The amount of folk psychology in both that article and this thread is disappointing but expected. Introversion has become a fuzzy and basically useless term tha

The amount of folk psychology in both that article and this thread is disappointing but expected. Introversion has become a fuzzy and basically useless term that gets folded into a number of unrelated concepts: neuroticism, openness to experience, and agreeableness. I think that people get attached to the introvert/extravert division because it's the most clearly defined by social relations. It takes less introspection to be able to look at social group and define one's self relative to one's peers in terms of how much others seem to enjoy spending time in shared company compared to one's self. The reality is that somebody might crave a lot of human contact but be paralyzed by social anxiety (that's me). Or maybe they don't want to leave their comfort zone but once out there can engage in long deep conversations with others, even strangers. We also mix into that stew social lubricants like alcohol, drugs, and board games that can warp a social situation and reward different social behaviors. Ultimately, I think people understand a lot less about themselves than they realize (and I include myself in that). We latch onto the simplest categories, and we especially love categories that depict us as victims of societal circumstance, or somehow superior to the people around us. The reality is that if you pick one dimension of psychological categorization like a diagnosis or a trait like introversion, and then look at all the people who share that, I think they share less in common than they might assume.