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.
No, it’s not bullshit, it’s science illiterate pop psychology.
Introversion and extroversion are things. “Introverts” and “extroverts” are reductive simplifications. Introversion and extroversion are nowhere near as binary as sexuality, and sexuality is still an extremely wide spectrum.
You’ve probably experienced fear at some point in your life. Would it make sense — for that reason alone — to label you a coward?
Yet you, by your own choice, wrote and posted a comment on a public forum. Purposefully communicated your thoughts to the extraneous world. So you’re not a “real introvert”, clesrly. ^/s
God I’m tired of people pretending people have fundamental differences to the point of being different things, instead of understanding traits can be high or low and different in different contexts and that reductive simple labels only make things worse.