Making some noise about introverts

In 2012, the American writer Susan Cain published her best-selling book, Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can’t Stop Talking. Cain’s answers with a resounding no As Cain shows, the Extrovert Ideal became the foundation on which self-help guru Dale Carnegie built his empire. Cain writes, “Harvard’s provost Paul Buck declared in the late 1940s that Harvard should reject the ‘sensitive, neurotic’ type and the ‘intellectually over-stimulated’ in favour of boys of the ‘healthy extrovert kind’.” We may no longer live in times of such overt biases but this line of thinking, favouring a certain outgoing personality type, has far from faded in contemporary corporate work culture. Cain, who spent a weekend attending one of his boisterous meet-ups, describes him sharply: “He strikes me as having a ‘hyperthymic’ temperament—a kind of extroversion-on-steroids characterized, in the words of one psychiatrist, by ‘exuberant, upbeat, overenergetic, and overconfident lifelong traits’ that have been recognized as an asset in business, especially sales.” Should it surprise anyone that there are so few recognisably introverted employees in people-facing roles like sales? “Many of us are uncomfortable with the idea of taking on a ‘false’ persona for any length of time,” as Cain writes.