Introverts trying to be Extraverted: Difficult to Fake it Til You Make It

New research reported in Scientific American shows that Introverts will struggle to look extraverted in a hyper-extraverted environment:

Another line of research led by Rowan Jacques-Hamilton investigated the costs of sustained extraverted behavior in everyday life. I highlighted the word "sustained" because it turns out this is a really important caveat. Prior research had shown that no matter one's placement on the extraversion-introversion continuum, those who more naturally acted extraverted were more likely to feel authentic in the moment. Consistent with that finding, Jacques-Hamilton and his colleagues found that asking participants to "act extraverted" for one week in everyday life had "wholly positive" benefits for positive emotions and reports of authenticity for the sample overall. However, the important nuance is that more introverted people displayed weaker increases in positive emotions, experienced increased negative emotions and tiredness, and experienced decreased feelings of authenticity over the course of the experiment. This research highlights the costs of repeatedly acting out of character, and also the costs of being forced to act of character (the experimenters explicitly instructed the participants to act in a certain way). This has deep implications for the well-being of introverts who live in cultures where extraversion is highly valued and emphasized as the ideal way of being. C. Ashley Fulmer and her colleagues investigated the relationship between extraversion and happiness and self-esteem across 7,000 people from 28 societies and found that the positive relationship between extraversion and happiness and self-esteem was much greater when a person's level of extraversion matched the average level of extraversion of their society. This research suggests that person-environment fit matters quite a bit when looking at the relationship between introversion and well-being. The researchers proposed a "person-culture match hypothesis" that argues that culture can function as an important amplifier of the positive effect of personality on self-esteem and happiness.*

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Coddled Children Grow up Self-Disruptive

In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Attorney Greg Lukianoff (founder of FIRE) and moral psyhchologist Jonathan Haidt address America’s mushrooming inability to engage in productive civil discourse. Increasing numbers of people are claiming that they cannot cope with ideas that challenge their own world view. They sometimes claim that ideas that challenge their own ideas are "not safe." In dozens of well-publicized cases, rather than work to counteract "bad" ideas with better ideas, they work to muzzle speaker by disrupting presentations or even running the purportedly offensive speakers off campus. There is a related and growing problem. We cannot talk with each other at all regarding many many important issues. We shout each other down and use the heckler's veto. These maladies are especially prominent on some American college campuses, but these problems are also rapidly spreading to the country at large, including corporate America. Consider this 2016 example featuring the students of Yale having a "discussion" with Professor Nicholas Christakis: You would never guess it from this video alone, but this mass-meltdown was triggered after child development specialist Erika Christakis (wife of Nicholas), sent this email to students. This incident at Yale is one of many illustrations offered by Haidt and Lukianoff as evidence of a disturbing trend.  Here's another egregious example involving Dean Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna College who was run out of her college after committing the sin of writing this email to a student.  More detail here.  The authors offer this as the genesis of the overall problem:

In years past, administrators were motivated to create campus speech codes in order to curtail what they deemed to be racist or sexist speech. Increasingly, however, the rationale for speech codes and speaker disinvitations was becoming medicalized: Students claimed that certain kinds of speech—and even the content of some books and courses—interfered with their ability to function. They wanted protection from material that they believed could jeopardize their mental health by “triggering” them, or making them “feel unsafe.”
The solution offered by Lukianoff and Haidt is to take a moment to stop to recognize what they call the “Three Bad Ideas.”

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Waitress Reports: Families no longer having conversations over dinner

My daughters and I ate at a local diner tonight. Our waitress has been doing this work for 45 years, since she was 15. She said one of the striking changes in her business is how people no longer engage in conversations while eating. She estimated that 8 out of 10 groups of people barely talk. Instead, they are mostly looking at their phones while they eat at the restaurant. She is dismayed about this and said that she sees this in her own family; it is difficult to have conversation with her own children because they are glued to their phones. Apparently, Phubbing is the new normal.

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United States Interference with foreign elections

There is so very much hypocrisy in the air and on the ground these days! One type that is prominent is the claim that Russia has interfered with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. If true, that is obviously a bad thing. But as this article from Mint News indicates, it is a rare news article that reminds its consumers that the United States has a long history of interfering with the elections in other countries:

Despite that the U.S. has hypocritically exerted influence over foreign elections in all corners of the globe — in fact, it has arrogantly done so a whopping 81 times between 1946 and 2000, alone — with just one-third of those operations undertaken overtly.
Check out the article for the details.

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