The Social Costs of Seeking Solitude

What is your idea of the perfect day? Does it involve lively gatherings filled with friends? Or would you rather spend the time in solitude, with a stack of books and your favorite television series? The way that you answer this question will affect how strangers judge you, and whether they consider it okay to socially exclude you.

People differ in the extent to which they enjoy spending time by themselves. While some people consider solitude to be painful and boring, there are others who find solitude to be pleasant and interesting. But those who enjoy solitude—those of us who are introverted and prefer a quiet evening at home over a night out with friends at a noisy bar—are often treated as outliers in modern life. Organizations and social groups can seem tailor-made for extraverts, those who thrive off of frequent, lively social interactions. In our research, we found that there can be negative social consequences for solitude seekers.

In research with Dr. Dongning Ren at Tilburg University, we inquired how people judge and act toward those who enjoy solitude. We found that people are more likely to socially exclude individuals who enjoy solitude. In other words, solitude seekers are more likely to be ostracized from groups and teams. This happens because people assume that everyone involved (both the excluders, and the ones being excluded) will be better off if solitude seekers are left to their own devices. But social exclusion can be a dangerous thing, even for people who enjoy time alone. And this means that solitude seekers face extra challenges in work, and in life.

Assumptions About Solitude Seekers

When we meet someone for the first time, we form an impression of that person, and use that impression to judge what activities they might enjoy and how we should treat them. In our studies, we examined how people judge (and treat) those who enjoy solitude. If someone is seen as a solitude seeker (they are the type of person who enjoys spending time alone), people make a lot of assumptions based on that information. They assume that solitude seekers don’t care much about belonging to groups; that they are disagreeable and hard to get along with; and that they are, to put it bluntly, not warm. Importantly, these negative impressions have consequences. People are more likely to exclude and avoid interacting with solitude seekers.

It’s “Easier for Everyone” This Way

Why do people exclude solitude seekers? Two beliefs helped to explain our results.

First, people exclude solitude seekers due to self-interest: People believe that it would be difficult or unpleasant to spend time with solitude seekers. When we exclude solitude seekers, we are making things easier on ourselves by avoiding potentially awkward social situations.

Second, people also care about the well-being of the solitude seeker: People believe that solitude seekers actually don’t want to be included, and that they wouldn’t enjoy interacting with others. When we exclude solitude seekers, to some extent we might think that we are doing them a favor.

The problem is that these beliefs, particularly the idea that solitude seekers want to be excluded, are probably wrong.

Everybody Hurts

People assume that solitude seekers are impervious to the pain of social exclusion, assuming that they don’t want to join our parties, or work with us on new projects at work. But almost everyone dislikes being excluded. Even subtle forms of exclusion, like being snubbed by an anonymous stranger in a laboratory experiment, can provoke a strong emotional response. Although we didn’t test this directly in our studies, our intuition is that even die-hard solitude seekers would have a negative reaction to being excluded. We would expect that solitude (by choice) is very different from forced solitude.

When we learn about the personality traits of others, it’s only natural to try to predict what they will enjoy and how they want to be treated. The problem is that making predictions about people is hard, especially when you are trying to predict the reactions of someone you don’t know well. You should think twice before socially excluding solitude seekers.

They might be happy to be invited to your next party (or to work with you on your next project), and you might be happy to have them join.


For Further Reading

Ren, D., & Evans, A. M. (2021). Leaving the loners alone: Dispositional preference for solitude evokes ostracism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 47(8), 1294-1308.

Wesselmann, E. D., Cardoso, F. D., Slater, S., & Williams, K. D. (2012). To be looked at as though air: Civil attention matters. Psychological Science, 23(2), 166-168.
 

Anthony Evans conducts research to understand how people make decisions involving trust, cooperation, and civility, with a focus on user behavior in online marketplaces and communities. He is an assistant professor of Social Psychology at Tilburg University

What Happens When Introverts Act Like Extraverts? In a Word, Leadership


Quiet, reserved, shy, unassertive. These are terms often used to describe introverts and are not usually the behaviors we think of when we think of a leader. Instead, we tend to associate leadership behavior with being bold, assertive, and outgoing—these terms are used to describe extraverts.

Why are people low in extraversion—introverts—perceived to be less leaderlike (even in their own opinion)? More importantly, what behavioral strategies can introverts use to overcome this perception?

How To Create  Leaders

Together with my colleague, Professor Peter O’Connor, we hoped to see if we could improve how introverts viewed their own leadership capability, and how others viewed them. In groups of three or four, over 600 people worked together to solve an ambiguous survival problem developed by NASA that involved a hypothetical crash-landing on the Moon. We also measured the personalities of the participants, including how extraverted they were. Before the group activity started, we selected one person within each group to enact one of the following behavioral instructions:

  • To act energetic, talkative, enthusiastic, bold, active, assertive, and sociable—this was the ‘act extraverted’ instruction
  • To act quiet, reserved, lethargic, passive, compliant, and unadventurous—the ‘act introverted’ instruction
  • No special instruction—they were free to act how they wanted during the activity

We measured the leadership of all participants both in terms of how they viewed their own leadership behaviors and how their group members viewed their leadership behaviors. We then compared how much leadership was displayed by the chosen participants in each of the three conditions. We also compared how much positive and negative emotion the chosen participants felt after the activity.

What did we find? Extraverts did indeed enjoy more leadership potential, no matter what instructions they received. Also, introverts who were instructed to act like extraverts were more likely to emerge as leaders in their group, without any damage to their positive or negative emotion.

Extraverts were another matter entirely. Extraverts who were instructed to act quiet, reserved, shy, and so forth thought quite poorly of their own leadership capability. They also felt worse emotionally. Quite simply, extraverts didn’t like acting introverted.

You may be surprised that introverts who acted like extraverts didn’t suffer emotionally, but other research also shows that introverts do quite well when they act extraverted. So, why do introverts not act extraverted more often? It seems one of the biggest barriers to introverts acting extraverted may not be the acting itself, but the expectation of the acting. Introverts think that acting like an extravert will be unpleasant, when in fact it usually isn’t.

Leadership Takeaways

First, extraverts are, on average, seen to be more leaderlike than introverts. Second—and fortunately—personality is not completely deterministic because you can engage in behaviors that are “out of character” to achieve leadership goals. And finally, for introverts, acting out of character does not appear to make them unhappy, but for extraverts it does.

But should an introvert have to act like an extravert to obtain a leadership position, or should leadership positions better adapt to allow for more introverted leaders? My answer is a little of both, although I lean more towards the former than the latter. Leadership is inherently a socially-oriented role. It doesn’t make sense that you can be effective in a leadership role without engaging in at least some of the behaviors that define extraversion, such as being assertive, bold, talkative, and energetic. Furthermore, being behaviorally flexible can be a character strength.

At the same time, there are situations where organizations should embrace introverted leadership. This can happen on teams where the members are already very proactive and like to get things done. In that case, it may be better to have an introverted leader at the helm because they are less likely to assert themselves and potentially “get in the way.”

In sum, both introverts and extraverts can be great leaders, but introverts are less likely to be viewed as leaderlike. However, introverts can adapt their behavior to enhance their leadership potential, with minimal emotional cost, even though they may not think that doing so will be much fun.


For Further Reading

Grant, A. M., Gino, F., & Hofmann, D. A. (2011). Reversing the extraverted leadership advantage: The role of employee proactivity. Academy of Management Journal, 54(3), 528-550. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2011.61968043

Spark, A., & O'Connor, P. J. (2021). State extraversion and emergent leadership: Do introverts emerge as leaders when they act like extraverts? The Leadership Quarterly, 32(3), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2020.101474

Zelenski, J. M., Whelan, D. C., Nealis, L. J., Besner, C. M., Santoro, M. S., & Wynn, J. E. (2013). Personality and affective forecasting: Trait introverts underpredict the hedonic benefits of acting extraverted. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(6), 1092-1108. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032281
 

Andrew Spark is a personality scientist at Queensland University of Technology and conducts research into the causes and consequences of acting out of character.

Good Friends Protect Shy College Freshmen from Loneliness and Depression

Transitioning to college means not just figuring out new academic expectations but also a whole new social world. Incoming college students are leaving high school friends, typically for a larger environment in which they know few of their peers. For some students, this may be an exciting opportunity. For others, particularly those who are shy, this can be a scary experience.

The stress associated with the college transition can lead to depression, loneliness, and generally poor well-being. My student, Tiffany Absher, and I wanted to further understand the impact that shyness and friendship may have on adjustment during the first year of college. In particular, we had two sets of questions.

First, how do friendships change during the first year of college, and do students have the same best friends at the end of the year as they had at the beginning? Do friendship patterns look different for shy students?

Secondly, we were interested in how friendship and shyness impact emotional well-being. Does greater shyness predict poorer well-being? Does quality of friendship matter? Is the influence of friendship on well-being more important for shy students than for other students?      

To explore these questions, we studied a group of first-year students at a small, public liberal arts college. These students completed surveys in the first month of their first semester (Fall) and the last two months of their second semester (Spring).

Both times, students reported the name of their most important friend and rated the quality of that friendship. High-quality friendships involve emotional support, companionship, and disclosure, while lower-quality friendships include more criticism and conflict. Students also reported on their shyness, depression and anxiety, loneliness, and satisfaction with life in both Fall and Spring.

We expected that first-year college students would often replace high school friendships with new college friends. However, that did not seem to be the case. Instead, more than 50% of the students had the same best friend across their entire first year of college.

Even more surprising, at the end of their first year, less than 20% of the students listed someone they met in college as their best friend. Even the students who changed friends were likely to have a new friend that they knew before entering college rather than someone they had recently met.

We also found that shy students were more likely to have the same friends at the end of the year as they had at the beginning compared to less shy students. This finding is consistent with research by Jens Asendorpf who found that shy college students were more likely to maintain pre-college friendships and took longer to form new relationships in college. Thus, shy students, compared to less shy students, may rely more heavily on their established best friends for emotional support and reassurance as they navigate college.

Our second goal was to explore how these friendships help students. We found that the impact of friendship differed depending on students’ level of shyness.

As you can see in the graph below, when shy students (on the right) had lower-quality friendships, they experienced more negative outcomes. These included depression and anxiety (psychologists call these “internalizing symptoms”), as well as more loneliness and less satisfaction with life. However, when shy students had high-quality friendships, they had low negative outcomes.  In fact, if you look at the figure, you will see that shy students with a supportive best friend didn’t differ in terms of negative outcomes from the students who weren’t shy.

 

Line graph showing degree of shyness on x axis and spring internalizing symptoms on the y axis

Figure 1: Shyness and friendship quality are related to internalizing symptoms

This finding suggests that high-quality friendships play an important role in protecting students from the negative effects of shyness. Shy students experienced more loneliness and lower life satisfaction and, thus, had a particularly difficult time adjusting to the transition. However, having a good friend who provided emotional support during the transition limited these negative outcomes for shy students.

This is consistent with my previous research which found that shy children are particularly influenced by the environment during the transition to middle school. Somewhat surprisingly, that study showed that transitioning to middle school had generally positive effects on children’s peer relationships. Immediately after the transition, victimization, and exclusion decreased overall. As kids are entering a new school, they are so focused on figuring out where they stand in the social hierarchy (such as who their friends will be and who is popular) that they may engage in fewer negative interactions.

Because this new focus provided shy children with a break from peers’ negative perceptions of them, they had greater decreases in mistreatment compared to less shy children following the middle school transition. Thus, when the peer environment was more positive, shy children had better outcomes.

Combined, these findings suggest that school transitions may be an opportunity, rather than a barrier, for shy students. However, the right social supports—particularly in the form of high-quality friendships—are essential for a successful transition.


For Further Reading

Shell, M. D. & Absher, T. N. (2019). Effects of shyness and friendship on socioemotional adjustment during the college transition. Personal Relationships, 26, 386-405. doi: 10.1111/pere.12285

Asendorpf, J. B. (2000). Shyness and adaptation to the social world of university. In Crozier, W. R. (ed.), Shyness: Development, Consolidation, and Change. Routledge, New York, pp. 103–120.

Shell, M. D., Gazelle, H. & Faldowski, R. A. (2014). Anxious solitude and the middle school transition: A Child × Environment Model of peer exclusion and victimization trajectories. Developmental Psychology, 50, 1569-1589. doi: 10.1037/a0035528


Madelynn Shell is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. She studies peer relationships and school transitions in children, adolescents, and emerging adults. 

Introverts Feel True to Themselves When They Act Extraverted Because Acting Extraverted Feels Good

When do you feel the most authentic, or true to yourself? Does this depend on your personality? For example, would introverts (people who tend to be quiet and introspective) answer this question differently than extraverts (those who tend to be bold and sociable)? You might think that you would feel most authentic when you act in line with your general level of extraversion as that is how you typically act. But that's not the case. Regardless of how introverted or extraverted people usually are, research shows that they feel more authentic when they act more extraverted.

This finding seems counterintuitive, and led us to ask the question: Why is it that people feel more authentic when being more extraverted?

Positive Affect as an Explanation

One of the most robust findings in personality psychology is that extraverts feel more positive emotions. Might positive emotions explain the link between extraversion and authenticity? Several theories in the psychological literature support this idea. First, people might use their positive emotions as a rule of thumb for judging authenticity: "I feel good, so I must be acting like myself." Positive feelings might also lead to approaching goals and exploring new environments, behaviors that could be viewed as steps toward one's true potential. And positive affect could signal broader perceptions of flourishing, including authenticity.

Putting the Positive Affect Explanation to the Test

We conducted a few studies testing whether positive affect explains the link between extraverted behavior and authenticity. In one study, 97 undergraduate participants interacted in group activities once a week over 10 weeks. The activities included playing Twister, trying to solve the parking problem on campus, and discussing the meaning of a painting. The activities were meant to produce variation in behaviors, including introverted and extraverted behaviors. After each session, participants rated their extraversion, positive affect, and authenticity during the activity. We found that, regardless of trait extraversion, people felt more authentic when acting extraverted and that positive affect partially explained this association. That is, when people acted more extraverted, they felt more authentic, and part of the reason was because they also felt more positive.

Because the previous study took place in a somewhat contrived laboratory setting, we tried to replicate our findings as people went about their daily lives. In one study, we simply asked 129 adult participants to report on their extraversion, positive affect, and authenticity over the previous hour 4 times per day for 15 days. In another study, we wanted to see whether the results would hold when we told people to behave in certain ways. In this study, 147 adult participants were divided into two groups. One group was told to act extraverted in their daily interactions: "In your interactions with other people across the next week, act in a bold, talkative, outgoing, active, and assertive way, as much as possible." The other group was told to act more introverted: "In your interactions with other people across the next week, act in an unassuming, sensitive, calm, modest, and quiet way, as much as possible." Participants reported on their extraversion, positive affect, and authenticity over the previous hour 6 times per day for 1 week.

We thought that instructing people to behave in different ways might negate the benefits of extraversion for authenticity. However, in both studies, positive feelings explained nearly all the association between extraverted behavior and authenticity, and this held for introverts and extraverts alike.

An Invitation for Introverts

Regardless of whether you're in a lab situation, free to choose your actions in daily life, or told to act in a certain way, our studies suggest that extraverted behavior is associated with authenticity, and that this can be explained by increased positive affect. Does this mean introverts should act extraverted all the time to experience the benefits of positivity and authenticity? Is your "real" self extraverted, even if you identify as an introvert?

We wouldn't go so far as to make such claims. After all, differences between people in personality and behavior are inherently valuable and may be adaptive in different situations. And some research shows that increasing extraversion over longer time periods can fatigue more introverted people. However, introverts worried that acting extraverted could feel phony or fake can be reassured that they may feel better and potentially more like themselves, at least in the short term. And when introverts act extraverted, perhaps it is not a contradiction of their real selves, but rather a normal and natural way of behaving that could come with psychological benefits.


For Further Reading

Wilt, J. A., Sun, J., Jacques-Hamilton, R., & Smillie, L. D. (2023). Why does it feel authentic to be and act extraverted? Exploring the mediating role of positive affect. Self and Identity, 22(6), 896-931. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2023.2246672

Fleeson, W., & Wilt, J. (2010). The relevance of Big Five trait content in behavior to subjective authenticity: Do high levels of within-person behavioral variability undermine or enable authenticity achievement? Journal of Personality, 78(4), 1353-1382. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2010.00653.x

Jacques-Hamilton, R., Sun, J., & Smillie, L. D. (2019). Costs and benefits of acting extraverted: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(9), 1538. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000516


Joshua A. Wilt is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. His research focuses on existential issues such as authenticity, meaning, and religion/spirituality, as well as personality structure, process, and dynamics.

Jessie Sun is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on moral improvement, the connections between well-being and morality, and which kinds of social experiences matter for well-being.

Rowan Jacques-Hamilton is a Scientific Assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence. His research includes topics related across personality psychology and behavioral ecology, with a particular interest in well-being and quantitative methods.

Luke D. Smillie is an Associate Professor in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses causes and consequences of individual differences in personality, with emphases on biological bases of personality as well as the implications of personality for individual and interpersonal outcomes, including emotion, well-being, and morality.