Quiet (54 page)

40.
disproportionate numbers of graduate degrees
: G. P. Macdaid, M. H. McCaulley, and R. I. Kainz,
Atlas of Type Tables
(Gainesville, FL: Center for Applications of Psychological Type, 1986), pp. 483–85. See also Hill, “Developmental Student Achievement.”

41.
outperform extroverts on the Watson-Glaser
: Joanna Moutafi, Adrian Furnham, and John Crump, “Demographic and Personality Predictors of Intelligence: A Study Using the NEO Personality Inventory and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator,”
European Journal of Personality
17, no. 1 (2003): 79–84.

42.
Introverts are not smarter than extroverts
: Author interview with Gerald Matthews, November 24, 2008. See also D. H. Saklofske and D. D. Kostura, “Extraversion-Introversion and Intelligence,”
Personality and Individual Differences
11, no. 6 (1990): 547–51.

43.
those performed under time or social pressure
: Gerald Matthews and Lisa Dorn, “Cognitive and Attentional Processes in Personality and Intelligence,”
in
International Handbook of Personality and Intelligence
, edited by Donald H. Saklofske and Moshe Zeidner (New York: Plenum Press, 1995), 367–96. See also Gerald Matthews et al.,
Personality Traits
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 12.

44.
also direct their attention differently … are asking “what if”
: Debra L. Johnson et al., “Cerebral Blood Flow and Personality: A Positron Emission Tomography Study,”
The American Journal of Psychiatry
156 (1999): 252–57. See also Lee Tilford Davis and Peder E. Johnson, “An Assessment of Conscious Content as Related to Introversion-Extroversion,”
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
3, no. 2 (1983).

45.
a difficult jigsaw puzzle to solve
: Colin Cooper and Richard Taylor, “Personality and Performance on a Frustrating Cognitive Task,”
Perceptual and Motor Skills
88, no. 3 (1999): 1384.

46.
a complicated series of printed mazes
: Rick Howard and Maeve McKillen, “Extraversion and Performance in the Perceptual Maze Test,”
Personality and Individual Differences
11, no. 4 (1990): 391–96. See also John Weinman, “Noncognitive Determinants of Perceptual Problem-Solving Strategies,”
Personality and Individual Differences
8, no. 1 (1987): 53–58.

47.
Raven Standard Progressive Matrices
: Vidhu Mohan and Dalip Kumar, “Qualitative Analysis of the Performance of Introverts and Extroverts on Standard Progressive Matrices,”
British Journal of Psychology
67, no. 3 (1976): 391–97.

48.
personality traits of effective call-center employees
: Interview with the author, February 13, 2007.

49.
if you were staffing an investment bank
: Interview with the author, July 7, 2010.

50.
men who are shown erotic pictures
: Camelia Kuhnen et al., “Nucleus Accumbens Activation Mediates the Influence of Reward Cues on Financial Risk Taking,”
NeuroReport
19, no. 5 (2008): 509–13.

51.
all introverts are constantly … vigilant about threats
: Indeed, many contemporary personality psychologists would say that threat-vigilance is more characteristic of a trait known as “neuroticism” than of introversion per se.

52.
threat-vigilance is more characteristic of a trait
: But harm avoidance is correlated with both introversion and neuroticism (both traits are associated with Jerry Kagan's “high reactivity” and Elaine Aron's “high sensitivity”). See Mary E. Stewart et al., “Personality Correlates of Happiness and Sadness: EPQ-R and TPQ Compared,”
Personality and Individual Differences
38, no. 5 (2005): 1085–96.

53.
“If you want to determine”
: can be found at
http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/ccarver/sclBISBAS.html
.
I first came across this scale in Jonathan Haidt's excellent book,
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
(New York: Basic Books, 2005), 34.

54.
“become independent of the social environment”
: Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi,
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 16.

55.
“Psychological theories usually assume”
: Mihalyi Csikszentmilhalyi,
The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), xii.

56.
you probably find that your energy is boundless
: The same goes for happiness. Research suggests that buzz and other positive emotions seem to come a little easier to extroverts, and that extroverts as a group are happier. But when psychologists compare happy extroverts with happy introverts, they find that the two groups share many of the same characteristics—self-esteem; freedom from anxiety; satisfaction with their life work—and that those features predict happiness more strongly than extroversion itself does. See Peter Hills and Michael Argyle, “Happiness, Introversion-Extraversion and Happy Introverts,”
Personality and Individual Differences
30 (2001): 595–608.

57.
“Release Your Inner Extrovert”
:
BusinessWeek
online column, November 26, 2008.

58.
Chuck Prince
: For an account of Chuck Prince's persona, see, for example, Mara Der Hovanesian, “Rewiring Chuck Prince,”
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
, February 20, 2006.

59.
Seth Klarman
: For information on Klarman, see, for example, Charles Klein, “Klarman Tops Griffin as Investors Hunt for ‘Margin of Safety,' ”
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
, June 11, 2010. See also Geraldine Fabrikant, “Manager Frets Over Market but Still Outdoes It,”
New York Times
, May 13, 2007.

60.
Michael Lewis
: Michael Lewis,
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).

61.
Warren Buffett
: Warren Buffett's story, as related in this chapter, comes from an excellent biography: Alice Schroeder,
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
(New York: Bantam Books, 2008).

62.
“inner scorecard”
: Some psychologists would relate Warren Buffett's self-direction not necessarily to introversion but to a different phenomenon called “internal locus of control.”

  1.
Mike Wei
: The interviews with Mike Wei and others from Cupertino, related throughout this chapter, were conducted with the author at various stages between 2006 and 2010.

  2.
article called “The New White Flight”
: Suein Hwang, “The New White Flight,”
Wall Street Journal
, November 19, 2005.

  3.
53 were National Merit Scholarship … 27 percent higher than the
nationwide average
: Monta Vista High School website, as of May 31, 2010.

  4.
Talking is simply not a focus
: Richard C. Levin, “Top of the Class: The Rise of Asia's Universities,”
Foreign Affairs
, May/June 2010.

  5.
the
San Jose Mercury News
ran an article
: Sarah Lubman, “East West Teaching Traditions Collide,”
San Jose Mercury News
, February 23, 1998.

  6.
“colleges can learn to listen to their sound of silence”
: Heejung Kim, “We Talk, Therefore We Think? A Cultural Analysis of the Effect of Talking on Thinking,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
83, no. 4 (2002): 828–42.

  7.
The
Journal of Research in Personality
: Robert R. McCrae, “Human Nature and Culture: A Trait Perspective,”
Journal of Research in Personality
38 (2004): 3–14.

  8.
Americans are some of the most extroverted
: See, for example, David G. Winter,
Personality: Analysis and Interpretation of Lives
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 459.

  9.
One study comparing eight- to ten-year-old children
: Xinyin Chen et al., “Social Reputation and Peer Relationships in Chinese and Canadian Children: A Cross-Cultural Study,”
Child Development
63, no. 6 (1992): 1336–43. See also W. Ray Crozier,
Shyness: Development, Consolidation and Change
(Routledge, 2001), 147.

10.
Chinese high school students tell researchers
: Michael Harris Bond,
Beyond the Chinese Face: Insights from Psychology
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 62.

11.
Another study asked Asian-Americans
: Kim, “We Talk, Therefore We Think?”

12.
Asian attitudes to the spoken word
: See, for example, Heejung Kim and Hazel Markus, “Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Silence: An Analysis of Talking as a Cultural Practice,” in
Engaging Cultural Differences in Liberal Democracies
, edited by Richard K. Shweder et al. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), 432–52.

13.
proverbs from the East
: Some of these come from the epigraph of the article by Heejung Kim and Hazel Markus, cited above.

14.
grueling Ming dynasty–era
jinshi
exam
: Nicholas Kristof, “The Model Students,”
New York Times
, May 14, 2006.

15.
pictures of men in dominance poses
: Jonathan Freeman et al., “Culture Shapes a Mesolimbic Response to Signals of Dominance and Subordination that Associates with Behavior,”
NeuroImage
47 (2009): 353–59.

16.
“It is only those from an explicit tradition”
: Harris Bond,
Beyond the Chinese Face
, 53.

17.
taijin kyofusho
: Carl Elliott,
Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 71.

18.
Tibetan Buddhist monks find inner peace
: Marc Kaufman, “Meditation Gives Brain a Charge, Study Finds,”
Washington Post
, January 3, 2005.

19.
“Their civility has been well documented”
: Lydia Millet, “The Humblest of Victims,”
New York Times
, August 7, 2005.

20.
Westernization of the past several decades
: See, for example, Xinyin Chen et al., “Social Functioning and Adjustment in Chinese Children: The Imprint of Historical Time,”
Child Development
76, no. 1 (2005): 182–95.

21.
One study comparing European-American
: C. S. Huntsinger and P. E. Jose, “A Longitudinal Investigation of Personality and Social Adjustment Among Chinese American and European American Adolescents,”
Child Development
77, no. 5 (2006): 1309–24. Indeed, the same thing seems to be happening to Chinese kids
in China
as the country Westernizes, according to a series of longitudinal studies measuring changes in social attitudes. While shyness was associated with social and academic achievement for elementary school children as recently as 1990, by 2002 it predicted peer rejection and even depression. See Chen, “Social Functioning and Adjustment in Chinese Children.”

22.
The journalist Nicholas Lemann
: “Jews in Second Place,”
Slate
, June 25, 1996.

23.
“A … E … U … O … I”
: These vowels were presented out of the usual sequence at Preston Ni's seminar.

24.
Gandhi was, according to his autobiography
: The story of Gandhi related in this chapter comes primarily from
Gandhi: An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), esp. 6, 20, 40–41, 59, 60–62, 90–91.

25.
The TIMSS exam
: I originally learned about this from Malcom Gladwell,
Outliers: The Story of Success
(New York: Little Brown and Company, 2008).

26.
In 1995, for example, the first year the TIMSS was given
: “Pursuing Excellence: A Study of U.S. Eighth-Grade Mathematics and Science Teaching, Learning Curriculum, and Achievement in International Context, Initial Findings from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study,” U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Pursuing Excellence, NCES 97-198 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996).

27.
In 2007, when researchers measured
: TIMSS Executive Summary. The nations whose students fill out more of the questionnaire also tend to have students who do well on the TIMSS test: Erling E. Boe et al., “Student Task Persistence in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study: A Major Source of Achievement Differences at the National, Classroom and Student Levels” (Research Rep. No. 2002-TIMSS1) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, Center for Research and Evaluation in Social Policy). Note that this study was based on 1995 data.

28.
cross-cultural psychologist Priscilla Blinco
: Priscilla Blinco, “Task Persistence in Japanese Elementary Schools,” in
Windows on Japanese Education
, edited by Edward R. Beauchamp (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991). Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this study in his book
Outliers
.