Look on the Internet and you can find countless quizzes which will recognize you as an introvert or extrovert. When either of these couldn’t suffice, we came up with another term, Ambivert. We love to label ourselves, Don’t we? As much as we categorise people as tall or short, we also tend to categorise people on the based of personality types as if it as an ingrained feature. Personality is what we develop as we grow and absorb information. We do not have a fixed personality as it keeps on changing with each passing day or even situations.
So, How do you recognize yourself? An Introvert, an extrovert or just a human?
It does not take rocket science to figure out that we are not the same at all situations. Our personality is different in front of our friends and different in front of our boss. It’s different in front of our office colleagues and different in front of your parents. Imagine, for instance, a scenario where Mr. X sees you for the first time at a local bar where you are quite outgoing with your close friends. X will, without any second doubt label you as an outgoing or “extrovert” but in real life, you are mostly conserved and into yourself. Wouldn’t that be incorrect? Mistakenly assuming that aspects of a person’s behaviour are permanent is known as the “fundamental attribution error”
A famous US psychologist Walter Mischel conducted some work in this area. In a study, he and his colleagues observed the behaviour of children on a summer camp. They found that rather than some children being conscientious and others aggressive, these traits were often situation-specific. For example, a kid could be fierce and angry when teased but very cool with his friends. In this scenario, it would be misleading to label a kid based on one or two instances. One of the prime reasons of our shift in personality traits can be attributed to sadness. This study was once done in Bielefeld University where sad music actually triggered some amount of sadness in participants.
What if we consider an average behaviour over a span of time?
It could be actually fair to judge or label someone’s personality over a span of time-based on their averaged behaviour over a wide range of situations but some research also shows that these personality traits are susceptible to shift. In a general scenario which you would agree, people generally become more agreeable as they grow older. Although these shifts don’t happen at the same speed through life.
Another research at Illinois, psychologists decided to take psychology tests for students 16 weeks apart. They asked how they would like their personalities to change and gave them tips on how to do so (one was to use “if-then plans”: if x happens, I will do y). The preliminary finding was that their personalities shifted in the desired directions.
So, when it comes to personality, even a small incident or shift could cause dramatic consequences. A person who labelled himself as an “Introvert” at any early age could start behaving like an extrovert if some circumstances shape their life. Opportunity shapes most of our personality and it would be misleading to label anyone depending on any circumstance.
Originally published on: http://skithub.com/introvert-extrovert-or-just-human/
