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

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 a Mesolimbic Response to Signals of Dominance and Subordination that Associates with Behavior,” NeuroImage 47 (2009): 353–59.

16. “It is only those from an explicit tradition”: Harris Bond, Beyond the Chinese Face , 53.

17. taijin kyofusho : Carl Elliott, Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 71.

18. Tibetan Buddhist monks find inner peace: Marc Kaufman, “Meditation Gives Brain a Charge, Study Finds,” Washington Post , January 3, 2005.

19. “Their civility has been well documented”: Lydia Millet, “The Humblest of Victims,” New York Times , August 7, 2005.

20. Westernization of the past several decades: See, for example, Xinyin Chen et al., “Social Functioning and Adjustment in Chinese Children: The Imprint of Historical Time,” Child Development 76, no. 1 (2005): 182–95.

21. One study comparing European-American: C. S. Huntsinger and P. E. Jose, “A Longitudinal Investigation of Personality and Social Adjustment Among Chinese American and European American Adolescents,” Child Development 77, no. 5 (2006): 1309–24. Indeed, the same thing seems to be happening to Chinese kids in China as the country Westernizes, according to a series of longitudinal studies measuring changes in social attitudes. While shyness was associated with social and academic achievement for elementary school children as recently as 1990, by 2002 it predicted peer rejection and even depression. See Chen, “Social Functioning and Adjustment in Chinese Children.”

22. The journalist Nicholas Lemann: “Jews in Second Place,” Slate , June 25, 1996.

23. “A … E … U … O … I”: These vowels were presented out of the usual sequence at Preston Ni’s seminar.

24. Gandhi was, according to his autobiography: The story of Gandhi related in this chapter comes primarily from Gandhi: An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), esp. 6, 20, 40–41, 59, 60–62, 90–91.

25. The TIMSS exam: I originally learned about this from Malcom Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2008).

26. In 1995, for example, the first year the TIMSS was given: “Pursuing Excellence: A Study of U.S. Eighth-Grade Mathematics and Science Teaching, Learning Curriculum, and Achievement in International Context, Initial Findings from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study,” U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Pursuing Excellence, NCES 97-198 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996).

27. In 2007, when researchers measured: TIMSS Executive Summary. The nations whose students fill out more of the questionnaire also tend to have students who do well on the TIMSS test: Erling E. Boe et al., “Student Task Persistence in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study: A Major Source of Achievement Differences at the National, Classroom and Student Levels” (Research Rep. No. 2002-TIMSS1) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, Center for Research and Evaluation in Social Policy). Note that this study was based on 1995 data.

28. cross-cultural psychologist Priscilla Blinco: Priscilla Blinco, “Task Persistence in Japanese Elementary Schools,” in Windows on Japanese Education , edited by Edward R. Beauchamp (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991). Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this study in his book Outliers .

CHAPTER 9: WHEN SHOULD YOU ACT MORE EXTROVERTED THAN YOU REALLY ARE?

1. Meet Professor Brian Little: The stories about Brian Little throughout this chapter come from numerous telephone and e-mail interviews with the author between 2006 and 2010.

2. Hippocrates, Milton, Schopenhauer, Jung: Please see A Note on the Words Introvert and Extrovert for more on this point.

3. Walter Mischel: For an overview of the person-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 Personality Dispositions,” Annual Review of Psychology 49 (1998): 229–58. In further support of the premise that there truly is such a thing as a fixed personality: We know now that people who score as introverts on personality tests tend to have different physiologies and probably inherit some different genes from those who measure as extroverts. We also know that personality traits predict an impressive variety of important life outcomes. If you’re an extrovert, you’re more likely to have a wide circle of friends, have risky sex, get into accidents, and excel at people-oriented work like sales, human resources, and teaching. (This doesn’t mean that you will do these things—only that you’re more likely than your typical introvert to do them.) If you’re an introvert, you’re more likely to excel in high school, in college, and in the land of advanced degrees, to have smaller social networks, to stay married to your original partner, and to pursue autonomous work like art, research, math, and engineering. Extroversion and introversion even predict the psychological challenges you might face: depression and anxiety for introverts (think Woody Allen); hostility, narcissism, and overconfidence for extroverts (think Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick , drunk with rage against a white whale).

In addition, there are studies showing that the personality of a seventy-year-old can be predicted with remarkable accuracy from early adulthood on. In other words, despite the remarkable variety of situations that we experience in a lifetime, our core traits remain constant. It’s not that our personalities don’t evolve; Kagan’s research on the malleability of high-reactive people has singlehandedly disproved this notion. But we tend to stick to predictable patterns. If you were the tenth most introverted person in your high school class, your behavior may fluctuate over time, but you probably still find yourself ranked around tenth at your fiftieth reunion. At that class reunion, you’ll also notice that many of your classmates will be more introverted than you remember them being in high school: quieter, more self-contained, and less in need of excitement. Also more emotionally stable, agreeable, and conscientious. All of these traits grow more pronounced with age. Psychologists call this process “intrinsic maturation,” and they’ve found these same patterns of personality development in countries as diverse as Germany, the UK, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Turkey. They’ve also found them in chimps and monkeys.

This makes evolutionary sense. High levels of extroversion probably help with mating, which is why most of us are at our most sociable during our teenage and young adult years. But when it comes to keeping marriages stable and raising children, having a restless desire to hit every party in town may be less useful than the urge to stay home and love the one you’re with. Also, a certain degree of introspection may help us age with equanimity. If the task of the first half of life is to put yourself out there, the task of the second half is to make sense of where you’ve been.