Tag Archives: extroversion

Exploding the sociability binary

A lot of the discussion about introversion and extraversion seems to collapse a whole bunch of things into a single binary. When people point out that they’re not well-described by either term, they tend to come up with patches like “ambivert,” but this is a missed opportunity to develop a more granular understanding of sociability. There are enough tensions in the underlying definitions that I want to blow up those terms and replace them with more precisely defined axes along which people vary:

  • Stimulation affinity
  • Social skill
  • Social anxiety
  • Relationship realism (vs intuitive individualism)
  • Communalism (vs ideological individualism)

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