Extraversion

Extraversion describes how much energy you draw from people, activity and excitement. People who score high seek company, speak up and feel upbeat often. People who score low, usually called introverts, need less stimulation, prefer smaller groups or their own company, and recharge in quiet.

The six facets

In the IPIP-NEO-120 Extraversion is made up of six facets (Johnson, 2014):

• Friendliness: warmth toward others and ease in making friends.
• Gregariousness: enjoying crowds, parties and being in a group.
• Assertiveness: taking charge and speaking up.
• Activity level: a fast pace and a full schedule.
• Excitement-seeking: a taste for thrills, noise and stimulation.
• Cheerfulness: frequent positive emotions, such as joy and enthusiasm.

Two aspects sit under the facets: Enthusiasm, the sociable and positive side, and Assertiveness, the drive to lead and be noticed (DeYoung, Quilty and Peterson, 2007). A warm, cheerful person can have no wish to take charge, and a forceful leader can dislike parties.

High and low in everyday life

Toward the high end, an empty weekend feels like a waste. You make plans, start conversations with strangers and think out loud. The cost: you can fill silences that other people wanted, and the quest for stimulation can push you toward risks you would not take on a quiet day.

Toward the low end, a quiet evening on your own is how you recharge, and a crowded party drains you fast. You prefer one long conversation to ten short ones and think before you speak. The cost shows in settings that reward visibility: meetings where the loudest idea wins, networking, any job where you have to sell yourself.

Introversion is not shyness

Shyness is the fear of being judged, and in the Big Five it lives mostly in the Self-consciousness facet of Neuroticism, not in Extraversion. Someone low in Extraversion and low in Neuroticism is reserved but at ease: they enjoy company in small doses without worrying about it. Someone high in both may love parties and still replay every conversation on the way home.

What the research links it to

Mood. Extraversion is one of the strongest Big Five correlates of happiness and positive emotion (Steel, Schmidt and Shultz, 2008). In a study that tracked people several times a day, everyone, introverts included, reported more positive feelings in the moments when they acted in an outgoing way (Fleeson, Malanos and Achille, 2002). Whether introverts would gain from acting extraverted all the time is a different question, and that study does not answer it.

Leadership. Of the five traits, Extraversion was the strongest correlate of leadership in a meta-analysis, with a corrected correlation of .31, driven by both emerging as a leader and being judged effective (Judge et al., 2002).

Work. A synthesis of meta-analyses found small to moderate advantages for people higher in Extraversion in many work outcomes, from motivation to job satisfaction (Wilmot et al., 2019). The advantages are averages: in solitary, focused work they shrink.

Age. Social confidence rises in young adulthood, while the energetic, sociable side declines slowly in later life (Roberts, Walton and Viechtbauer, 2006).

A common misreading

The research above can sound like an argument that extraverts have it better. It shows that extraverts report more positive emotion on average, which is close to part of the definition of the trait. Introverts are not, on average, more anxious or less kind, and the quiet evening they choose is not a symptom of anything.