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

INTRODUCTION:

THE NORTH AND SOUTH OF TEMPERAMENT

1. Montgomery, Alabama. December 1, 1955: For an excellent biography of Rosa Parks, see Douglas Brinkley, Rosa Parks: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2000). Most of the material in Quiet about Parks is drawn from this work.

A note about Parks: Some have questioned the singularity of her actions, pointing out that she’d had plenty of civil rights training before boarding that bus. While this is true, there’s no evidence, according to Brinkley, that Parks acted in a premeditated manner that evening, or even as an activist; she was simply being herself. More important for Quiet ’s purposes, her personality did not prevent her from being powerful; on the contrary, it made her a natural at nonviolent resistance.

2. “north and south of temperament”: Winifred Gallagher (quoting J. D. Higley), “How We Become What We Are,” The Atlantic Monthly , September 1994. (Higley was talking about boldness and inhibition, not extroversion and introversion per se, but the concepts overlap in many ways.)

3. governs how likely we are to exercise: Robert M. Stelmack, “On Personality and Arousal: A Historical Perspective on Eysenck and Zuckerman,” in Marvin Zuckerman and Robert M. Stelmack, eds., On the Psychobiology of Personality: Essays in Honor of Marvin Zuckerman (San Diego: Elsevier, 2004), 22. See also Caroline Davis et al., “Motivations to Exercise as a Function of Personality Characteristics, Age, and Gender,” Personality and Individual Differences 19, no. 2 (1995): 165–74.

4. commit adultery: Daniel Nettle, Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 100. See also David P. Schmitt, “The Big Five Related to Risky Sexual Behaviour Across 10 World Regions: Differential Personality Associations of Sexual Promiscuity and Relationship Infidelity,” European Journal 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 Sleep Deprivation,” Journal of Sleep Research 16, no. 4 (2007): 354–63. See also Daniel Taylor and Robert M. McFatter, “Cognitive Performance After Sleep Deprivation: Does Personality Make a Difference?” Personality and Individual Differences 34, no. 7 (2003): 1179–93; and Andrew Smith and Andrea Maben, “Effects of Sleep Deprivation, Lunch, and Personality on Performance, 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 of May 2, 2010, in the PSYCINFO database, there were 9,194 entries on “extraversion,” 6,111 on “introversion,” and 12,494 on the overlapping subject of “neuroticism.” There were fewer entries for the other “Big 5” personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Similarly, as of June 14, 2010, a Google scholar search found about 64,700 articles on “extraversion,” 30,600 on “extroversion,” 55,900 on “introversion,” and 53,300 on “neuroticism.” The psychologist William Graziano, in an e-mail dated July 31, 2010, refers to introversion/extroversion as “the 300 lb. gorilla of personality, meaning that it 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 and Practical Guide (London: Chapman and Hall, 1995), 47, finds the incidence of introversion at 36 percent, which is in turn determined from Isabel Myers’s own study from 1985. A more recent study, published by the Center for Applications of Psychological Type Research Services in 1996, sampled 914,219 people and found that 49.3 percent were extroverts and 50.7 percent were introverts. See “Estimated Frequencies of the Types in the United States Population,” a brochure published by the Center for Application of Psychological Type (CAPT) in 1996 and 2003. That the percentage of introverts found by these studies rose from 36 percent to 50.7 percent doesn’t necessarily mean that there are now more introverts in the United States, according to CAPT. It may be “simply a reflection of the populations sampled and included.” In fact, a wholly separate survey, this one using the Eysenck Personality Inventory and Eysenck Personality Questionnaire rather than the Myers-Briggs test, indicates that extraversion scores have increased over time (from 1966 to 1993) for both men and women: see Jean M. Twenge, “Birth Cohort Changes in Extraversion: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis, 1966–1993,” Personality and Individual Differences 30 (2001): 735–48.

14. United States is among the most extroverted of nations: This has been noted in two studies: (1) Juri Allik and Robert R. McCrae, “Toward a Geography of Personality Traits: Patterns of Profiles Across 36 Cultures,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 35 (2004): 13–28; and (2) Robert R. McCrae and Antonio Terracciano, “Personality Profiles of Cultures: Aggregate Personality Traits,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89:3 (2005): 407–25.

15. Talkative people, for example: William B. Swann Jr. and Peter J. Rentfrow, “Blirtatiousness: Cognitive, Behavioral, and Physiological Consequences of Rapid Responding,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 6 (2001): 1160–75.

16. Velocity of speech counts: Howard Giles and Richard L. Street Jr., “Communicator Characteristics and Behavior,” in M. L. Knapp and G. R. Miller, eds., Handbook of Interpersonal Communication , 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 103–61. (But note some good news for introverts: slow speech can be perceived as honest and benevolent, according to other studies.)

17. the voluble are considered smarter: Delroy L. Paulhus and Kathy L. Morgan, “Perceptions of Intelligence in Leaderless Groups: The Dynamic Effects of Shyness and Acquaintance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72, no. 3 (1997): 581–91.

18. one informal study: Laurie Helgoe, Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden 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: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 4, 12, 18, 2, 31, etc.

21. W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”: Michael Fitzgerald, The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger’s Syndrome and the Arts (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2005), 69. See also Ira Progoff, Jung’s Psychology and Its Social Meaning (London: Routledge, 1999), 111–12.

22. Chopin’s nocturnes: Tad Szulc, Chopin in Paris: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 69.

23. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time : Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (New York: Vintage International), 1997.