# Are people on Facebook conflating introversion with shyness/anxiety? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 4, 2012, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-people-on-facebook-conflating-introversion-with-shyness-anxiety/617761 "2012-04-04T01:08:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2012, 5:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-people-on-facebook-conflating-introversion-with-shyness-anxiety/617761/41 "2012-04-08T05:58:12Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > I have occasional thoughts. My doctoral research includes ancient languages, applied mathematics, and a bunch of stuff in between. I have reasonable competence in a few areas, even if I am nothing special in any one of my fields. I am very committed to ideas, am not a pinhead overspecialist, and I am non-shy. My thoughts are sufficiently useful that I have a piece forthcoming in a volume next year (and no it is not a conference proceeding). > > This conversation is my idea of hell. I am sure you find it refreshing, rejuvenating, and absolutely scintillating. I get that and I hope you find conversation partners who share your enthusiasm. > > But please understand that when you ask me whether I am sure I saw a frog as opposed to a toad, I am already fantasizing about shooting myself in the face. I will desperately look for any way to end the conversation and extricate myself with a minimum of hurt feelings. It’s not that I _can’t_ talk to you about this; I probably can recall a few lines of Aristophanes’ Frogs off the top of my head in Greek should it be relevant. I am sure you are witty and charming. But I would find the discussion enervating in the extreme. I would endure it only if there were some instrumental value. It is not my idea of fun. I can’t imagine having that strong a revulsion to something that isn’t anxiety based. The usual distinction between extroverts and introverts does not involve revulsion at having a conversation, just that it feels draining. Are you sure what you characterize as introversion isn’t social anxiety? ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2012, 1:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-people-on-facebook-conflating-introversion-with-shyness-anxiety/617761/42 "2012-04-08T13:08:09Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > I can’t imagine having that strong a revulsion to something that isn’t anxiety based. The usual distinction between extroverts and introverts does not involve revulsion at having a conversation, just that it feels draining. Are you sure what you characterize as introversion isn’t social anxiety? Was there something unclear about my statement that I would find the conversation “enervating in the extreme?” I might find all sorts of things draining and unpleasant without suggesting I am anxious about them. I definitely do not have social anxiety of any kind. ---
**Author:** ![eclectic\_wench](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ac91a4/32.png) [@eclectic\_wench](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eclectic_wench)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2012, 2:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-people-on-facebook-conflating-introversion-with-shyness-anxiety/617761/43 "2012-04-08T14:18:03Z")
I don’t think it’s even a matter of conflating introversion with shyness - I think they’re conflating introversion with a whole lot of completely unrelated stuff. 1, 2, 5 and 8 are basic politeness. (Seriously, if you don’t know that some of these are basic manners, you shouldn’t be interacting with anyone, extroverted or introverted.) 3, 4, 6 and 9 are about personality traits that don’t have anything to do with extroversion or introversion. 7 is about raising a toddler. 10 is just plain weird. Who ‘enables’ someone else to make friends? Isn’t that, I don’t know, up to the person? I wouldn’t even know how to ‘enable’ someone (other than my toddler) to make friends. 11 is a combo of ‘basic manners’ and ‘plain weird’. Who on earth, except weirdoes, tries to decide how many friends another person should have? 12 makes total sense: don’t try and make another person into you. Duh. This applies to introverts dealing with extroverts, too, and to basically any other combination of personalities. I’m introverted - I recharge by being on my own - but I love, need and enjoy hanging out with friends, too. And I don’t tend to observe a situation before I jump in, or any of that other stuff. This reads like it was written by someone who has no idea what ‘introverted’ and’extroverted’ actually mean; instead he has one friend with all the personality traits described, and he’s decided that those must somehow be the definition of introversion. ---
**Author:** ![Ashley\_Pomeroy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c68b51/32.png) [@Ashley\_Pomeroy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ashley_Pomeroy)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2012, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-people-on-facebook-conflating-introversion-with-shyness-anxiety/617761/44 "2012-04-08T21:30:27Z")
The subject of boring conversation jogs something in my mind. I used to work with a bunch of people who are the living embodiment of the “pepperpots” from Monty Pythons Flying Circus. You know the type. “_Ooh, I was saying to Mavis the other day, I was saying to her, why is there a penguin on top of the television, I mean how did it get there? And Mavis said oooh I don’t know hey isn’t that a new television it’s better than those old models they have dials and I like BBC2 and that nice Kenneth Clarke ooh and I was in the shop the other day and I bought some margerine and when the lady at the till ran it through she gave me the wrong change so I said to her ooh then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats etc_”. It’s a recurrent stereotype of British comedy. Les Dawson used to play a similar type of character: > **[Cissie and Ada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cissie_and_Ada)** > > Cissie and Ada, in full Cissie Braithwaite and Ada Shufflebotham (or Sidebottom),\[notes 1\] are a comedy drag act featuring two fictional housewives from Northern England (or, more specifically, Lancashire). The act was created and played by the comedian Les Dawson and the comic actor Roy Barraclough on television in the 1970s and 1980s. > Cissie and Ada sketches featured the two women gossiping. Their comedic mannerisms included stoical pursing of lips and constantly heaved bosoms. Cissie and ... The appeal was presumably a combination of the familiarity of the stereotype, and of the love of language. The odd turns of phrase that people come up with when their minds aren’t turned on. That kind of comedy relies for its effect on a mixture of shared experiences and a very precise command of a standard type of English, which I suspect are two things that will slowly die out with time, as Britain transitions from a literary society to a visual one, but that’s another essay and it’s probably not correct anyway. Was Britain ever a literary society? Perhaps during the heyday of the Penguin paperback, but nowadays it’s a television society, a post-television society. Comedy and literature can either fragment into ever-smaller niches, or they can universalise, but in the process they have to become universally comprehensible, and there are limits to the amount and quality of information that can be transmitted by a set of generic icons. And yet e.g. the fish-slapping dance speaks to us all, on different levels. So perhaps the future belongs to multi-layered writing that gah etc next paragraph. Now, presumably the men of Monty Python had met and observed this type of person in real life, and I can imagine e.g. John Cleese being driven absolutely bonkers by the inane repetition, the lack of substance, etc. He strikes me as the kind of man who would not want to be stuck in a social gathering with boring people, and yet he probably was, many times, which is funny. “_Why’d you say Burma?_”, “_I panicked_”, “_Oh, intercourse the penguin_”, etc. Two things strike me, in my intellectual way. The first is that these blathering blabbermouths - these bloated boobies, these zipped-up zipperminds, these pooped-out pinwheels, these ludicrous lozenges, these most unmanly mayonnaises - are extroverted introverts, in the sense that their conversation consists of a detailed description of the things _they did_ the day before, as if their immediate surroundings were the entire world. They aren’t really interacting with other people, they’re merely delivering a monologue, with pauses. I’m sure we’ve all been on the receiving end of a “conversation” that’s entirely unidirectional. There was a quote, something like “the definition of a bore is someone who takes up your time without providing companionship”. No, no. “A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company”. Variously attributed to Oscar Wilde and some Italian bloke. But these people are really substantial introverts, because their only topic is themselves. They’re radiant introverts, as opposed to people who are functionally social without being obnoxious. They are the conversational equivalent of the face-huggers in Alien. They seek out people at parties, and then stick their metaphorical ovipositors down your metaphorical throat, and you can’t get a word in edgeways. Because you’ve got an ovipositor in your throat. And, ninthly, the Monty Python team, and most successful writer-performers in general, presumably fit the introvert pattern to a T, but at the same time you’d hardly call e.g. John Cleese (again) a withdrawn wallflower. A solitary sadcase. A lonely lizard. The Pythons - I’m just picking them because they’re familiar - must have fought hard for their show, and they had to go on stage in front of an audience, perform, and at university they would have had to meet and greet people, cultivate allies etc. They got where they got not just because they were clever comic writers, but also because they knew a lot of people and didn’t spend their days cooped up indoors. They got out there, pressed the flesh. They worked in an introverted profession that involved sitting down and writing, but they could turn it off, turn it around. So, er. I’m not sure if I had a point. Extroverts are often aggressive introverts; the definitions are fluid. The image linked at the top makes me want to smear jam over the iPad of the man or woman who came up with that particular typographical style. Really smear it in jam. Dunk it in jam. Immerse it in jam. Can you immerse something in jam? I think of immersion as something that applies to pure liquids, such as water, whereas jam is a chunky sort of thing. You immerse something in water; you bury something in soil; jam is in-between. I was thinking about “sachet”, you see. In one of the other threads a US writer mocks the use of the word sachet, as in “sachet of ketchup”. And yet in the UK we do indeed describe the little plastic packets of tomato sauce that you get in McDonalds as sachets of ketchup. Presumably because, at some point, “sachet of ketchup” sounded more American. See, until McDonald’s took off, in the 1970s, fast food burger joint tomato sauce was served in plastic tomato sauce bottles, the quintessential Wimpy Burger tomato-shaped tomato sauce bottle, with a scummy congealed crust of sauce on the spout. And then McDonald’s introduced sachets, which must have sounded a bit exotic, and of course ketchup… and of… must wind down… wind down. Have a cup of tea. ---
**Author:** ![Normal\_Phase](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Normal\_Phase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Normal_Phase)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2012, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-people-on-facebook-conflating-introversion-with-shyness-anxiety/617761/45 "2012-04-09T00:32:22Z")
My five year old has shyness issues, for lack of a better word, but is not remotely introverted – kid’s a people person through and through and always has been. ---
**Author:** ![dracoi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/90db22/32.png) [@dracoi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dracoi)\ **Post date:** [April 9, 2012, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-people-on-facebook-conflating-introversion-with-shyness-anxiety/617761/46 "2012-04-09T17:38:27Z")
> [@eclectic\_wench](#): > > 11 is a combo of ‘basic manners’ and ‘plain weird’. Who on earth, except weirdoes, tries to decide how many friends another person should have? Well, my father for one. I totally failed by 1) not being on the football team (National Merit Scholar was no substitute) 2) not becoming a doctor (CPA is apparently no substitute) and 3) not obtaining at least a dozen friends at any point in life. On the other hand, I think you can call my father a weirdo, so maybe I’m proving the point. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2012, 12:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-people-on-facebook-conflating-introversion-with-shyness-anxiety/617761/47 "2012-04-10T00:33:13Z")
> [@Ashley\_Pomeroy](#): > > But these people are really substantial introverts, because their only topic is themselves. They’re radiant introverts, as opposed to people who are functionally social without being obnoxious. They are the conversational equivalent of the face-huggers in Alien. They seek out people at parties, and then stick their metaphorical ovipositors down your metaphorical throat, and you can’t get a word in edgeways. Because you’ve got an ovipositor in your throat. Errr… no. An introvert is not someone who talks mostly about themselves. Actually an introvert is most likely to give anyone their complete and undivided attention, which is why they get exhausted in groups of people. We’re not good at filtering out irrelevant blather. It’s real work to treat people like people rather than fun sources of noise. This is one reason I am too prone to see extroverts as superficial and insincere… if you’re holding court with a group of 10 people whose composition is changing every 30 seconds, how can you possibly be discussing anything more meaningful than “Yay! We’re a group of people!” Actually, on the more generous side, I tend to draw computer analogies with extroverts and introverts. Extroverts are networkers… they accumulate nodes and connections, and it’s okay if there are errors because there’s so much redundancy and repetition. Introverts are processors, we take time to evaluate people as individuals, and we try to get it right because there are fewer encounters (or vice versa, take your pick). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-people-on-facebook-conflating-introversion-with-shyness-anxiety/617761.md?page=2)