terrill.ca

26/100 is OK

In highschool we did many 'find yourself' questionnaires. The most interesting one was a Myers-Briggs test my psych/soc class did. Central to the Myers-Briggs test is your Psychological Type: Introvert or Extrovert, or something in between. This test ranked you numerically on a 0-100 scale. The higher your 'score', the more extroverted you were.

The whole class did the test and calculated their scores. The teacher cherry-picked students who would have wildly different scores and asked them to share their scores. There were the obligatory upper 90's "I can't be alone" social butterflies. But when she picked a couple of the quieter students their scores were unexpected. I made the mistake of making eye contact with her and was eventually asked for my score: an honest 26. The rest of the class laughed, and the results looked like this:

I scored 26 on a 0-100 scale, everyone else was above 50

Maybe it was the psychological stigma of not wanting to score low on a test, or maybe peer pressure to be 'cool' (read extroverted). Regardless, a lot of people lied to themselves.

Years have passed and introversion is half cool (at least in Waterloo) and yet very few people really understand this very basic, and relatively large segment of the population. Time and again the introverted are dragged out to a bar, or party where they sit awkwardly all night.

Excerpt from "Caring for your introvert"

The worst of it is that extroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves. Still, we endure stoically, because the etiquette books—written, no doubt, by extroverts—regard declining to banter as rude and gaps in conversation as awkward. We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts' Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say "I'm an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush."

The above quote from Caring for your introvert is strongly worded. I do not recommend the article to introverts (we already know who we are, and what we like). All extroverts should read it. You'll learn a lot about a lot of people.