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Comment by MetaMan | Hacker News Reader

Sorry but I can't take the article seriously. The notion that everybody can simply be divided into either being an "Extrovert" or "Introvert" is very doubtful for me.

Even if you accept this one dimensional personality description as being useful by itself;

- is it constant (the same in all circumstances),

- does it vary over time?

- Is everyone either an "introvert" or an "extrovert" OR do people fit on a sliding scale between the two extremes?

I'm guessing that the author feels he is an introvert. IMO, rather than trying to redefine or clarify what it means to be an "introvert" just don't accept the "introvert/Extrovert" labels. Its a pseudo-scientific term which is used in a lazy way to put people into neat boxes.

I'll bet most people can think of situations where they will act "extroverted" and others where they'll be "introverted".

We are neither a number or a label!

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The words "introvert" and "extrovert" have been used by a lot of people over the years, starting all the way back at Freud I think. If a modern scientist uses these words, though, they're probably talking about it in terms of the Big Five[1] personality model, which is mostly just identifying some observed clusters of traits with strong correlations that tend to persist over a person's life. People argue about whether there might be more emperical clusters worth adding, or whether they might be made more orthogonal but generally there's a good amount of rigor behind them, far more than IQ for instance.

Introversion/Extroversion is very much a matter of degree, just like pretty much any other human trait. It doesn't uniquely determine behavior by any means, humans are very complex creatures. However, there is a pretty strong correlation [2] between someone acting in an introverted or extroverted manner in one situation and acting the same way later.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation

EDIT: All of which isn't to say that people can't use those terms in pseudo-scientific ways, or that the author of the article isn't. After all, people use terms like 'mass' and 'gravity' in pseudo scientific ways too.

Thanks for the links but I remain unconvinced that Extraversion (describing people as either extrovert or introvert) is accurate or ultimately useful. From the 1st Wiki link I note that:

1. "Many studies have confirmed that in predicting actual behavior the more numerous facet or primary level traits are far more effective (e.g. Mershon & Gorsuch, 1988;[25] Paunonon & Ashton, 2001[26])"

2. Most measures are based on self-description.

So we have a personality description which is not very accurate in terms of predicting behaviour and which also leads to a lot of disagreement (as witnessed by the comments here) about what it actually means in terms of behaviour and human interaction!

If a "measure" is (a) not very accurate and (b) confuses rather than clarifies behaviour / human interaction then for me its not very useful no matter how seductive it is.

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