Сьюзан Кейн - Quiet [The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking]

In addition to “shy” and “bold” animals, and to “fast” and “slow” ones, biologists sometimes speak of the “hawk” and “dove” members of a given species. Great tit birds, for example, some of whom are much more aggressive than others, often act like case studies in an international relations class. These birds feed on beech tree nuts, and in years when nuts are scarce, the hawkish female birds do better, just as you’d expect, because they’re quick to challenge nut-eating competitors to a duel. But in seasons when there are plenty of beech nuts to go around, the female “doves”—who, incidentally, tend to make more attentive mothers—do better than the “hawks,” because the hawks waste time and bodily health getting into fights for no good reason.

Male great tits, on the other hand, have the opposite pattern. This is because their main role in life is not to find food but to defend territory. In years when food is scarce, so many of their fellow tit birds die of hunger that there’s enough space for all. The hawkish males then fall into the same trap as their female comrades during nutty seasons—they brawl, squandering precious resources with each bloody battle. But in good years, when competition for nesting territory heats up, aggression pays for the hawkish male tit bird.

During times of war or fear—the human equivalent of a bad nut season for female tit birds—it might seem that what we need most are aggressive heroic types. But if our entire population consisted of warriors, there would be no one to notice, let alone battle, potentially deadly but far quieter threats like viral disease or climate change.

Consider Vice President Al Gore’s decades-long crusade to raise awareness of global warming. Gore is, by many accounts, an introvert. “If you send an introvert into a reception or an event with a hundred other people he will emerge with less energy than he had going in,” says a former aide. “Gore needs a rest after an event.” Gore acknowledges that his skills are not conducive to stumping and speechmaking. “Most people in politics draw energy from backslapping and shaking hands and all that,” he has said. “I draw energy from discussing ideas.”

But combine that passion for thought with attention to subtlety—both common characteristics of introverts—and you get a very powerful mix. In 1968, when Gore was a college student at Harvard, he took a class with an influential oceanographer who presented early evidence linking the burning of fossil fuels with the greenhouse effect. Gore’s ears perked up.

He tried to tell others what he knew. But he found that people wouldn’t listen. It was as if they couldn’t hear the alarm bells that rang so loudly in his ears.

“When I went to Congress in the middle of the 1970s, I helped organize the first hearings on global warming,” he recalls in the Oscar-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth —a film whose most stirring action scenes involve the solitary figure of Gore wheeling his suitcase through a midnight airport. Gore seems genuinely puzzled that no one paid attention: “I actually thought and believed that the story would be compelling enough to cause a real sea change in the way Congress reacted to that issue. I thought they would be startled, too. And they weren’t.”

But if Gore had known then what we know now about Kagan’s research, and Aron’s, he might have been less surprised by his colleagues’ reactions. He might even have used his insight into personality psychology to get them to listen. Congress, he could have safely assumed, is made up of some of the least sensitive people in the country—people who, if they’d been kids in one of Kagan’s experiments, would have marched up to oddly attired clowns and strange ladies wearing gas masks without so much as a backward glance at their mothers. Remember Kagan’s introverted Tom and extroverted Ralph? Well, Congress is full of Ralphs—it was designed for people like Ralph. Most of the Toms of the world do not want to spend their days planning campaigns and schmoozing with lobbyists.

These Ralph-like Congressmen can be wonderful people—exuberant, fearless, persuasive—but they’re unlikely to feel alarmed by a photograph of a tiny crack in a distant glacier. They need more intense stimulation to get them to listen. Which is why Gore finally got his message across when he teamed up with whiz-bang Hollywood types who could package his warning into the special-effects-laden show that became An Inconvenient Truth .

Gore also drew on his own strengths, using his natural focus and diligence to tirelessly promote the movie. He visited dozens of movie theaters across the country to meet with viewers, and gave innumerable TV and radio interviews. On the subject of global warming, Gore has a clarity of voice that eluded him as a politician. For Gore, immersing himself in a complicated scientific puzzle comes naturally. Focusing on a single passion rather than tap dancing from subject to subject comes naturally. Even talking to crowds comes naturally when the topic is climate change: Gore on global warming has an easy charisma and connection with audience members that eluded him as a political candidate. That’s because this mission, for him, 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 won or lost any election when the earth is uninhabitable.”

If you’re a sensitive sort, then you may be in the habit of pretending to be more of a politician and less cautious or single-mindedly focused than you actually are. But in this chapter I’m asking you to rethink this view. Without people like you, we will, quite literally, drown.

Back here at Walker Creek Ranch and the gathering for sensitive people, the Extrovert Ideal and its primacy of cool is turned upside down. If “cool” is low reactivity that predisposes a person to boldness or nonchalance, then the crowd that has come to meet Elaine Aron is deeply uncool.

The atmosphere is startling simply because it’s so unusual. It’s something you might find at a yoga class or in a Buddhist monastery, except that here there’s no unifying religion or worldview, only a shared temperament. It’s easy to see this when Aron delivers her speech. She has long observed that when she speaks to groups of highly sensitive people the room is more hushed and respectful than would be usual in a public gathering place, and this is true throughout her presentation. But it carries over all weekend.

I’ve never heard so many “after you’s” and “thank you’s” as I do here. During meals, which are held at long communal tables in a summer-camp style, open-air cafeteria, people plunge hungrily into searching conversations. There’s a lot of one-on-one discussion about intimate topics like childhood experiences and adult love lives, and social issues like health care and climate change; there’s not much in the way of storytelling intended to entertain. People listen carefully to each other and respond thoughtfully; Aron has noted that sensitive people tend to speak softly because that’s how they prefer others to communicate with them.

“In the rest of the world,” observes Michelle, a web designer who leans forward as if bracing herself against an imaginary blast of wind, “you make a statement and people may or may not discuss it. Here you make a statement and someone says, ‘What does that mean ?’ And if you ask that question of someone else, they actually answer.”

It’s not that there’s no small talk, observes Strickland, the leader of the gathering. It’s that it comes not at the beginning of conversations but at the end. In most settings, people use small talk as a way of relaxing into a new relationship, and only once they’re comfortable do they connect more seriously. Sensitive people seem to do the reverse. They “enjoy small talk only after they’ve gone deep,” says Strickland. “When sensitive people are in environments that nurture their authenticity, they laugh and chitchat just as much as anyone else.”