Sure there is - they show up on college campuses every fall and call themselves “Orientation Leaders.”
In my case, it’s both. I am a genuine introvert who cherishes my alone time, and I also have pretty significant social anxiety. Forcing myself to get out there and do more stuff with more people might help with the social anxiety, but at the cost of my introverted self. Kind of a thorny issue to address. Ideally the only reason I’d choose to stay home would be natural preference rather than anxiety. It’s usually a mix of both.
There’s also a reinforcement effect. True introverts are less likely to socialize therefore more likely to lack these skills therefore more likely to be socially awkward which reinforces social anxiety. I think there’s probably a high comorbidity there, for lack of a better word.
That describes me too.
Just for fun, I asked Google AI whether people who prefer to isolate themselves (extreme introverts), or people who are very gregarious (extreme extroverts) statistically commit more crimes of violence against people (which is to say, for no other end than cruelty or expressing grievances).
The answer was introverts commit more by percentage. However, AI found a couple of studies that both groups of people plan crimes as frequently, extroverts just talk about them more (kind of axiomatically-- they talk about EVERYTHING more); therefore, extroverts are more likely to get stopped in the planning stage by someone who \intervenes, while introverts are not.
I then asked if, even though a greater percentage of introverts committed such crimes, which group commits the greater total number, and got stats that show that because many more people self-report being extroverts than introverts, the greater number of crimes of cruelty or venting grievances are committed by people who are extroverted. Especially, for some reason, if you add in animal cruelty. This is by far an extrovert’s crime. Go scratch.
That means that even if introverts as a group produce a higher percentage of criminal X, and we want to catch lots of criminals X, checking every introvert is not the way to do so. Extroverts produce the greatest total number, so check them.
It occurred to me to wonder if there has ever been a fait test of leaving introverts the hell alone, given that they are out-numbered, and all the extroverts have got themselves convinced that harassing then will bring down crime.
Then I thought of the pandemic.
I don’t trust AI here, because at it really does is look up stats and meta-studies a hell of a lot faster than I ever could, and I don’t think this work has been done yet, but I wonder if introvert-type crimes went down at the beginning of lockdown? That may be the only natural experiment in our own time in leaving introverts the hell alone, and a very rare one of scale. We used to have quarantines, and things.
Don’t get me started on *identifying things introverts do as criminal," and things extroverts do as “mischievous,” or other words like that.
Interesting question. It’s possible that attempting to figure out the answer would be further complicated by the possibility that similar crimes committed by extroverts may have gone up.
as a side note, how do we classify people who have a thousand (nebulous) friends online–from a distance–but never go out to make/meet REAL friends in person
We call them “Dopers”. That’s how. 