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contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favors quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in groups. We like to think that we value individuality, but all too often we admire one
type
of individual—the kind who’s comfortable “putting himself out there.” Sure, we allow technologically gifted loners who launch companies in garages to have any personality they please, but they are the exceptions, not the rule, and our tolerance extends mainly to those who get fabulously wealthy or hold the promise of doing so.
    Introversion—along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.
    The Extrovert Ideal has been documented in many studies, though this research has never been grouped under a single name.Talkative people, for example, are rated as smarter, better-looking, more interesting, and more desirable as friends.Velocity of speech counts as well as volume: we rank fast talkers as more competent and likable than slowones. The same dynamics apply in groups, where research shows thatthe voluble are considered smarter than the reticent—even though there’s zero correlation between the gift of gab and good ideas. Even the word
introvert
is stigmatized—one informal study, by psychologist Laurie Helgoe, found that introverts described their own physical appearance in vivid language (“green-blue eyes,” “exotic,” “high cheekbones”), but when asked to describe generic introverts they drew a bland and distasteful picture (“ungainly,” “neutral colors,” “skin problems”).
    But we make a grave mistake to embrace the Extrovert Ideal so unthinkingly. Some of our greatest ideas, art, and inventions—from the theory of evolution to van Gogh’s sunflowers to the personal computer—came from quiet and cerebral people who knew how to tune in to their inner worlds and the treasures to be found there. Without introverts, the world would be devoid of:
    the theory of gravity
    the theory of relativity
    W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”
    Chopin’s nocturnes
    Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time
    Peter Pan
    Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
and
Animal Farm
    The Cat in the Hat
    Charlie Brown
    Schindler’s List, E.T.
, and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
    Google
    Harry Potter *
    As the science journalist Winifred Gallagher writes: “The glory of the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic achievement.Neither
E=mc 2
nor
Paradise Lost
was dashed off by a partyanimal.” Even in less obviously introverted occupations, like finance, politics, and activism, some of the greatest leaps forward were made by introverts. In this book we’ll see how figures like Eleanor Roosevelt, Al Gore, Warren Buffett, Gandhi—and Rosa Parks—achieved what they did not in spite of but
because of
their introversion.
    Yet, as
Quiet
will explore, many of the most important institutions of contemporary life are designed for those who enjoy group projects and high levels of stimulation. As children, our classroom desks are increasingly arranged in pods, the better to foster group learning, and research suggests that thevast majority of teachers believe that the ideal student is an extrovert. We watch TV shows whose protagonists are not the “children next door,” like the Cindy Bradys and Beaver Cleavers of yesteryear, but rock stars and webcast hostesses with