalin refused to believe that the Germanswould invade Russia in 1941, even afterninety warnings of an impending attack. SeeDominic D. P. Johnson, Overconfidence and

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War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illu-sions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 2004).

3. The AOL–Time Warner merger: NinaMonk, Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin,and the Unmaking of AOL Time-Warner (NewYork: HarperCollins, 2005).

4. They protect themselves better from thedownside: The psychology professorRichard Howard, in an interview with theauthor on November 17, 2008, notes thatintroverts tend to down-regulate positiveemotions and extroverts tend to up-regulatethem.

5. our limbic system: Note that these daysmany scientists dislike the phrase “limbicsystem.” This is because no one reallyknows which parts of the brain this termrefers to. The brain areas included in thissystem have changed over the years, andtoday many use the term to mean brain

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areas that have something to do with emo-tion. Still, it’s a useful shorthand.

6. “No, no, no! Don’t do that”: See, for ex-ample, Ahmad R. Hariri, Susan Y.Bookheimer, and John C. Mazziotta, “Mod-ulating Emotional Responses: Effects of aNeocortical Network on the Limbic Sys-tems,” NeuroReport 11 (1999): 43–48.

7. what makes an extrovert an extrovert:Richard E. Lucas and Ed Diener, “Cross-Cul-tural Evidence for the FundamentalFeatures of Extraversion,” Journal of Person-ality and Social Psychology 79, no. 3 (2000):452–68. See also Michael D. Robinson etal., “Extraversion and Reward-Related Pro-cessing: Probing Incentive Motivation in Af-fective Priming Tasks,” Emotion 10, no. 5(2010): 615–26.

8. greater economic, political, and hedon-istic ambitions: Joshua Wilt and WilliamRevelle, “Extraversion,” in Handbook of

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Individual Differences in Social Behavior, ed-ited by Mark R. Leary and Rich H. Hoyle(New York: Guilford Press, 2009), 39.

9. The key seems to be positive emotion:See Lucas and Diener, “Cross-Cultural Evid-ence for the Fundamental Features of Extra-version.” See also Daniel Nettle, Personality:What Makes You the Way You Are (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2007).

10. The basis of buzz: Richard Depue and PaulCollins, “Neurobiology of the Structure ofPersonality: Dopamine, Facilitation of In-centive Motivation, and Extraversion,” Be-havioral and Brain Sciences 22, no. 3 (1999):491–569. See also Nettle, Personality: WhatMakes You the Way You Are.

11. Dopamine is the “reward chemical”: De-pue and Collins, “Neurobiology of theStructure of Personality: Dopamine, Facilit-ation of Incentive Motivation, and Extraver-sion.” See also Nettle, Personality: What

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Makes You the Way You Are. See also SusanLang, “Psychologist Finds Dopamine Linkedto a Personality Trait and Happiness,” Cor-nell Chronicle 28, no. 10 (1996).

12. early findings have been intriguing:Some of the findings in this line of researchhave been contradictory or have not beenreplicated, but together they pose an im-portant avenue of inquiry.

13. In one experiment, Richard Depue: De-pue and Collins, “Neurobiology of theStructure of Personality: Dopamine, Facilit-ation of Incentive Motivation, andExtraversion.”

14. extroverts who win gambling games: Mi-chael X. Cohen et al., “Individual Differ-ences in Extraversion and Dopamine Genet-ics Predict Neural Reward Responses,” Cog-nitive Brain Research 25 (2005): 851–61.

15. other research has shown that the medi-al orbitofrontal cortex: Colin G. DeYoung

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et al., “Testing Predictions from PersonalityNeuroscience: Brain Structure and the BigFive,” Psychological Science 21, no. 6(2010): 820–28.

16. introverts “have a smaller re-sponse” … “break a leg to get there”:Nettle, Personality: What Makes You the WayYou Are.

17. “This is great!”: Michael J. Beatty et al.,“Communication Apprehension as Tem-peramental Expression: A Communibiolo-gical Paradigm,” Communication Mono-graphs 65 (1988): reporting that peoplewith high communication apprehension“value moderate … success less than dothose low in the trait.”

18. “Everyone assumes that it’s good to ac-centuate positive emotions”: RichardHoward interview with the author, Novem-ber 17, 2008. Howard also pointed to thisinteresting take by Roy F. Baumeister et al.,

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“How Emotions Facilitate and Impair Self-Regulation,” in Handbook of Emotion Regu-lation, edited by James J. Gross (New York:Guilford Press, 2009), 422: “positive emo-tion can sweep aside the normal restraintsthat promote civilized behavior.”

19. Another disadvantage of buzz: Note thatthis sort of risk-taking behavior is in whatDaniel Nettle (Personality: What Makes Youthe Way You Are, 83) calls “the shared ter-ritory” of extroversion and another person-ality trait, conscientiousness. In some casesconscientiousness is the better predictor.

20. extroverts are more likely than intro-verts to be killed while driving … re-marry: Nettle, Personality: What Makes Youthe Way You Are. See also Timo Lajunen,“Personality and Accident Liability: Are Ex-troversion, Neuroticism and PsychoticismRelated to Traffic and Occupational Fatalit-ies?” Personality and Individual Differences31, no. 8 (2001): 1365–73.

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21. extroverts are more prone than intro-verts to overconfidence: Peter Schaefer,“Overconfidence and the Big Five,” Journalof Research in Personality 38, no. 5 (2004):473–80.

22. better off with more women: See, for ex-ample, Sheelah Kolhatkar, “What if WomenRan Wall Street?” New York Magazine,March 21, 2010.

23. a strong predictor of financial risk-tak-ing: Camelia M. Kuhnen and Joan Y. Chiao,“Genetic Determinants of Financial RiskTaking,” PLoS ONE 4(2): e4362.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004362 (2009).See also Anna Dreber et al., “The 7R Poly-morphism in the Dopamine Receptor D4Gene (DRD4) Is Associated with FinancialRisk Taking in Men.” Evolution and HumanBehavior 30, no. 2 (2009): 85–92.

24. When faced with a low probability ofwinning: J. P. Roiser et al., “The Effect of

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Polymorphism at the Serotonin TransporterGene on Decision-making, Memory and Ex-ecutive Function in Ecstasy Users and Con-trols,” Psychopharmacology 188 (2006):213–27.

25. Another study, of sixty-four traders:Mark Fenton O’Creevy et al., Traders: Risks,Decisions, and Management in Financial Mar-kets (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,2005), 142–43.

26. delaying gratification, a crucial life skill:Jonah Lehrer, “Don’t,” The New Yorker,May 18, 2009. See also Jacob B. Hirsh etal., “Positive Mood Effects on Delay Dis-counting,” Emotion 10, no. 5 (2010):717–21. See also David Brooks, The SocialAnimal (New York: Random House, 2011),124.

27. scientists gave participants the choice:Samuel McClure et al., “Separate NeuralSystems Value Immediate and Delayed

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Monetary Rewards,” Science 306 (2004):503–7.

28. A similar study suggests: Hirsch, “PositiveMood Effects on Delay Discounting.”

29. Yet it was just this kind of risk-rewardmiscalculation: Wall Street’s judgmentwas clouded by a strange brew of (1)lemming-like behavior, (2) the opportunityto earn large transaction fees, (3) the fearof losing market share to competitors, and(4) the inability to properly balance oppor-tunity against risk.

30. Too much power was concentrated inthe hands of aggressive risk-takers: Inter-view with the author, March 5, 2009.

31. “For twenty years, the DNA”: FareedZakaria, “There Is a Silver Lining,” New-sweek, October 11, 2008.

32. Vincent Kaminski: Steven Pearlstein, “TheArt of Managing Risk,” The Washington Post,November 8, 2007. See also Alexei

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Barrionuevo, “Vincent Kaminski: Soundingthe Alarm But Unable to Prevail,” in “10Enron Players: Where They Landed Afterthe Fall,” The New York Times, January 29,2006. And see Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracyof Fools: A True Story (New York: Broad-way, 2005), 250.

33. Imagine that you’ve been invited toNewman’s lab: C. M. Patterson and JosephNewman, “Reflectivity and Learning fromAversive Events: Toward a PsychologicalMechanism for the Syndromes of Disinhibi-tion,” Psychological Review 100 (1993):716–36. Carriers of the s-variant of the5HTTLPR polymorphism (which is associ-ated with introversion and sensitivity) havealso been show to be faster to learn toavoid penalizing stimuli in passive avoid-ance tasks. See E. C. Finger et al., “The Im-pact of Tryptophan Depletion and5-HTTLPR Genotype on Passive Avoidanceand Response Reversal Instrumental

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Learning Tasks,” Neuropsychopharmacology32 (2007): 206–15.

34. introverts are “geared to inspect”: JohnBrebner and Chris Cooper, “Stimulus orResponse-Induced Excitation: A Comparis-on of the Behavior of Introverts and Extro-verts,” Journal of Research in Personality 12,no. 3 (1978): 306–11.

35. more likely you are to learn: Indeed, it’sbeen shown that one of the crucial waysthat we learn is to analyze our mistakes.See Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide (NewYork: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009),51.

36. If you force extroverts to pause … how tobehave around warning signals in thefuture: Interview with the author, Novem-ber 13, 2008. Another way to understandwhy some people worry about risks andothers ignore them is to go back to the ideaof brain networks. In this chapter I focused

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on the dopamine-driven reward system andits role in delivering life’s goodies. Butthere’s a mirror-image brain network, oftencalled the loss avoidance system, whose jobis to call our attention to risk. If the rewardnetwork chases shiny fruit, the loss avoid-ance system worries about bad apples.

The loss avoidance system, like the re-ward network, is a double-edged sword. Itcan make people anxious, unpleasantlyanxious, so anxious that they sit out bullmarkets while everyone else gets rich. Butit also causes them to take fewer stupidrisks. This system is mediated in part by aneurotransmitter called serotonin—andwhen people are given drugs like Prozac(known as selective serotonin reuptake in-hibitors) that affect the loss avoidance sys-tem, they become more blasé about danger.They also become more gregarious. Thesefeatures coincide uncannily, points out theneurofinance expert Dr. Richard Peterson,

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with the behavior of irrationally exuberantinvestors. “The characteristics of decreasedthreat perception and increased social affili-ation [resulting from drugs like Prozac]mirror the decreased risk perception andherding of excessively bullish investors,” hewrites. “It is as if bubble investors are ex-periencing a partial deactivation of theirbrains’ loss avoidance systems.”

37. relative performance of introverts andextroverts: Dalip Kumar and Asha Kapila,“Problem Solving as a Function of Extraver-sion and Masculinity,” Personality and Indi-vidual Differences 8, no. 1 (1987): 129–32.

38. Extroverts get better grades: AdrianFurnham et al., “Personality, Cognitive Ab-ility, and Beliefs About Intelligence as Pre-dictors of Academic Performance,” Learningand Individual Differences 14 (2003): 49–66.See also Isabel Briggs Myers and Mary H.McCaulley, MBTI Manual: A Guide to theDevelopment and Use of the Myers-Briggs

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Type Indicator (Palo Alto, CA: ConsultingPsychologists Press, 1985), 116; see alsothe Myers 1980 study referred to in AllanB. Hill, “Developmental Student Achieve-ment: The Personality Factor,” Journal ofPsychological Type 9, no. 6 (2006): 79–87.

39. 141 college students’ knowledge: EricRolfhus and Philip Ackerman, “AssessingIndividual Differences in Knowledge:Knowledge, Intelligence, and RelatedTraits,” Journal of Educational Psychology91, no. 3 (1999): 511–26.

40. disproportionate numbers of graduatedegrees: G. P. Macdaid, M. H. McCaulley,and R. I. Kainz, Atlas of Type Tables(Gainesville, FL: Center for Applications ofPsychological Type, 1986), pp. 483–85. Seealso Hill, “Developmental StudentAchievement.”

41. outperform extroverts on the Watson-Glaser: Joanna Moutafi, Adrian Furnham,

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and John Crump, “Demographic and Per-sonality Predictors of Intelligence: A StudyUsing the NEO Personality Inventory andthe Myers-Briggs Type Indicator,” EuropeanJournal of Personality 17, no. 1 (2003):79–84.

42. Introverts are not smarter than extro-verts: Author interview with Gerald Mat-thews, November 24, 2008. See also D. H.Saklofske and D. D. Kostura, “Extraversion-Introversion and Intelligence,” Personalityand Individual Differences 11, no. 6 (1990):547–51.

43. those performed under time or socialpressure: Gerald Matthews and Lisa Dorn,“Cognitive and Attentional Processes inPersonality and Intelligence,” in Internation-al Handbook of Personality and Intelligence,edited by Donald H. Saklofske and MosheZeidner (New York: Plenum Press, 1995),367–96. See also Gerald Matthews et al.,

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Personality Traits (Cambridge, UK: Cam-bridge University Press, 2003), ch. 12.

44. also direct their attention differ-ently … are asking “what if”: Debra L.Johnson et al., “Cerebral Blood Flow andPersonality: A Positron Emission Tomo-graphy Study,” The American Journal of Psy-chiatry 156 (1999): 252–57. See also LeeTilford Davis and Peder E. Johnson, “AnAssessment of Conscious Content as Relatedto Introversion-Extroversion,” Imagination,Cognition and Personality 3, no. 2 (1983).

45. a difficult jigsaw puzzle to solve: ColinCooper and Richard Taylor, “Personalityand Performance on a Frustrating CognitiveTask,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 88, no. 3(1999): 1384.

46. a complicated series of printed mazes:Rick Howard and Maeve McKillen, “Extra-version and Performance in the PerceptualMaze Test,” Personality and Individual

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Differences 11, no. 4 (1990): 391–96. Seealso John Weinman, “NoncognitiveDeterminants of Perceptual Problem-Solv-ing Strategies,” Personality and IndividualDifferences 8, no. 1 (1987): 53–58.

47. Raven Standard Progressive Matrices:Vidhu Mohan and Dalip Kumar, “Qualitat-ive Analysis of the Performance of Intro-verts and Extroverts on Standard Progress-ive Matrices,” British Journal of Psychology67, no. 3 (1976): 391–97.

48. personality traits of effective call-centeremployees: Interview with the author,February 13, 2007.

49. if you were staffing an investment bank:Interview with the author, July 7, 2010.

50. men who are shown erotic pictures:Camelia Kuhnen et al., “Nucleus Accum-bens Activation Mediates the Influence ofReward Cues on Financial Risk Taking,”NeuroReport 19, no. 5 (2008): 509–13.

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51. all introverts are constantly … vigilantabout threats: Indeed, many contemporarypersonality psychologists would say thatthreat-vigilance is more characteristic of atrait known as “neuroticism” than of intro-version per se.

52. threat-vigilance is more characteristic ofa trait: But harm avoidance is correlatedwith both introversion and neuroticism(both traits are associated with JerryKagan’s “high reactivity” and Elaine Aron’s“high sensitivity”). See Mary E. Stewart etal., “Personality Correlates of Happinessand Sadness: EPQ-R and TPQ Compared,”Personality and Individual Differences 38, no.5 (2005): 1085–96.

53. “If you want to determine”: can be foundat http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/ccarver/sclBISBAS.html. I first came acrossthis scale in Jonathan Haidt’s excellentbook, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding

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Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York:Basic Books, 2005), 34.

54. “become independent of the social envir-onment”: Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Flow:The Psychology of Optimal Experience (NewYork: Harper Perennial, 1990), 16.

55. “Psychological theories usually assume”:Mihalyi Csikszentmilhalyi, The Evolving Self:A Psychology for the Third Millennium (NewYork: Harper Perennial, 1994), xii.

56. you probably find that your energy isboundless: The same goes for happiness.Research suggests that buzz and other pos-itive emotions seem to come a little easierto extroverts, and that extroverts as a groupare happier. But when psychologists com-pare happy extroverts with happy intro-verts, they find that the two groups sharemany of the same characteristics—self-es-teem; freedom from anxiety; satisfactionwith their life work—and that those

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features predict happiness more stronglythan extroversion itself does. See Peter Hillsand Michael Argyle, “Happiness,Introversion-Extraversion and Happy Intro-verts,” Personality and Individual Differences30 (2001): 595–608.

57. “Release Your Inner Extrovert”: Busi-nessWeek online column, November 26,2008.

58. Chuck Prince: For an account of ChuckPrince’s persona, see, for example, MaraDer Hovanesian, “Rewiring Chuck Prince,”Bloomberg BusinessWeek, February 20, 2006.

59. Seth Klarman: For information on Klar-man, see, for example, Charles Klein, “Klar-man Tops Griffin as Investors Hunt for‘Margin of Safety,’ ” Bloomberg Busi-nessWeek, June 11, 2010. See also Ger-aldine Fabrikant, “Manager Frets Over Mar-ket but Still Outdoes It,” New York Times,May 13, 2007.

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60. Michael Lewis: Michael Lewis, The BigShort: Inside the Doomsday Machine (NewYork: W. W. Norton, 2010).

61. Warren Buffett: Warren Buffett’s story, asrelated in this chapter, comes from an ex-cellent biography: Alice Schroeder, TheSnowball: Warren Buffett and the Business ofLife (New York: Bantam Books, 2008).

62. “inner scorecard”: Some psychologistswould relate Warren Buffett’s self-directionnot necessarily to introversion but to a dif-ferent phenomenon called “internal locus ofcontrol.”

CHAPTER 8: SOFT POWER1. Mike Wei: The interviews with Mike Wei

and others from Cupertino, relatedthroughout this chapter, were conductedwith the author at various stages between2006 and 2010.

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2. article called “The New White Flight”:Suein Hwang, “The New White Flight,”Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2005.

3. 53 were National Merit Scholar-ship … 27 percent higher than the na-tionwide average: Monta Vista HighSchool website, as of May 31, 2010.

4. Talking is simply not a focus: Richard C.Levin, “Top of the Class: The Rise of Asia’sUniversities,” Foreign Affairs, May/June2010.

5. the San Jose Mercury News ran an article:Sarah Lubman, “East West Teaching Tradi-tions Collide,” San Jose Mercury News,February 23, 1998.

6. “colleges can learn to listen to theirsound of silence”: Heejung Kim, “We Talk,Therefore We Think? A Cultural Analysis ofthe Effect of Talking on Thinking,” Journalof Personality and Social Psychology 83, no.4 (2002): 828–42.

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7. The Journal of Research in Personality:Robert R. McCrae, “Human Nature and Cul-ture: A Trait Perspective,” Journal of Re-search in Personality 38 (2004): 3–14.

8. Americans are some of the most extro-verted: See, for example, David G. Winter,Personality: Analysis and Interpretation ofLives (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 459.

9. One study comparing eight- to ten-year-old children: Xinyin Chen et al., “SocialReputation and Peer Relationships inChinese and Canadian Children: A Cross-Cultural Study,” Child Development 63, no. 6(1992): 1336–43. See also W. Ray Crozier,Shyness: Development, Consolidation andChange (Routledge, 2001), 147.

10. Chinese high school students tell re-searchers: Michael Harris Bond, Beyond theChinese Face: Insights from Psychology (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1991), 62.

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11. Another study asked Asian-Americans:Kim, “We Talk, Therefore We Think?”

12. Asian attitudes to the spoken word: See,for example, Heejung Kim and HazelMarkus, “Freedom of Speech and Freedomof Silence: An Analysis of Talking as a Cul-tural Practice,” in Engaging Cultural Differ-ences in Liberal Democracies, edited byRichard K. Shweder et al. (New York: Rus-sell Sage Foundation, 2002), 432–52.

13. proverbs from the East: Some of thesecome from the epigraph of the article byHeejung Kim and Hazel Markus, citedabove.

14. grueling Ming dynasty–era jinshi exam:Nicholas Kristof, “The Model Students,”New York Times, May 14, 2006.

15. pictures of men in dominance poses:Jonathan Freeman et al., “Culture Shapes aMesolimbic Response to Signals of Domin-ance and Subordination that Associates

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with Behavior,” NeuroImage 47 (2009):353–59.

16. “It is only those from an explicit tradi-tion”: Harris Bond, Beyond the Chinese Face,53.

17. taijin kyofusho: Carl Elliott, Better ThanWell: American Medicine Meets the AmericanDream (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003),71.

18. Tibetan Buddhist monks find innerpeace: Marc Kaufman, “Meditation GivesBrain a Charge, Study Finds,” WashingtonPost, January 3, 2005.

19. “Their civility has been well docu-mented”: Lydia Millet, “The Humblest ofVictims,” New York Times, August 7, 2005.

20. Westernization of the past several dec-ades: See, for example, Xinyin Chen et al.,“Social Functioning and Adjustment inChinese Children: The Imprint of Historical

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Time,” Child Development 76, no. 1 (2005):182–95.

21. One study comparing European-Americ-an: C. S. Huntsinger and P. E. Jose, “A Lon-gitudinal Investigation of Personality andSocial Adjustment Among Chinese Americ-an and European American Adolescents,”Child Development 77, no. 5 (2006):1309–24. Indeed, the same thing seems tobe happening to Chinese kids in China asthe country Westernizes, according to aseries of longitudinal studies measuringchanges in social attitudes. While shynesswas associated with social and academicachievement for elementary school childrenas recently as 1990, by 2002 it predictedpeer rejection and even depression. SeeChen, “Social Functioning and Adjustmentin Chinese Children.”

22. The journalist Nicholas Lemann: “Jews inSecond Place,” Slate, June 25, 1996.

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23. “A … E … U … O … I”: These vowels werepresented out of the usual sequence at Pre-ston Ni’s seminar.

24. Gandhi was, according to his autobio-graphy: The story of Gandhi related in thischapter comes primarily from Gandhi: AnAutobiography: The Story of My Experimentswith Truth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957),esp. 6, 20, 40–41, 59, 60–62, 90–91.

25. The TIMSS exam: I originally learnedabout this from Malcom Gladwell, Outliers:The Story of Success (New York: LittleBrown and Company, 2008).

26. In 1995, for example, the first year theTIMSS was given: “Pursuing Excellence: AStudy of U.S. Eighth-Grade Mathematicsand Science Teaching, Learning Cur-riculum, and Achievement in InternationalContext, Initial Findings from the Third In-ternational Mathematics and ScienceStudy,” U.S. Department of Education,

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National Center for Education Statistics,Pursuing Excellence, NCES 97-198 (Wash-ington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Of-fice, 1996).

27. In 2007, when researchers measured:TIMSS Executive Summary. The nationswhose students fill out more of the ques-tionnaire also tend to have students who dowell on the TIMSS test: Erling E. Boe et al.,“Student Task Persistence in the Third In-ternational Mathematics and Science Study:A Major Source of Achievement Differencesat the National, Classroom and StudentLevels” (Research Rep. No. 2002-TIMSS1)(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania,Graduate School of Education, Center forResearch and Evaluation in Social Policy).Note that this study was based on 1995data.

28. cross-cultural psychologist PriscillaBlinco: Priscilla Blinco, “Task Persistencein Japanese Elementary Schools,” in

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Windows on Japanese Education, edited byEdward R. Beauchamp (Westport, CT:Greenwood Press, 1991). Malcolm Gladwellwrote about this study in his book Outliers.

CHAPTER 9: WHEN SHOULD YOU ACT MOREEXTROVERTED THAN YOU REALLY ARE?

1. Meet Professor Brian Little: The storiesabout Brian Little throughout this chaptercome from numerous telephone and e-mailinterviews with the author between 2006and 2010.

2. Hippocrates, Milton, Schopenhauer,Jung: Please see A Note on the Words Intro-vert and Extrovert for more on this point.

3. Walter Mischel: For an overview of theperson-situation debate, see, for example,David C. Funder, The Personality Puzzle(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 118–44.See also Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda,“Reconciling Processing Dynamics and

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Personality Dispositions,” Annual Review ofPsychology 49 (1998): 229–58. In furthersupport of the premise that there truly issuch a thing as a fixed personality: Weknow now that people who score as intro-verts on personality tests tend to have dif-ferent physiologies and probably inheritsome different genes from those who meas-ure as extroverts. We also know that per-sonality traits predict an impressive varietyof important life outcomes. If you’re an ex-trovert, you’re more likely to have a widecircle of friends, have risky sex, get into ac-cidents, and excel at people-oriented worklike sales, human resources, and teaching.(This doesn’t mean that you will do thesethings—only that you’re more likely thanyour typical introvert to do them.) If you’rean introvert, you’re more likely to excel inhigh school, in college, and in the land ofadvanced degrees, to have smaller socialnetworks, to stay married to your original

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partner, and to pursue autonomous worklike art, research, math, and engineering.Extroversion and introversion even predictthe psychological challenges you mightface: depression and anxiety for introverts(think Woody Allen); hostility, narcissism,and overconfidence for extroverts (thinkCaptain Ahab in Moby-Dick, drunk withrage against a white whale).

In addition, there are studies showingthat the personality of a seventy-year-oldcan be predicted with remarkable accuracyfrom early adulthood on. In other words,despite the remarkable variety of situationsthat we experience in a lifetime, our coretraits remain constant. It’s not that our per-sonalities don’t evolve; Kagan’s research onthe malleability of high-reactive people hassinglehandedly disproved this notion. Butwe tend to stick to predictable patterns. Ifyou were the tenth most introverted personin your high school class, your behavior

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may fluctuate over time, but you probablystill find yourself ranked around tenth atyour fiftieth reunion. At that class reunion,you’ll also notice that many of your class-mates will be more introverted than you re-member them being in high school: quieter,more self-contained, and less in need of ex-citement. Also more emotionally stable,agreeable, and conscientious. All of thesetraits grow more pronounced with age. Psy-chologists call this process “intrinsic matur-ation,” and they’ve found these same pat-terns of personality development in coun-tries as diverse as Germany, the UK, Spain,the Czech Republic, and Turkey. They’vealso found them in chimps and monkeys.

This makes evolutionary sense. Highlevels of extroversion probably help withmating, which is why most of us are at ourmost sociable during our teenage andyoung adult years. But when it comes tokeeping marriages stable and raising

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children, having a restless desire to hitevery party in town may be less useful thanthe urge to stay home and love the oneyou’re with. Also, a certain degree of intro-spection may help us age with equanimity.If the task of the first half of life is to putyourself out there, the task of the secondhalf is to make sense of where you’ve been.

4. social life is performance: See, for ex-ample, Carl Elliott, Better Than Well: Amer-ican Medicine Meets the American Dream(New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 47.

5. Jack Welch advised in a BusinessWeek:Jack Welch, “Release Your Inner Extro-vert,” BusinessWeek online, November 26,2008.

6. Free Trait Theory: For an overview of FreeTrait Theory, see, for example, Brian R.Little, “Free Traits, Personal Projects, andIdeo-Tapes: Three Tiers for Personality

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Psychology,” Psychological Inquiry 7, no. 4(1996): 340–44.

7. “To thine own self be true”: Actually, thisadvice comes not so much fromShakespeare as from his character Poloniusin Hamlet.

8. research psychologist named RichardLippa: Richard Lippa, “Expressive Control,Expressive Consistency, and the Corres-pondence Between Expressive Behavior andPersonality,” Journal of Behavior and Person-ality 36, no. 3 (1976): 438–61. Indeed, psy-chologists have found that some peoplewho claim not to be shy in a written ques-tionnaire are quite adept at concealingthose aspects of shyness that they can con-trol consciously, such as talking to mem-bers of the opposite sex and speaking forlong periods of time. But they often “leak”their shyness unwittingly, with tense bodypostures and facial expressions.

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9. psychologists call “self-monitoring”:Mark Snyder, “Self-Monitoring of Express-ive Behavior,” Journal of Personality and So-cial Psychology 30, no. 4 (1974): 526–37.

10. experience less stress while doing so:Joyce E. Bono and Meredith A. Vey, “Per-sonality and Emotional Performance: Extra-version, Neuroticism, and Self-Monitoring,”Journal of Occupational Health Psychology”12, no. 2 (2007): 177–92.

11. “Restorative niche” is Professor Little’sterm: See, for example, Brian Little, “FreeTraits and Personal Contexts: Expanding aSocial Ecological Model of Well-Being,” inPerson-Environment Psychology: New Direc-tions and Perspectives, edited by W. BruceWalsh et al. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erl-baum Associates, 2000).

12. “a Free Trait Agreement”: See, for ex-ample, Brian Little and Maryann F. Joseph,“Personal Projects and Free Traits: Mutable

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Selves and Well Beings,” in Personal ProjectPursuit: Goals, Action, and Human Flourish-ing, edited by Brian R. Little et al.(Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associ-ates, 2007), 395.

13. “Emotional labor”: Howard S. Friedman,“The Role of Emotional Expression inCoronary Heart Disease,” in In Search of theCoronary-Prone: Beyond Type A, edited byA. W. Siegman et al. (Hillsdale, NJ:Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989),149–68.

14. people who suppress negative emotions:Melinda Wenner, “Smile! It Could MakeYou Happier: Making an EmotionalFace—or Suppressing One—Influences YourFeelings,” Scientific American Mind, October14, 2009, ht-tp://www.scientificamerican.com/art-icle.cfm?id=smile-it-could-make-you-happier.

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CHAPTER 10: THE COMMUNICATION GAP1. people who value intimacy highly:

Randy J. Larsen and David M. Buss, Person-ality Psychology: Domains of KnowledgeAbout Human Nature (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 353.

2. “Extroverts seem to need people as aforum”: E-mail from William Graziano tothe author, July 31, 2010.

3. In a study of 132 college students: JensB. Aspendorf and Susanne Wilpers, “Person-ality Effects on Social Relationships,” Journ-al of Personality and Social Psychology 74,no. 6 (1998): 1531–44.

4. so-called Big Five traits: Agreeableness isdefined later in this chapter. “Openness toExperience” measures curiosity, opennessto new ideas, and appreciation for art, in-vention, and unusual experiences; “Con-scientious” people are disciplined, dutiful,efficient, and organized; “Emotional

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Stability” measures freedom from negativeemotions.

5. sit them down in front of a computerscreen: Benjamin M. Wilkowski et al.,“Agreeableness and the Prolonged SpatialProcessing of Antisocial and Prosocial In-formation,” Journal of Research in Personal-ity 40, no. 6 (2006): 1152–68. See alsoDaniel Nettle, Personality: What Makes Youthe Way You Are (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007), chapter onagreeableness.

6. equally likely to be agreeable: Under the“Big Five” definitions of personality, extro-version and agreeableness are by definitionorthogonal. See, for example, Colin G.DeYoung et al., “Testing Predictions fromPersonality Neuroscience: Brain Structureand the Big Five,” Psychological Science 21,no. 6 (2010): 820–28: “Agreeableness ap-pears to identify the collection of traits re-lated to altruism: one’s concern for the

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needs, desires, and rights of others (as op-posed to one’s enjoyment of others, whichappears to be related primarily toExtraversion).”

7. latter are “confrontive copers”: See, forexample: (1) Donald A. Loffredo and SusanK. Opt, “Argumentation and Myers-BriggsPersonality Type Preferences,” paperpresented at the National CommunicationAssociation Convention, Atlanta, GA; (2)Rick Howard and Maeve McKillen, “Extra-version and Performance in the PerceptualMaze Test,” Personality and Individual Differ-ences 11, no. 4 (1990): 391–96; (3) RobertL. Geist and David G. Gilbert, “Correlates ofExpressed and Felt Emotion During MaritalConflict: Satisfaction, Personality, Processand Outcome,” Personality and IndividualDifferences 21, no. 1 (1996): 49–60; (4) E.Michael Nussbaum, “How Introverts VersusExtroverts Approach Small-Group

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Argumentative Discussions,” The ElementarySchool Journal 102, no. 3 (2002): 183–97.

8. An illuminating study by the psycholo-gist William Graziano: William Grazianoet al., “Extraversion, Social Cognition, andthe Salience of Aversiveness in Social En-counters,” Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology 49, no. 4 (1985): 971–80.

9. robots interacted with stroke patients:See Jerome Groopman, “Robots That Care,”The New Yorker, November 2, 2009. Seealso Adriana Tapus and Maja Mataric,“User Personality Matching with Hands-OffRobot for Post-Stroke Rehabilitation Ther-apy,” in Experimental Robotics, vol. 39 ofSpringer Tracts in Advance Robotics (Berlin:Springer, 2008), 165–75.

10. University of Michigan business schoolstudy: Shirli Kopelman and AshleighShelby Rosette, “Cultural Variation in Re-sponse to Strategic Emotions in

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Negotiations,” Group Decision and Negoti-ation 17, no. 1 (2008): 65–77.

11. In her book Anger: Carol Tavris, Anger: TheMisunderstood Emotion (New York: Touch-stone, 1982).

12. catharsis hypothesis is a myth: RussellGeen et al., “The Facilitation of Aggressionby Aggression: Evidence against the Cath-arsis Hypothesis,” Journal of Personality andSocial Psychology 31, no. 4 (1975): 721–26.See also Tavris, Anger.

13. people who use Botox: Carl Zimmer, “WhyDarwin Would Have Loved Botox,” Discov-er, October 15, 2009. See also Joshua IanDavis et al., “The Effects of BOTOX Injec-tions on Emotional Experience,” Emotion10, no. 3 (2010): 433–40.

14. thirty-two pairs of introverts and extro-verts: Matthew D. Lieberman and RobertRosenthal, “Why Introverts Can’t AlwaysTell Who Likes Them: Multitasking and

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Nonverbal Decoding,” Journal of Personalityand Social Psychology 80, no. 2 (2006):294–310.

15. It requires a kind of mental multitask-ing: Gerald Matthews and Lisa Dorn, “Cog-nitive and Attentional Processes in Person-ality and Intelligence,” in InternationalHandbook of Personality and Intelligence, ed-ited by Donald H. Saklofske and MosheZeidner (New York: Plenum, 1995),367–96.

16. interpreting what the other person issaying: Lieberman and Rosenthal, “Why In-troverts Can’t Always Tell Who LikesThem.”

17. experiment by the developmental psy-chologist Avril Thorne: Avril Thorne,“The Press of Personality: A Study of Con-versations Between Introverts and Extra-verts,” Journal of Personality and Social Psy-chology 53, no. 4 (1987): 718–26.

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CHAPTER 11: ON COBBLERS AND GENERALSSome of the advice in this chapter is basedon interviews I conducted with manycaring teachers, school administrators, andchild psychologists, and on the followingwonderful books:

Elaine Aron, The Highly SensitiveChild: Helping Our Children ThriveWhen the World Overwhelms Them(New York: Broadway Books), 2002.

Bernardo J. Carducci, Shyness: ABold New Approach (New York:Harper Paperbacks, 2000).

Natalie Madorsky Elman and EileenKennedy-Moore, The Unwritten Rulesof Friendship (Boston: Little Brown,2003).

Jerome Kagan and Nancy Snidman,The Long Shadow of Temperament

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(Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2004).

Barbara G. Markway and Gregory P.Markway, Nurturing the Shy Child(New York: St. Martin’s Press,2005).

Kenneth H. Rubin, The FriendshipFactor (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Ward K. Swallow, The Shy Child:Helping Children Triumph Over Shy-ness (New York: Time Warner,2000).

1. Mark Twain once told a story: This comesfrom Donald Mackinnon, who believed (butwas not 100 percent certain) that MarkTwain told this story. See Donald W.MacKinnon, “The Nature and Nurture ofCreative Talent,” (Walter Van Dyke

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Bingham Lecture given at Yale University,New Haven, CT, April 11, 1962).

2. this cautionary tale … by Dr. JerryMiller: I conducted several in-person and e-mail interviews with Dr. Miller between2006 and 2010.

3. Emily Miller: I conducted several inter-views with Emily Miller between 2006 and2010.

4. Elaine Aron: Elaine N. Aron, Psychotherapyand the Highly Sensitive Person (New York:Routledge, 2010), 18–19.

5. Dr. Kenneth Rubin: Rubin, The FriendshipFactor.

6. “very little is made available to thatlearner”: Jill D. Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig,“Introversion: The Often Forgotten FactorImpacting the Gifted,” Virginia Associationfor the Gifted Newsletter 21, no. 1 (1999).

7. Experts believe that negative publicspeaking: Gregory Berns, Iconoclast: A

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Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differ-ently (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press,2008), 77.

8. Extroverts tend to like movement: IsabelMyers et al., MBTI Manual: A Guide to theDevelopment and Use of the Myers-BriggsType Indicator, 3rd ed., 2nd printing (PaloAlto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press,1998), 261–62. See also Allen L. Hammer,ed., MBTI Applications: A Decade of Researchon the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (PaloAlto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press,1996).

9. prerequisite to talent development: Seechapter 3, especially on the work of AndersEricsson.

10. “they are usually very comfortable talk-ing with one or two of their classmates”:E-mail from Roger Johnson to the author,June 14, 2010.

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11. Don’t seat quiet kids in “high interac-tion” areas: James McCroskey, “QuietChildren in the Classroom: On Helping NotHurting,” Communication Education 29(1980).

12. being popular isn’t necessary: Rubin, TheFriendship Factor: “Research findings do notsuggest that popularity is the golden routeto all manner of good things. There simplyis not much evidence that it guarantees so-cial or academic success in adolescence,young adulthood, or later life.… If yourchild finds one other child to befriend, andthe pair clearly have fun together and enjoyeach other’s company and are supportivecompanions, good for him. Stop worrying.Not every child needs to be part of a big,happy gang. Not every child needs manyfriends; for some, one or two will do.”

13. intense engagement in and commitmentto an activity: I. McGregor and BrianLittle, “Personal Projects, Happiness, and

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Meaning: On Doing Well and Being Your-self,” Journal of Personality and Social Psy-chology 74, no. 2 (1998): 494–512.

14. the psychologist Dan McAdams: Jack J.Bauer, Dan P. McAdams, and Jennifer L.Pals, “Narrative Identity and EudaimonicWell-Being,” Journal of Happiness Studies 9(2008): 81–104.

A NOTE ON THE WORDS INTROVERT ANDEXTROVERT

1. the anthropologist C. A. Valentine: C. A.Valentine, “Men of Anger and Men ofShame: Lakalai Ethnopsychology and ItsImplications for Sociological Theory,” Eth-nology no. 2 (1963): 441–77. I first learnedabout this article from David Winter’s ex-cellent textbook, Personality: Analysis andInterpretation of Lives (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996).

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2. Aristotle: Aristoteles, Problematica PhysicaXXX, 1 (Bekker 953A 10 ff.), as translatedin Jonathan Barnes, The Complete Works ofAristotle, the Revised Oxford Translation II(Princeton, N.J.: Bollingen, 1984).

3. John Milton: Cited in David G. Winter, Per-sonality: Analysis and Interpretation of Lives(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 380–84.

4. Schopenhauer: Arthur Schopenhauer,“Personality, or What a Man Is,” in The Wis-dom of Life and Other Essays (New York andLondon: Dunne, 1901), 12–35 (originalwork published 1851); cited in Winter, Per-sonality, 384–86.

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