[Reflect] Make connections: What’s wrong with being quiet?

Cain asserts that “shyness and introversion share an undervalued status in a world that prizes extroversion.... As a society, we prefer action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt” (par. 10). To explore these categories of introversion and extroversion and to test Cain’s assertion about society’s valuing one personality type over the other, think of someone you would describe as introverted and someone else who seems to be extroverted. (Include yourself, if you like.) What in particular leads you to classify these individuals as introverts or extroverts? Consider whether personality type has any effect on how other people react to them or whether they are more or less successful in school or in social or work contexts. Your instructor may ask you to post your thoughts on a class discussion board or to discuss them with other students in class. Use these questions to get you started:

• What do you think are the defining characteristics of these two personality types?
• Which, if any, of these characteristics seem to be overvalued or devalued? By whom and in what contexts? Why?
• Cain raises a question about the way psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry may be pathologizing shyness or introversion—in other words, “encouraging perfectly healthy shy people to see themselves as ill” (par. 4). What do you think about this issue?

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