The phrase usually arrives secondhand. A colleague uses it in a review, or a friend says it as a compliment that does not quite feel like one, and the search that follows is an attempt to find out which.
What comes back is two different things wearing the same name.
2
separable aspects inside trait extraversion, neither of them a thinking style
8
function-attitudes in Jung's original scheme, of which introverted thinking is one
340
sales representatives in the study that broke the extraverted ideal
$151
predicted hourly revenue at the middle of the extraversion scale
Two systems, one phrase
Jung described eight function-attitudes in 1921, pairing four mental functions with two directions of attention. Introverted thinking is one of them, and it describes reasoning organised around an internal framework of definitions rather than around external consistency. The 16-type tradition later arranged four of these into a stack per type, which is where the abbreviation Ti comes from.
The trait tradition uses introversion for something else entirely. There it is one end of extraversion, one of the five broad dimensions that emerged from decades of factor analysis, and it has nothing to do with how anybody reasons.
| What somebody might mean | Where it comes from | What it describes |
|---|---|---|
| Introverted thinking, or Ti | Jung in 1921, then the four-function stacks | Reasoning against an internal framework rather than a shared one |
| An introvert who is analytical | Everyday usage | Two separate observations stuck together |
| Low extraversion on a trait measure | Five-factor research | How strongly social contact and reward register |
| The Thinker, as a type nickname | Free test sites, with no single author | A label with no measurement under it |
The four rows are not variations of one idea. Somebody who has been called an introverted thinker at work almost certainly meant row two, which is a description of behaviour and not a claim about anything internal.
Trait introversion is not a way of thinking
This is the correction worth making, because the phrase quietly implies otherwise.
DeYoung, Quilty and Peterson showed in 2007 that each of the big five dimensions splits into two coherent aspects. Extraversion divides into assertiveness and enthusiasm. Assertiveness is about taking the lead and making oneself heard. Enthusiasm is about sociability and positive feeling. Neither is a cognitive style, and a person can be low on one and average on the other, which is why so many people find the single label a poor fit.
Smillie's review of the reward literature in 2013 points at the same thing from a different angle. Extraversion tracks sensitivity to potential reward, which explains why extraverted people gain more from a promising social situation rather than why they think differently in it.
So the trait says how strongly certain kinds of stimulus register. It says nothing about whether somebody reasons from principles or from cases, which is the thing the word thinker was doing in the phrase.
The part that is actually a problem
Nobody searches this phrase out of taxonomic curiosity. They search it after a meeting.
Anderson and Kilduff ran two studies of task groups in 2009 and found that people higher in trait dominance were rated as more competent by fellow group members, by outside observers and by research staff, after controlling for their actual ability. Counting the behaviours showed the mechanism. Dominant participants offered more suggestions and spoke earlier, and those acts were read as competence signals by everyone watching.
The finding is not that talkative people are wrong about things. It is that a room has no way of measuring judgement directly, so it measures the visible correlates, and speaking early is the most visible one available.
That is the actual cost of being the quiet analytical person in the room, and it is a perception cost rather than a capability one. It also explains why the feedback so often arrives as speak up more, which is advice about the signal rather than about the work.
The middle of the scale, which nobody sells
The advice that follows from the perception problem is usually to become more extraverted, and the evidence does not support that either.
Grant studied 340 outbound call centre representatives in 2013 and found the relationship between extraversion and sales revenue was not a straight line. It was an inverted U. People near the middle of the extraversion scale outperformed both ends.
- Middle of the scale: 151.38$ per hour
- Low extraversion: 126.8$ per hour
- High extraversion: 114.96$ per hour
The most extraverted representatives were the worst performers in the study. The proposed reason is that ambiverts naturally alternate between talking and listening, expressing enough assertiveness to persuade without appearing overconfident.
Which means the answer to a quiet person in a talkative room is not to imitate the loudest performer, since the loudest performer is not the benchmark. It is to make the existing judgement visible earlier, which is a much smaller change.
What the quiet half can do about it
Timing beats volume. The Anderson and Kilduff result turns on speaking early rather than on speaking often, and a short contribution in the first few minutes does more for how a person is read than a longer one at the end.
Writing is the other lever. Somebody who circulates a paragraph before the meeting has entered the room having already spoken, and the paragraph tends to be better than what anyone improvises. That is not a workaround for a deficit. It is a different medium in which the same judgement becomes visible.
The introversion and extraversion test here reports a percentile rather than a category, which matters given how much of the population sits near the middle, and what a social battery actually is covers the recovery side of the same trait.
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, 93(5).
- Smillie, L. D. (2013). Extraversion and reward processing. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3).
- Anderson, C., Kilduff, G. J. (2009). Why do dominant personalities attain influence in face-to-face groups? The competence-signaling effects of trait dominance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(2).
- Grant, A. M. (2013). Rethinking the extraverted sales ideal: the ambivert advantage. Psychological Science, 24(6).
- Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: a meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1).
- Pittenger, D. J. (2005). Cautionary comments regarding the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 57(3).