Should we become so proficient at self-presentation that we can dissemble without anyone suspecting? Must we learn to stage-manage our voices, gestures, and body language until we can tell – sell – any story we want? These seem venal aspirations, a marker of how far we’ve come – and not in a good way – since.
We like to think that we value individuality, but all too often we admire one type of individual – the.
If you force extroverts to pause, says Newman, they’ll do just as well as introverts at the numbers game.
Even T. S. Eliot’s famous 1915 poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock – in which he laments the need to “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” – seems a cri de coeur about the new demands of self-presentation.
All of which raises the question, how did we go from Character to Personality without realizing that we had sacrificed something meaningful along the way?
A well-known study out of UC Berkeley by organizational behavior professor Philip Tetlock found that television pundits – that is, people who earn their livings by holding forth confidently on the basis of limited information – make worse predictions about political and economic trends than they would by random chance. And the very worst prognosticators tend to be the most famous and the most confident – the very ones who would be considered natural leaders in an HBS classroom.
Extroverts get better grades than introverts during elementary school, but introverts outperform extroverts in high school and college.
Don is “a bitter introvert,” as he cheerfully puts it – bitter because the more time he spends at HBS, the more convinced he becomes that he’d better change his ways.
Introverts are not smarter than extroverts. According to IQ scores, the two types are equally intelligent. And on many kinds of tasks, particularly those performed under time or social pressure or involving multitasking, extroverts do better. Extroverts are better than introverts at handling information overload.
That’s because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said that their workspace was acceptably private, compared to only 19 percent of the worst performers; 76 percent of the worst performers but only 38 percent of the top performers said that people often interrupted them needlessly.
In our culture, guilt is a tainted word, but it’s probably one of the building blocks of conscience.
Overarousal interferes with attention and short-term memory – key.
Greeters wearing UPW T-shirts and ecstatic smiles line the entrance, springing up and down, fists pumping. You can’t get inside without slapping them five. I know, because I try.
Csikszentmihalyi, who between 1990 and 1995 studied the lives of ninety-one exceptionally creative people in the arts, sciences, business, and government, many of his subjects were on the social margins during adolescence, partly because “intense curiosity or focused interest seems odd to their peers.” Teens who are too gregarious to spend time alone often fail to cultivate their talents “because practicing music or studying math requires a solitude they dread.
Extroverts get better grades than introverts during elementary school, but introverts outperform extroverts in high school and college. At the university level, introversion predicts academic performance better than cognitive ability. One study tested 141 college students’ knowledge of twenty different subjects, from art to astronomy to statistics, and found that introverts knew more than the extroverts about every single one of them.
Studies show that one third to one half of us are introverts. This means that you have more introverted kids in your class than you think. Even at a young age, some introverts become adept at acting like extroverts, making it tough to spot them. Balance teaching methods to serve all the kids in your class. Extroverts tend to like movement, stimulation, collaborative work. Introverts prefer lectures, downtime, and independent projects. Mix it up fairly.
Introverts often have one or two deep interests that are not necessarily shared by their peers. Sometimes they’re made to feel freaky for the force of these passions, when in fact studies show that this sort of intensity is a prerequisite to talent development. Praise these kids for their interests, encourage them, and help them find like-minded friends, if not in the classroom, then outside it.
Introverts tend to be driven by their interests and passions, naturally organizing their lives around the things they love most to do. This is a great boon, because focusing on one or two pursuits tends to build mastery in a given area, and mastery builds self-confidence – rather than the other way around.
It can be hard for extroverts to understand how badly introverts need to recharge at the end of a busy day.
As children, our classroom desks are increasingly arranged in pods, the better to foster group learning, and research suggests that the vast majority of teachers believe that the ideal student is an extrovert.