Psychologists Uncover A New Type Of Extravert, And You Might Know This Person
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If you have long considered yourself to be an ambivert, there’s a small possibility you could have misidentified yourself.
New findings from a psychology study led by Jason Huang from Michigan State University suggest that there’s another personality type called the “other-contingent extravert.”
People who fall in this category only express their extraverted nature when they are in environments they feel comfortable in and are among people they perceive to be friendly, the psychologists shared in a paper to be published in the Journal of Individual Differences.
“We conceptualize other-contingent extraversion as an individual difference in the tendency to elevate one’s state extraversion when interacting with friendly others,” the researchers noted.
The team had to demonstrate this in a scientific setting, so they invited 83 undergraduate students from the United States to join a three-week-long experiment, where participants had to disclose the characteristics of their most recent social interactions two times a day.
In their surveys, the students were to answer three questions: “How friendly was the other person/people you were interacting with?,” “How willing to engage in conversation was the other person/people?,” and “How sociable was the other person/people you were interacting with?” Responses were marked on a seven-point scale, one being “not at all” and seven denoting “extremely.” The participants then had to rate their level of extraversion during those social interactions.
What was predictable was that most respondents would express elevated extraversion when meeting people they perceived to be friendly.
The more compelling result was that some participants, the other-contingent extraverts, were more influenced by the social cues of others, and only reacted with an elevated sense of extraversion in “friendlier” settings.
“Results indicate that, despite a general positive association between others’ friendliness and one’s state extraversion, individuals differed in the degree to which they manifested state extraversion in response to others’ friendliness, allowing us to model this individual difference as other-contingent extraversion,” the researchers concluded.
That seemingly quiet friend who becomes animated when around you? They could be an other-contingent extravert.
[via Psychology Today, cover image via Shutterstock]
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