A 2010 University of Michigan study shows that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were thirty years ago, with much of the drop having occurred since 2000. (The study’s aut...
Will this job allow me to spend time on in-character activities like, for example, reading, strategizing, writing, and researching? Will I have a private workspace or be subject to the constant demand...
Why do we accept this one-size-fits-all situation as a given when we know perfectly well that adults don’t organize themselves this way? We often marvel at how introverted, geeky kids blossom into sec...
Why did these leaders’ effectiveness turn on whether their employees were passive or proactive? Grant says it makes sense that introverts are uniquely good at leading initiative-takers. Because of the...
When you go to a football game and someone offers you a beer [...], they're really saying hi, have a glass of extroversion.
When people are skilled at adopting free traits, it can be hard to believe that they’re acting out of character. Professor Little’s students are usually incredulous when he claims to be an introvert....
What's so magical about solitude? In many fields, it's only when you're alone that you can engage in deliberate practice. This is the key to exceptional achievement.
What is the inner behavior of people whose most visible feature is that when you take them to a party they aren't very pleased about it?
What if you love knowledge for its own sake, not necessarily as a blueprint to action? What if you wish there were more, not fewer reflective types in the world?
We see ourselves as a nation of extroverts—which means that we’ve lost sight of who we really are.
We perceive talkers as smarter than quiet types—even though grade-point averages and SAT and intelligence test scores reveal this perception to be inaccurate.
We consume indie music and films, and generate our own online content. We think different (even if we got the idea from Apple Computer’s famous ad campaign).
We all write our life stories as if we were novelists, McAdams believes, with beginnings, conflicts, turning points, and endings. And the way we characterize our past setbacks profoundly influences ho...
Unhappy people tend to see setbacks as contaminants that ruined an otherwise good thing (I was never the same again after my wife left me), while generative adults see them as blessings in disguise (T...
This style of teaching reflects the business community, one fifth-grade teacher in a Manhattan public school told me, where people’s respect for others is based on their verbal abilities, not their or...
They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in w...
The word introvert is not a synonym for hermit or misanthrope.
The things that interested him, music and writing, held no value for the people who mattered most back then: his peers. People would always tell me, ‘These are the best years of your life,’ he recalls...
The parents of high-reactive children are exceedingly lucky, Belsky told me. The time and effort they invest will actually make a difference. Instead of seeing these kids as vulnerable to adversity, p...
The other thing Aron found about sensitive people is that sometimes they're highly empathic. It's as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people's emotions and from the tragedies...