How two perfectly good psychological terms became misunderstood, and why personality labels can be misleading.
When Carl Jung introduced the concepts of Introversion and Extraversion in his 1921 book Psychological Types, he was describing something quite different from what most people understand these words to mean today.
For Jung, the distinction concerned the direction of a person’s psychological orientation.
Extraversion described an orientation towards the external world, towards people, objects, events and circumstances. Introversion described an orientation towards the internal world, towards subjective impressions, ideas and personal interpretations.
Neither was inherently better than the other. They were simply different ways of engaging with the world.
More than a century later, however, these two words have taken on meanings that can be quite different from Jung’s original concepts.
How the meanings became distorted
Today, an introvert is commonly understood to be someone who is quiet, shy, reserved, socially awkward or uncomfortable around other people.
An extravert, meanwhile, is generally understood to be outgoing, talkative, confident, sociable and perhaps even attention-seeking.
These popular descriptions are a considerable departure from Jung’s original concepts.
An introvert is not necessarily shy, just as an extravert is not necessarily confident.
An introvert can be an excellent public speaker, enjoy socialising and be perfectly comfortable leading a large team. Equally, an extravert can be quiet, thoughtful and uncomfortable in social situations.
Shyness, confidence and social skills are not the same things as Jung’s psychological orientations.
To complicate matters further, modern personality psychology, particularly the Big Five model, uses Extraversion to describe a collection of traits that includes sociability, assertiveness and positive emotionality.
This is a legitimate psychological construct, but it is not identical to Jung’s original concept.
Consequently, different people can use the same words while referring to quite different aspects of personality.
Not everyone fits neatly into either category
There is another problem with dividing people into introverts and extraverts.
Some individuals have such a balance of inward and outward preferences that neither description is particularly accurate.
Jung recognised that both orientations exist within the individual. His theory also distinguished between different psychological functions, which could have different orientations.
This means that someone’s natural preferences may be more complex than a single label suggests.
Yet many personality profiling systems insist on placing everyone into one category or the other.
Human personality is far more nuanced than a choice between two opposing labels.
And there is a further problem, one that concerns the science of measurement itself.
The problem with measuring personality
Every measuring system has a margin of error. All measurements should, strictly speaking, display the margin of error. For example, this table is 800mm +/- 10mm. Personality profiling systems are no exception.
Now consider two individuals whose preferences sit very close to the boundary between Introversion and Extraversion.
One falls marginally on the introverted side, the other marginally on the extraverted side.
A conventional personality profiling system might classify them as two different personality types, despite their preferences being almost identical.
Worse still, the error margin inherent in the measurement, may be greater than their distance from the boundary.
If either individual completed the questionnaire again, their result could fall on the opposite side.
The person hasn’t changed. The measurement has. Yet the personality label changes completely.
This is an important distinction.
In other words, the system may be perfectly capable of identifying someone’s general preferences, but much less capable of determining which side of an arbitrary dividing line they belong on.
This is a fundamental weakness of systems that convert continuous personality preferences into rigid categories.
The problem with labels
At PeopleMaps, we have spent more than 25 years applying Jungian personality psychology to real workplace problems.
One of the lessons we have learned is that labels frequently create more confusion than understanding.
Tell a manager that an employee is an introvert and they may immediately make assumptions about that person’s communication skills, confidence, leadership potential or ability to work with others.
Those assumptions may be entirely wrong.
Worse still, people often adopt these labels as descriptions of what they can and cannot do.
“I’m an introvert, so I’m no good at networking.”
“I’m an extravert, so I can’t work alone.”
Neither statement follows from Jung’s theory.
Personality preferences describe what comes naturally to someone, not what they are capable of doing.
This distinction is particularly important in the workplace, where inaccurate assumptions about personality can influence recruitment, management, development and career opportunities.
Why PeopleMaps takes a different approach
PeopleMaps deliberately avoids using the terms Introvert and Extravert in its reports and applications.
Not because Jung was wrong, but because the everyday meanings of these words have drifted so far from their original psychological meaning that they can now be misleading.
We also recognise that personality preferences vary in strength.
Some preferences are strong and pronounced. Others are mild, balanced or sit close to a classification boundary.
Rather than exaggerating small differences by assigning opposing labels, we focus on understanding an individual’s natural preferences and explaining how those preferences may influence their behaviour at work.
We describe how people prefer to communicate, make decisions, approach problems and interact with others.
And we do so without requiring managers or employees to learn psychological terminology or interpret personality types.
Our objective isn’t to put people into categories. It is to help people understand themselves and others, so they can work together more effectively.
After all, understanding someone’s personality should open up possibilities, not impose limitations.
That is why PeopleMaps builds personality applications, not personality reports.
PeopleMaps
Understanding People at Work.
