Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Introversion—along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.”

This touches on another theme, the Extrovert Ideal in American Society. Cain’s premise in the book is that introversion has not just been overlooked, but that it has also been degraded to the point that it is seen as an embarrassment, or worse. Her goal is to redeem this personality type, which a third to a half of the population belongs to, and show that it has value equal to that of extroversion.

“Carnegie’s metamorphosis from farmboy to salesman to public-speaking icon is also the story of the rise of the Extrovert Ideal. Carnegie’s journey reflected a cultural evolution that reached a tipping point around the turn of the twentieth century, changing forever who we are and whom we admire, how we act at job interviews and what we look for in an employee, how we court our mates and raise our children. America had shifted from what the influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality—and opened up a Pandora’s Box of personal anxieties from which we would never quite recover.”

Here Cain refers to Dale Carnegie, whose life story is inextricably intertwined with the rise of the Extrovert Ideal. Carnegie transformed himself from a shy country boy into a gregarious, confident peddler of public speaking within the span of a decade. His books and public lectures were a large part of the trend at the beginning of the 20th century toward the idea that extroversion was something everyone should strive for.

“Well-meaning parents of the midcentury agreed that quiet was unacceptable and gregariousness ideal for both girls and boys. Some discouraged their children from solitary and serious hobbies, like classical music, that could make them unpopular. They sent their kids to school at increasingly young ages, where the main assignment was learning to socialize. Introverted children were often singled out as problem cases (a situation familiar to anyone with an introverted child today).”

This passage shows how firmly the Extrovert Ideal took hold in American society during the 20th century. In just a couple of generations, the idea arose that something was wrong with introverted children. They were guided away from solitary, quiet pursuits and toward more social ones that promoted an outgoing personality. Cain notes that, by and large, this is still the case today, but she aims to change this perception of quiet kids.

“This exercise seems designed to show how our physiological state influences our behavior and emotions, but it also suggests that salesmanship governs even the most neutral interactions. It implies that every encounter is a high-stakes game in which we win or lose the other person’s favor. It urges us to meet social fear in as extroverted a manner as possible. We must be vibrant and confident, we must not seem hesitant, we must smile so that our interlocutors will smile upon us. Taking these steps will make us feel good—and the better we feel, the better we can sell ourselves.”

In this passage, Cain describes a workshop run by self-help guru Tony Robbins. Robbins is a motivational speaker—a modern-day Dale Carnegie—who coaches hundreds of people at a time who pay to take his seminars in large settings such as convention centers. Each seminar is a visceral, physical event as much as an emotional one—a quality this excerpt captures. The passage also shows how in the seminars every social encounter is turned into a sales pitch, an example of the Extrovert Ideal.

“If we assume that quiet and loud people have roughly the same number of good (and bad) ideas, then we should worry if the louder and more forceful people always carry the day. This would mean that an awful lot of bad ideas prevail while good ones get squashed. Yet studies in group dynamics suggest that this is exactly what happens. We perceive talkers as smarter than quiet types—even though grade-point averages and SAT and intelligence test scores reveal this perception to be inaccurate. In one experiment in which two strangers met over the phone, those who spoke more were considered more intelligent, better looking, and more likable. We also see talkers as leaders. The more a person talks, the more other group members direct their attention to him, which means that he becomes increasingly powerful as a meeting goes on. It also helps to speak fast; we rate quick talkers as more capable and appealing than slow talkers.”­­

Here the author presents common sense and research to make her point. No one has a monopoly on good ideas, which should logically be distributed equally between introverts and extroverts. Yet, because of their nature, extroverts are more likely to make their ideas known and get them accepted. Cain goes on to cite a study in which the predictions of TV pundits were less accurate than those made randomly, showing that the perception of extroverts as smarter or better leaders is wrong.

“For years before the day in December 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, she worked behind the scenes for the NAACP, even receiving training in nonviolent resistance. Many things had inspired her political commitment. The time the Ku Klux Klan marched in front of her childhood house. The time her brother, a private in the U.S. Army who’d saved the lives of white soldiers, came home from World War II only to be spat upon. The time a black eighteen-year-old delivery boy was framed for rape and sent to the electric chair. Parks organized NAACP records, kept track of membership payments, read to little kids in her neighborhood. She was diligent and honorable, but no one thought of her as a leader. Parks, it seemed, was more of a foot soldier.”

This quotation illustrates well the theme of the Power of Introverts. Though at first glance, Rosa Parks did not seem like a leader (according to our notion of them), she was in fact very much a leader. Her quiet, rock solid conviction allowed her, when the right time came, to stand up for her principles. Parks faced significant danger when asked to file a lawsuit to challenge the discriminatory public transportation segregation laws. Yet she followed through despite the many risks. Her leadership style stood in contrast to the Extrovert Ideal that society holds—but was no less valuable.

“We like to believe that we live in a grand age of creative individualism. We look back at the midcentury era in which the Berkeley researchers conducted their creativity studies, and feel superior. Unlike the starched-shirted conformists of the 1950s, we hang posters of Einstein on our walls, his tongue stuck out iconoclastically. We consume indie music and films, and generate our own online content. We ‘think different’ (even if we got the idea from Apple Computer’s famous ad campaign).

“But the way we organize many of our most important institutions—our schools and our workplaces—tells a very different story. It’s the story of a contemporary phenomenon that I call the New Groupthink—a phenomenon that has the potential to stifle productivity at work and to deprive schoolchildren of the skills they’ll need to achieve excellence in an increasingly competitive world.” 

Cain points out the irony of Americans’ affinity for individualism, all the while adhering to the Extrovert Ideal. The strength of this ideal in society is one of the book’s main themes. Cain uses the term “New Groupthink” (see Index of Terms) to refer to the prevailing notion that collaboration in work and school is always the best approach. Research, however, shows that there is indeed value in individualism and working alone.

“Open-plan offices have been found to reduce productivity and impair memory. They’re associated with high staff turnover. They make people sick, hostile, unmotivated, and insecure. Open-plan workers are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure and elevated stress levels and to get the flu; they argue more with their colleagues; they worry about coworkers eavesdropping on their phone calls and spying on their computer screens. They have fewer personal and confidential conversations with colleagues. They’re often subject to loud and uncontrollable noise, which raises heart rates; releases cortisol, the body’s fight-or-flight “stress” hormone; and makes people socially distant, quick to anger, aggressive, and slow to help others.”

Throughout the book, Cain relies on data to drive her ideas, not conventional wisdom. In the past several decades, the idea arose that the open-plan offices promote creativity and create a relaxed, comfortable atmosphere. The passage above contradicts such thinking on many levels. Cain also documents her sources throughout, and the notes for this section provide no less than eight references to support her claims. To signal that these are only the tip of the iceberg, Cain refers to “a mountain of recent data” that pushes back on the effectiveness of the open-plan office.

“But Berns’s study also shed light on exactly why we’re such conformists. When the volunteers played alone, the brain scans showed activity in a network of brain regions including the occipital cortex and parietal cortex, which are associated with visual and spatial perception, and in the frontal cortex, which is associated with conscious decision-making. But when they went along with their group’s wrong answer, their brain activity revealed something very different.

“Remember, what Asch wanted to know was whether people conformed despite knowing that the group was wrong, or whether their perceptions had been altered by the group. If the former was true, Berns and his team reasoned, then they should see more brain activity in the decision-making prefrontal cortex. That is, the brain scans would pick up the volunteers deciding consciously to abandon their own beliefs to fit in with the group. But if the brain scans showed heightened activity in regions associated with visual and spatial perception, this would suggest that the group had somehow managed to change the individual’s perceptions.”

Here is an example of how the author presents research studies in the book. In this particular study, participants played a game of spatial estimation. Some of the participants were actually confederates of the researchers, and their job was to purposely give wrong answers to rather simple questions. These errors influenced the other participants to also give wrong answers. Repeating the study with brain scans showed that peer pressure didn’t cause subjects to purposely choose the wrong answer just to go along; rather, it actually changed brain function, altering perception. Cain’s willingness to describe such complicated experiment in detail allows lay readers to be swayed by her approach.

“In addition to observing the children’s behaviors in strange situations, Kagan’s team measured their heart rates, blood pressure, finger temperature, and other properties of the nervous system. Kagan chose these measures because they’re believed to be controlled by a potent organ inside the brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is located deep in the limbic system, an ancient brain network found even in primitive animals like mice and rats. This network—sometimes called the ‘emotional brain’—underlies many of the basic instincts we share with these animals, such as appetite, sex drive, and fear.

“The amygdala serves as the brain’s emotional switchboard, receiving information from the senses and then signaling the rest of the brain and nervous system how to respond.”

In this passage, Cain defines the amygdala, a part of the brain that features prominently in research on personality types. Here, she describes how researcher Jerome Kagan conducted his study on infants to hypothesize that different reactions to stimuli could indicate which personality type each baby would have as an adult. Because the amygdala controls certain basic reactions, Kagan assumed that new stimuli introduced to the infants would prompt identifiable behaviors that he called “high-reactive” and “low-reactive.” 

On the one hand, according to the theory of gene-environment interaction, people who inherit certain traits tend to seek out life experiences that reinforce those characteristics. The most low-reactive kids, for example, court danger from the time they’re toddlers, so that by the time they grow up they don’t bat an eye at grown-up-sized risks. They ‘climb a few fences, become desensitized, and climb up on the roof,’ the late psychologist David Lykken once explained in an Atlantic article. ‘They’ll have all sorts of experiences that other kids won’t. Chuck Yeager (the first pilot to break the sound barrier) could step down from the belly of the bomber into the rocketship and push the button not because he was born with that difference between him and me, but because for the previous thirty years his temperament impelled him to work his way up from climbing trees through increasing degrees of danger and excitement.’

“Conversely, high-reactive children may be more likely to develop into artists and writers and scientists and thinkers because their aversion to novelty causes them to spend time inside the familiar—and intellectually fertile—environment of their own heads.”

This passage explains the interaction of “nature” (genetics) and “nurture” (environment) as they play out in real-world conditions. Jerome Kagan’s work with infants uses the term “high-reactives” for those with a predilection for introversion and “low-reactives” for those leaning toward extroversion. This genetic basis for personality type then gets reinforced by environmental factors as each group seeks out behavior that suits their temperament. As they grow up, they gain more experience with a certain set of skills and activities that conform to the idea of either introversion or extroversion.

“My colleague Sally is a good example of this phenomenon. Sally is a thoughtful and talented book editor, a self-described shy introvert, and one of the most charming and articulate people I know. If you invite her to a party, and later ask your other guests whom they most enjoyed meeting, chances are they’ll mention Sally. She’s so sparkly, they’ll tell you. So witty! So adorable!

“Sally is conscious of how well she comes across—you can’t be as appealing as she is without being aware of it. But that doesn’t mean her amygdala knows it. When she arrives at a party, Sally often wishes she could hide behind the nearest couch—until her prefrontal cortex takes over and she remembers what a good conversationalist she is. Even so, her amygdala, with its lifetime of stored associations between strangers and anxiety, sometimes prevails. Sally admits that sometimes she drives an hour to a party and then leaves five minutes after arriving.”

This is an example of how Cain mixes up her writing style to keep it interesting. The passage follows one describing the functions of the amygdala and frontal cortex sections of the brain, which control instinctual emotions and work to override them, respectively. The latter function allows introverts to overcome anxiety in new situations and act more like extroverts. Cain then presents the above about her friend Sally as a way to illustrate the drier scientific principles with a vivid anecdote.

“When combined with Kagan’s findings on high reactivity, this line of studies offers a very empowering lens through which to view your personality. Once you understand introversion and extroversion as preferences for certain levels of stimulation, you can begin consciously trying to situate yourself in environments favorable to your own personality—neither overstimulating nor understimulating, neither boring nor anxiety-making. You can organize your life in terms of what personality psychologists call ‘optimal levels of arousal’ and what I call ‘sweet spots,’ and by doing so feel more energetic and alive than before.”

This refers to more research about the theme of the genetic origins of introversion. One part of the brain stem, called the ascending reticular activating system, regulates the amount of sensory stimulation the brain receives. It works much like a gate that opens and closes to allow more or less stimulation. It is thought that this pathway is more open in introverts—hence their need to reduce stimulation in their environment.

“On Saturday morning, Dr. Aron appears in the Buckeye Lodge. She waits playfully behind an easel containing a flip chart while Strickland introduces her to the audience. Then she emerges smiling—ta-da!—from behind the easel, sensibly clad in a blazer, turtleneck, and corduroy skirt. She has short, feathery brown hair and warm, crinkly blue eyes that look as if they don’t miss a thing. You can see immediately the dignified scholar Aron is today, as well as the awkward schoolgirl she must once have been. You can see, too, her respect for her audience.”

In this passage, Cain describes a weekend retreat for introverts that she attended, at which Dr. Elaine Aron was the keynote speaker. Aron furthered the research of Jerome Kagan on high sensitivity. Cain frames a section of Chapter 6 with her description of the retreat, bookending a longer middle section in which she delves into Aron’s research. Cain uses such personal reporting techniques throughout the book, in addition to presenting research, to balance the writing approaches of “showing” and “telling.”

“FDR was elected president in 1933. It was the height of the Depression, and Eleanor traveled the country—in a single three-month period she covered 40,000 miles—listening to ordinary people tell their hard-luck stories. People opened up to her in ways they didn’t for other powerful figures. She became for Franklin the voice of the dispossessed. When she returned home from her trips, she often told him what she’d seen and pressed him to act. She helped orchestrate government programs for half-starved miners in Appalachia. She urged FDR to include women and African-Americans in his programs to put people back to work. And she helped arrange for Marian Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial. ‘She kept at him on issues which he might, in the rush of things, have wanted to overlook,’ the historian Geoff Ward has said. ‘She kept him to a high standard. Anyone who ever saw her lock eyes with him and say, “Now Franklin, you should . . .” never forgot it.’”

To illustrate researcher Brian Little’s Free Trait Theory, Cain describes Eleanor Roosevelt as a quintessential introvert who overcame her fears and anxieties to become a crusading public figure. Roosevelt could do this because her role-playing as an extrovert was in service to things she deeply believed in. At the same time, her empathic nature as an introvert illustrates the theme of Power of Introverts, as she informed President Roosevelt about things he needed to be aware to help the American people during the Great Depression.

“Elaine Aron has an idea about this. She believes that high sensitivity was not itself selected for, but rather the careful, reflective style that tends to accompany it. ‘The type that is “sensitive” or “reactive” would reflect a strategy of observing carefully before acting,’ she writes, ‘thus avoiding dangers, failures, and wasted energy, which would require a nervous system specially designed to observe and detect subtle differences. It is a strategy of “betting on a sure thing” or “looking before you leap.” In contrast, the active strategy of the [other type] is to be first, without complete information and with the attendant risks—the strategy of “taking a long shot” because the “early bird catches the worm” and “opportunity only knocks once.”’”

Here Cain presents some of the research on why animals with high sensitivity (what we call introversion in humans) were not selected out in the evolutionary process. It might seem as if they would be, given their lack of aggressiveness. Researcher Elaine Aron’s theory is that their traits have their own value in certain situations. Being circumspect and risk-averse allows organisms to hedge their bets in a risky environment, surviving when their more risk-taking counterparts meet their demise.

“We all have old brains, of course. But just as the amygdala of a high-reactive person is more sensitive than average to novelty, so do extroverts seem to be more susceptible than introverts to the reward-seeking cravings of the old brain. In fact, some scientists are starting to explore the idea that reward-sensitivity is not only an interesting feature of extroversion; it is what makes an extrovert an extrovert. Extroverts, in other words, are characterized by their tendency to seek rewards, from top dog status to sexual highs to cold cash. They’ve been found to have greater economic, political, and hedonistic ambitions than introverts; even their sociability is a function of reward-sensitivity, according to this view—extroverts socialize because human connection is inherently gratifying.”

This passage deals with the theme of the genetic origins of introversion and extroversion. The amygdala, an area of the older part of the brain, seems to control certain behaviors that make a person lean toward one of these personality types. For introverts, being highly sensitive to new stimuli is something that is centered in the amygdala. Likewise, this area controls reward-sensitivity, which extroverts are particularly geared to. Cain’s point is that these personality traits are not just choices or preferences, but rather have biological roots.

“Kellogg School of Management Professor Camelia Kuhnen has found that the variation of a dopamine-regulating gene (DRD4) associated with a particularly thrill-seeking version of extroversion is a strong predictor of financial risk-taking. By contrast, people with a variant of a serotonin-regulating gene linked to introversion and sensitivity take 28 percent less financial risk than others. They have also been found to outperform their peers when playing gambling games calling for sophisticated decision-making. (When faced with a low probability of winning, people with this gene variant tend to be risk-averse; when they have a high probability of winning, they become relatively risk-seeking.) Another study, of sixty-four traders at an investment bank, found that the highest-performing traders tended to be emotionally stable introverts.”

This passage touches on the themes of the Genetic Origins of Introversion and the Power of Introverts. Chapter 7 deals with the financial crash of 2007-2008 and the role that extroverts played because of their greater willingness to take risks. This study indicates the genetic origins of such behavior and, in the last sentence, shows that introverts are actually valuable assets at investment banks, which goes against the popular notion of aggressive action being necessary for trading.

“It’s hard to imagine other American moms and dads outside Cupertino smiling on a child who reads in public while everyone else is gathered around the barbecue. But parents schooled a generation ago in Asian countries were likely taught this quieter style as children. In many East Asian classrooms, the traditional curriculum emphasizes listening, writing, reading, and memorization. Talking is simply not a focus, and is even discouraged.”

This passage comes from a chapter in which the author examines several cultures to note the differences in preferred personality traits. Americans may view extroversion as the standard to strive for because of the influence of the Extrovert Ideal, but other parts of the world see things differently. Cain notes that many Asian cultures have what could be called an Introvert Ideal. The passage explores how Asian Americans in Cupertino, California, who have a foot in both cultures, navigate and perceive the two styles.

“Though Eastern relationship-honoring is admirable and beautiful, so is Western respect for individual freedom, self-expression, and personal destiny. The point is not that one is superior to the other, but that a profound difference in cultural values has a powerful impact on the personality styles favored by each culture. In the West, we subscribe to the Extrovert Ideal, while in much of Asia (at least before the Westernization of the past several decades), silence is golden. These contrasting outlooks affect the things we say when our roommates’ dishes pile up in the sink—and the things we don’t say in a university classroom.

“Moreover, they tell us that the Extrovert Ideal is not as sacrosanct as we may have thought. So if, deep down, you’ve been thinking that it’s only natural for the bold and sociable to dominate the reserved and sensitive, and that the Extrovert Ideal is innate to humanity, Robert McCrae’s personality map suggests a different truth: that each way of being—quiet and talkative, careful and audacious, inhibited and unrestrained—is characteristic of its own mighty civilization.”

This continues from the previous quotation as the author’s conclusion about the theme of the Extrovert Ideal: it’s not “one size fits all” nor should it be. This is really her argument throughout the book. She’s not claiming that introversion is better than extroversion, but rather that the two personality styles are equally valuable. Her emphasis on the strengths and advantages of introversion is simply to counter the influence of the Extrovert Ideal, which has dominated American culture for so long.

“But just as the nature-nurture debate was replaced with interactionism—the insight that both factors contribute to who we are, and indeed influence each other—so has the person-situation debate been superseded by a more nuanced understanding. Personality psychologists acknowledge that we can feel sociable at 6:00 p.m. and solitary at 10:00 p.m., and that these fluctuations are real and situation-dependent. But they also emphasize how much evidence has emerged to support the premise that notwithstanding these variations, there truly is such a thing as a fixed personality.”

Chapter 9 examines how introverts are able to behave “against type” and temporarily take on the persona of extroverts. Cain describes in this passage that while there has been debate about whether people have fixed personality types or that they adjust behavior to different situations, recent research indicates that fixed personality types do exist, supporting the theme of the Genetic Origins of Introversion. Cain goes on to note that the best explanation for the ability of people to act in ways outside their personality type is Brian Little’s Free Trait Theory.

“If introverts and extroverts are the north and south of temperament—opposite ends of a single spectrum—then how can they possibly get along? Yet the two types are often drawn to each other—in friendship, business, and especially romance. These pairs can enjoy great excitement and mutual admiration, a sense that each completes the other. One tends to listen, the other to talk; one is sensitive to beauty, but also to slings and arrows, while the other barrels cheerfully through his days; one pays the bills and the other arranges the children’s play dates. But it can also cause problems when members of these unions pull in opposite directions.”

Cain describes how introverts and extroverts often complement each other, one playing yin to the other’s yang. Much of the book is how the two personality types clash, but Cain also points out that it’s important to remember the old adage that opposites attract. In addition, as she notes elsewhere, people are rarely entirely one type or the other, but rather fall somewhere along a continuum. Thus, their personalities might be more attuned than first meets the eye.

“One of the best things you can do for an introverted child is to work with him on his reaction to novelty. Remember that introverts react not only to new people, but also to new places and events. So don’t mistake your child’s caution in new situations for an inability to relate to others. He’s recoiling from novelty or overstimulation, not from human contact. As we saw in the last chapter, introversion-extroversion levels are not correlated with either agreeableness or the enjoyment of intimacy. Introverts are just as likely as the next kid to seek others’ company, though often in smaller doses.”

Here Cain discusses one of the biggest misconceptions about introverts—that they are antisocial and dislike human contact. It really comes down to new experiences and meeting new people. Whereas extroverts are quite comfortable socializing with strangers, for introverts, novelty sometimes causes stress or discomfort because of the extra emotional stimulation it occasions. In this chapter, she presents ways that parents can help guide their introverted children to navigate the world better.