Introvert, Extrovert or Ambivert?
Extraversion is two things, and most people have one without the other
Almost everyone has been assigned a label here, and almost everyone has quietly noticed that it does not quite fit. There is a reason: extraversion is not one thing. It splits into warmth towards people and force in a group, and those two come apart constantly. The loud person who avoids parties and the quiet person everyone confides in are both mislabelled by a single word.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you are, not about how you wish you were or how your job requires you to behave.
What it measures
The two aspects that personality research finds inside extraversion. Enthusiasm is warmth, sociability and positive feeling towards people. Assertiveness is drive, taking the floor and leading. They correlate but not tightly, which is why a single introvert-extrovert score hides more than it shows.
Based on: The two aspects of extraversion: enthusiasm and assertiveness (DeYoung, Quilty & Peterson, 2007)
Possible results
Enthusiasm
Warmth towards people and appetite for their company.
Assertiveness
Taking the floor, pushing, leading.
Common questions
Is introversion the same as shyness?
No, and conflating them is the most common error here. Shyness is anxiety about being judged, and it belongs with neuroticism rather than with extraversion. An introvert prefers less social contact and is generally fine when it happens; a shy person may badly want the contact and be afraid of it. You can be a shy extrovert, which is an uncomfortable combination, and a confident introvert, which is a common one.
Can I become more extroverted?
Behaviour, yes; the underlying trait, slowly and only somewhat. Studies where introverts are asked to act extroverted for a week find that they report feeling better while doing it - and also that it is tiring, which both halves of the popular story tend to leave out. Assertiveness in particular responds well to practice, because it is a skill with a technique behind it.
What if my two bars are very different?
That is the most informative result this test produces. High assertiveness with low enthusiasm describes someone who commands a room without wanting to be in it - often read as cold, and often exhausted by work that a warmer person would find easy. Low assertiveness with high enthusiasm describes someone everybody likes and nobody promotes. Neither pattern is visible on a single introvert-extrovert scale.
Sources
- DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C., & Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Grant, A. M. (2013). Rethinking the extraverted sales ideal: The ambivert advantage. Psychological Science.
- Depue, R. A., & Collins, P. F. (1999). Neurobiology of the structure of personality: Dopamine, facilitation of incentive motivation, and extraversion. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
An honest note Three things worth being straight about. First, ambivert is not a third type - extraversion is distributed as a single bell curve, so the middle is simply where most people are, and there is no natural line separating the groups. Second, the popular definition of introversion as recharging alone is not how the trait is defined or measured in research; the measured core is closer to sensitivity to reward and positive emotion. Third, the well-known finding that ambiverts make the best salespeople comes from one 2013 study of 340 call-centre staff, and later work suggests the effect is narrower than the headline - it is a real result, not a general law.
Try one of these next
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How Much Do You Need to Stand Out?
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