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More than a decade ago, Susan Cain ignited a conversation about introversion and extroversion that continues today. In her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, and a 2012 TED Talk, which has since been viewed more than 34 million times, Cain argued that even though one-third to half of the population are introverts, the world is biased toward extroverts.
Susan Cain
That partiality extends to assumptions about creativity and leadership, Cain pointed out, and to schools and workplaces, which were designed “mostly for extroverts and for their need for lots of stimulation.” In the world of business events, Cain’s influence can be seen everywhere, from stories about making networking comfortable for introverts to designing physical layouts with quiet nooks so event participants — the introverts — can take breaks from the loud and crowded spaces where extroverts thrive.
But there’s been a tendency, not just in the world of business events, to divide people into two distinct groups and to make assumptions about their preferences. Reality is much more nuanced, according to Jens Asendorpf, a personality researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin. “Ninety percent of people are somewhere in the middle,” Asendorpf said in a recent Scientific American article, “Extrovert or Introvert: Most People Are Actually Ambiverts.” Research has focused on pronounced extroversion or introversion, with much less of a concentration on ambiverts — a personality type that is a mix of extroverts and introverts. Among those who have studied ambiverts is Karl Moore, an organizational researcher and associate professor of management at McGill University. Moore estimated that 40 percent of top business leaders are extroverts, 40 percent are introverts, and 20 percent are true ambiverts, based on his interviews with 350 C-suite executives.
I went to Convene’s digital archives to see what we’ve written about the topic. Since 2015, we’ve mentioned introverts 44 times vs. only 18 mentions of extroverts — lopsided results that were likely influenced by Cain’s impact. I found only one mention of “ambivert” in the archive, in a story told by Megan Finnell, CMP, senior director, strategy and insights for Freeman, during a PCMA EduCon 2022 session called “Accessing Your Blind Spots through Data Insights.”
Megan Finnell
Finnell, who was then director of meetings and conferences for a health-care management association, was trying to understand why in participant feedback, where the association’s major event generally received high scores, networking scored lower. Finnell and her team added an expensive party to the next event’s agenda, but feedback about the networking was even lower, she said in the session. “We said, ‘Okay, our people are not fun people. They want directed conversations.’” But when the association next offered moderated roundtables and discussion groups, the feedback about networking was even less favorable.
Finnell then decided to go directly to the audience and ask them how they liked to network and how they described themselves. The results “were pretty humbling,” she said in the session. Although she and her team had thought that most of the members of the association were introverts, respondents identified first as ambiverts, then as extroverts, and finally as introverts, she said. And the data also showed that, when it came to networking, half of the audience preferred parties and half of them preferred directed networking.
There’s “no magic line that clearly separates ambiversion from introversion and extroversion,” and there are also many more gradations, the psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman said in the Scientific American article.
Which helps make the case for designing for people, not categories of people. Said Asendorpf: “People who tend to be extroverted also like to keep to themselves from time to time. And since everyone needs social contact, introverts also seek interaction with others — just less so.”
Barbara Palmer is deputy editor of Convene.
On the Web
- Find TED’s 10-question quiz, “Are You an Extrovert, Introvert, or Ambivert?” at bit.ly/ambivert-TED.
- Read previous Meetings and Your Brain columns in our archive.