The idea that human personalities and behaviors can be sorted into two simplistic piles or even a scale between two piles is just silly.

There’s no predictive value to it- you can’t objectively classify\quantify people’s ‘vertion’ and then predict behaviors or outcomes based on those classifications, not even statistically from a large sample set because it’s meaninglessly subjective.

People are complex. Someone might appear ‘introverted’ in a social situation they’re unfamiliar with, but in a different setting my appear ‘extroverted’ because they’re very comfortable.

And some will say “social interactions give energy to extro and take it from intro” but what the hell does ‘energy’ mean in that context anyway? If I go to a small party with close friends all talking about sci-fi I’ll enjoy myself all night and feel refreshed, but I’d be exhausted after 30 minutes at a rave and need a week to recover.

And do people migrate between intro-extro throughout their life? In my 20’s I felt compelled to meet and experience new people all the time but now in my mid-40’s I don’t really care and tend to stick to the people I know. Does that mean I turned more introverted at some point? That’s why even as a personality scale it’s nonsense.

It’s all just Myers-Briggs for dummies, which is already for dummies.

The only way it makes sense is as a description of immediate behavior, not of a personality. Someone may be ‘behaving in an introverted way’ but saying that makes them an ‘introvert’ is nonsense because they may go somewhere else and behave in an extroverted way an hour later.

  • @stanleytweedleOP
    link
    28 months ago

    which was the case before everybody started self-labelling like items in a retail shop

    That’s definitely my beef. If there is a clinical, objective definition and test for intro\extro as traits I’d be interested to know more about it and I’d accept it could have value if applied with rigorous objectivity, but no part of the public conversation about intro\extro is anything but nonsense.