The motivations for the review and these studies (and my blog post) are that many people both in these studies but also anecdotally, feel that extroverts are worse listeners. People often feel as if extroverted people are "acting" and "creating a socially acceptable persona" rather than having a genuine interest in what their colleagues have to say. I wanted to review this article since myself and many of my friends are extroverts, and since having read X+Y: A Mathematician's approach to understanding Gender, I have been quite curious about ways to create a more Congressive society, or a more collaborative society and workplace, a more understanding society and workplace, and a more attentive society and workplace. To get a better definition of what this term means, try to find chapter 3 of the book mentioned above online. So, digging deeper into this Article:
"Since feeling seen and heard is important, extroverts who seem to focus on themselves may lose credibility with colleagues, the findings suggest. The research has ramifications for workplace relationships, especially as teams try to rebuild trust after two years of pandemic-related stress. Teams are often reconnecting through online platforms like Zoom where it can be harder to read social cues."
This is true. The pandemic had many ramifications for schools and workplaces -- though I would be so bold to wonder if these lines present something further. It's not just the pandemic that has brought us further into the digital world where education and business takes place, and I wonder if communication methods like emails, group chats, or other Covid-era digital communication systems have created this effect. In the past, It has been hard for me-- someone normally extroverted, but introverted online-- to break into hanging out on discord servers during the pandemic, where reading social cues to have a full conversation is minimized.
“It was a little counterintuitive, considering that extroverts are viewed as very socially capable and gregarious people,” says Collins. “I assumed that they would be seen as good listeners as well, because, in my mind, that's part of being sociable.”
We cut to the heart of why this result is perplexing: Do extroverts come off as sociable, or do they come off as obtuse? Being both affable and a bad listener is an interesting combo to actually speak about, though it does make sense when considering many of the extroverts we all know. The only way I can reconcile this in my own life is that often when I am with extroverts (And I myself do this) Introverts are given the cues of being listened to, but then the conversation shifts back to whatever the extroverts were talking about. On one hand, I think this is understandable since people naturally want to converse with people that are the same speed and mirror speech patterns of themselves. Granted, this can be hard, since we often put it to the introverts to keep up with the extroverts, and this often pushes introverts away. From my time in MUN, recruiting and retention in general has been heavily dependent on how extroverted someone is, and whether they can keep up with everyone else in the club which has always been fairly extroverted.
"The researchers conducted six studies involving nearly 2,500 subjects. In their first study, they surveyed about 150 MBA students about the listening skills of their classmates. After ranking themselves on a personality scale, students were asked to answer four questions, including: “If you were having a conversation with [classmate], to what extent would he or she … ‘listen to what you have to say, give you a chance to speak, remember what you had said the next time you see them, and be focused on things other than the conversation at hand.’”
Responses revealed a significant, negative relationship between an individual’s self-reported extroversion and group members’ ratings of that individual’s listening behavior. In other words, more extroverted individuals were seen as worse listeners.
In a second study, the researchers investigated whether the same perception would hold true in interactions among strangers. The researchers asked 655 participants recruited from an online participant pool to think about a “familiar stranger”—someone they had seen a few times in the last couple of months but never interacted with, like a fellow passenger on a train.
Participants assessed how extroverted they thought the stranger might be, and then imagined a conversation with this person, predicting the extent to which this stranger would pay attention and listen attentively, or steer the conversation toward themselves. The researchers found that when participants rated strangers as more extroverted, they also said they were more likely to be poor listeners."
So we have these results, and they align with everything else we've been talking about. The article then goes on to give several tips about what extroverts can do to give the appearance of being more attentive, but I feel this is disingenuous. I think what may be an unpopular opinion but one I think is right is that we really do just need to create a more introvert friendly society and workplace; to take a few notes from the book that was mentioned far above, some changes that could be instituted in the workplace, or in somewhere that i have a bit more experience, higher education: (1) getting rid of open forum type discussions with one person speaking, replacing them with small group discussions (2) less emphasis on speaking assessments in general, either replacing with emails or reports where ones listening ability and attentiveness is directed toward writing that can be referred back to and (3) including more women in pod-type discussions, since men are considered to be more 'extraverted' (Akbar, 2016) and having a majority of 'introverts' would likely increase the amount of attentiveness in a discussion pod.
Overall, this was good little read for the morning, and I liked making the connection to that book I've kept mentioning. I think the extraversion-introversion spectrum is a really interesting topic, and usually doesn't get enough light in the sun because people shirk these terms off saying things like "we're all extraverted and introverted in different ways" and dismiss the spectrum, though these are widely used terms and are useful for describing archetypes in a social setting. Have a read of this article and let me know what you think.
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