How to Be a Happy Introvert(The West prizes extroversion, yet faking traits poisons well-being.)
Much has been said about ties between extroversion and happiness that need not be restated here. It is true that extroverts tend toward higher degrees of pleasurable experience, on average. Extroverts tend to be more driven to seek out experiences and may even receive a neurophysiological reward for doing so. Extroverts also tend to have a more positive disposition, on balance. Having personalities that more epitomize Western cultural values, extroverts may not only be more comfortable in Western society, but may, indeed, benefit in overall well-being.
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who worked to develop these eminently useful concepts, wrote that extroverts modulate their own attitude in relating to others and give extraordinary attention to the effect they have on others. Like adventurers fulfilling manifest destiny, extroverts explore the world of the other in a verbally assertive way, distinctive from more verbally conservative introverts who, like many in Eastern cultures, may be more apt to refrain from expressing thoughts and feelings for the sake of interpersonal diplomacy and in managing an economy of psychological energy.
Western cultures say, “Be more extroverted”
Ashley Fulmer, from the University of Maryland, and fellow researchers (2010), proposed a “person-culture match hypothesis,” predicting that when a person’s personality matches the prevalent personalities of other people in a culture, culture functions as an important amplifier of the positive effect of personality on self-esteem and subjective well-being.
The team's research studied more than 7,000 individuals from 28 societies and found that the correlation between extroversion and subjective well-being is much stronger when a person’s degree of extroversion matched the approximate degree of extroversion in their culture.
Four studies were conducted by Nathan Hudson and Brent Roberts (2014) of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to examine individuals’ goals to change their personality traits. They found that, staggeringly, in the West, 87 percent of people explicitly expressed a goal of becoming more extroverted.
Scott Barry Kaufman (2018), digested a lot of research about introversion and came to the conclusion, “The biggest key to being a happy introvert is simply self-acceptance; not forcing oneself to repeatedly act out of character, or to think of oneself as merely a deviation from an ‘ideal’ personality.”
Rodney Lawn and fellow researchers (2019), acknowledged that introverts living in Western cultures experience ongoing pressure to conform to extroverted norms of behavior and may even experience stigma due to a lack of consistency between parts of their personality and the prevailing norms and expectations of their sociocultural environment.
Thanks for sharing this interesting piece of research.
Fascinating that well-being may be reduced if someone's extroversion levels don't match within the broader framework of the culture.
Western Societies often praise a more individualised focus instead of a collectivist focus and this might seem to match the heightened extroversion.
87% is so high that's a staggering amount of people who desire a higher leve of extroversion, but given how tough it is to be seen over the multitude of voices prevalent on both social media, blogs etc it's easy to understand why people might think that extroversion is the key to being noticed.