#extraversion

Ci-dessous, in extenso, une conversation dans le groupe WhatsApp KIVU NEWS [1/24, 06:50] Assani Longhe AL: La RDC À DAVOS 2026, LA RUPTURE DOCTRINALE MAJEURE: PASSAGE D’UNE DIPLOMATIE DE SOLLICITATION À UNE DIPLOMATIE D’INFLUENCE ET DE PARTENARIAT. Davos, 23-01-2026En tout, ce sont quelque 3.000 personnes de 130 pays qui ont participé au Forum économique de Davos26. Parmi eux figurent “près de…

By: John Burn-Murdoch

Published: Aug 8, 2025

NEW: Is the internet changing our personalities for the worse?

Conscientiousness and extroversion are down, neuroticism up, with young adults leading the charge.

This is a really consequential shift, and there’s a lot going on here, so let’s get into the weeds 

First up, personality analysis can feel vague, and you might well ask why it even matters?

On the first of those, the finding of distinct personality traits is robust. This field of research has been around for decades and holds up pretty well, even across cultures. 

On the second, studies consistently find personality shapes life outcomes.

In fact, personality traits — esp conscientiousness and neuroticism — are stronger predictors of career success, divorce and mortality than someone’s socio-economic background or cognitive abilities. 

Highly conscientious people (dependable, disciplined, committed) fare best of all. They live the longest, succeed at work, their relationships last.

This makes sense. Life isn’t just about knowing what you should do or having the resources to do it, it’s about following through. 

Conscientiousness is especially critical in the modern world. Life today is full of temptations. From hyper-engaging digital media to online gambling, the ability to ignore it all and put long-term wellbeing ahead of short-term kicks becomes a superpower. 

Generative AI could supercharge this dynamic.

A high-C student might use an LLM as a personal tutor to strengthen their knowledge of a concept; their low-C counterpart might task the same LLM with writing their essay, foregoing knowledge acquisition altogether. 

So, that’s conscientiousness.

At the other end of the spectrum, people high in neuroticism (anxious, often tense, feel emotions very strongly) tend to face more challenges in life.

Relationships break down, work life is difficult, stress can bring health problems. 

That’s what makes this chart so important.

People are changing in ways that decades of research suggests will lead to worse life outcomes, and this is particularly true of today’s teens, twenty- and thirty-somethings.

First up, personality analysis can feel vague, and you might well ask why it even matters?

On the first of those, the finding of distinct personality traits is robust. This field of research has been around for decades and holds up pretty well, even across cultures. 

On the second, studies consistently find personality shapes life outcomes.

In fact, personality traits — esp conscientiousness and neuroticism — are stronger predictors of career success, divorce and mortality than someone’s socio-economic background or cognitive abilities. 

Highly conscientious people (dependable, disciplined, committed) fare best of all. They live the longest, succeed at work, their relationships last.

This makes sense. Life isn’t just about knowing what you should do or having the resources to do it, it’s about following through. 

Conscientiousness is especially critical in the modern world. Life today is full of temptations. From hyper-engaging digital media to online gambling, the ability to ignore it all and put long-term wellbeing ahead of short-term kicks becomes a superpower. 

Generative AI could supercharge this dynamic.

A high-C student might use an LLM as a personal tutor to strengthen their knowledge of a concept; their low-C counterpart might task the same LLM with writing their essay, foregoing knowledge acquisition altogether. 

So, that’s conscientiousness.

At the other end of the spectrum, people high in neuroticism (anxious, often tense, feel emotions very strongly) tend to face more challenges in life.

Relationships break down, work life is difficult, stress can bring health problems. 

That’s what makes this chart so important.

People are changing in ways that decades of research suggests will lead to worse life outcomes, and this is particularly true of today’s teens, twenty- and thirty-somethings.

If the headline terms still feel fuzzy, we can dig into the more detailed traits they’re made up of.

Here are some of the sub-traits inside conscientiousness:

Young people say they increasingly struggle to make plans and follow through on them. They feel distracted, careless.

They also say they feel less outgoing and talkative (true of everyone, but especially young adults). Young people also report feeling less helpful and less trusting, as well as more argumentative.

Again: these are people’s own self-assessments, not others’ descriptions of them.

These detailed traits lead me to point the finger at the digital world.

Ubiquitous and hyper-engaging digital media has led to an explosion in distraction, as well as making it easier than ever to either not make plans in the first place or to abandon them last minute. 

To put it another way: distractions derail our intentions. And we’re now more distracted than ever.

Distraction is toxic to conscientiousness. 

As @kylascan has written, the sheer convenience of the online world makes real-life commitments feel messy and effortful

The in-person world encourages conscientiousness. The digital world gives you an opt-out.

The rise of time spent online and accompanying decline in face-to-face interactions mean less social policing of bad behaviours like “ghosting”. See @_alice_evans here:

If you’re low-C on the internet, you don’t pay the price. Not immediately, at least...

And note the timing of that steep young adult dip in extroversion:

The pandemic years when young people bore the brunt of restrictions on socialising in order to protect others from harm.

Long the most extroverted group in society, young adults are now the most introverted.

But I want to end on a more empowering note:

Unlike parental background and genetic make-up, there is a wealth of evidence that personality is malleable — what has been eroded can be rebuilt. 

Conscientiousness will separate those who just survive from those who thrive in the 21st century. We can each decide which half of that divide we fall on — but ironically that will take some dedication.

Here’s my article in full:

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By: John Burn-Murdoch

Published: Aug 8, 2025

What are the key attributes that shape the length and quality of our careers, relationships and lives more broadly? The socio-economic environment we grow up in certainly has a substantial influence, with parental prosperity acting as a propellant or a key to unlock crucial doors. Cognitive abilities are another obvious one: they enable better decision-making in all aspects of life. But another factor often gets less credit despite being just as important: personality.

In fact, studies consistently find that traits such as conscientiousness (the quality of being dependable and disciplined), emotional stability or agreeableness have a stronger link with professional success, relationship durability and longevity than the links between those outcomes and someone’s intelligence or socio-economic background.

Of all personality types, conscientious people tend to fare best on a number of key measures. They live the longest, have the most career success and are less likely to go through divorce. They even manage to hold down a job during recessions. Intuitively, this makes sense. Life isn’t just about knowing what you should do, or having the resources to do it, it’s about following through. Being motivated and persistent is a huge help.

Some studies suggest the advantage of conscientiousness is growing over time, and it’s easy to imagine why. When contemporary daily life is full of temptations — from always-on mobile internet and the lures of social media and online gambling, to hyper-palatable foods — the ability to ignore it all and put long-term wellbeing ahead of short-term kicks becomes a superpower.

Generative artificial intelligence could supercharge this dynamic. An industrious student who is not deterred by a challenge might use a large language model as a personal tutor to strengthen their knowledge of a concept; their less conscientious counterpart might task the same LLM with writing their essay, foregoing knowledge acquisition altogether.

All this makes it disconcerting that levels of conscientiousness in the population appear to be in decline. Extending a pioneering 2022 US study which identified early signs of a drop during the pandemic, I found a sustained erosion of conscientiousness, with the fall especially pronounced among young adults.

Digging deeper into the data, which comes from the Understanding America Study, we can see that people in their twenties and thirties in particular report feeling increasingly easily distracted and careless, less tenacious and less likely to make and deliver on commitments.

While a full explanation of these shifts requires thorough investigation, and there will be many factors at work, smartphones and streaming services seem likely culprits. The advent of ubiquitous and hyper-engaging digital media has led to an explosion in distraction, as well as making it easier than ever to either not make plans in the first place or to abandon them. The sheer convenience of the online world makes real-life commitments feel messy and effortful. And the rise of time spent online and the attendant decline in face-to-face interactions enable behaviours such as “ghosting”.

Collapsing conscientiousness is not the only personality shift visible in the data. Neuroticism — a function of the much-discussed increase in anxiety — has risen almost as much. Young adults also report feeling less amiable and outgoing. There’s a particularly steep drop shown in the latter during the pandemic, when young people bore the brunt of restrictions on contact in order to protect others from harm. In fact, long the most extroverted group in society, young adults are now the most introverted.

While the terminology of personality can feel vague, the science is solid. Decades of research consistently finds that all these shifts are in the direction associated with negative outcomes down the line. Life is full of challenges. A less committed, less connected and more easily distressed cohort will navigate them less well.

Maybe, your brain got a little bit fucked up. Maybe it wasn't a good time. Maybe you didn't like being alone, or being trapped in your room. Maybe you thought you were introverted just because you couldn't meet people, and weren't significantly sadder than you were everyday. It took me 5 years to understand I wasn't who I thought I was, that I wasn't who I pretended to be, and that I built my life in a way I could never be happy with. All because of one single fucked up year.

(the next paragraphs are my story, but you can skip straight to the conclusions after)

I was in middle school, hated it as much as a bullied, lonely kid could hate it. I didn't hate being home yet. It wasn't a sanctuary, but it was enough to give me a break. Covid was spreading, and we all ended up in lockdown, city by city. None of us thought it would happen. I felt guilty to be a child, of wanting to go outside and play. I got drowned in schoolwork, from when I woke up to 7/8pm, even during the night sometimes, because I didn't know I was the only one doing it. I didn't have any hobby and just played videogames when I was done. Alone all day, didn't talk to or see anyone except my family.

I fell in a spiral I couldn't escape. And sure enough I got severely depressed. A child growing up alone, feeling like something was wrong with them, only being able to talk to a family that didn't care to understand, or teens just as depressed on discord.

Years later, after therapy, I started realising that maybe l’m not introverted. That I didn't like being home at all. That I didn't like school, that I only liked it because it meant I wasn't home with my family, that I wasn't alone. I went to parties, spent time with friends, but something was still wrong. And yet, I had good grades, and got into an engineering school.

During the summer break, I spent two weeks in a camping, and the more I spent time here, the more I realised that if I could be outside, even only on my own, I wasn't so miserable. I spent time helping the camping staff, who turned out to be the kindest, most reassuring and helpful people I've met. People who welcomed me with open arms the second they saw me. People who yelled my name in a mic in front of dozen of people to say hello to me personally, and not anyone else, despite knowing me for barely a week. And I found my smile again. When I sent pictures of me to a friend, she told me that she forgot how beautiful my smile was. I was surrounded by strangers, and yet the happiest I've been in several years, maybe the happiest I've ever been. I never was introverted. I always hated being alone, and it didn't even matter if I was with people I knew or just anybody. I never was shy, just afraid because I didn't know how to talk to people at all. I didn't like being inside, being on the internet for hours, being awake at night, I hated it all but I convinced myself that it was what I was meant to be. I wasn't dependant on my friends I just needed to socialise with others.

I went numb, because I was smart, and I had to study and study, and go to work, then spend all the money I'll earn on therapy and trips to the countryside to get my mental health back. I played into the narrative of the passionate artist who was forced to study engineering but would make a living off of their art later, because artists on the internet shared their life as introverts, happy to spend their days inside, and that was all I knew how to be.

And I refuse to live like this any longer

Covid fucked up your brain. It fucked up your perception of yourself because it had to, for you to not feel like your life is slipping between your fingers. Nobody talk about how much they love seing people because it's supposed to be the "norm". It's not. The norm is putting on a soulless mask of a happy person, destroying yourself to be attractive and popular. Nobody wants to live this life, and pitching introverts and extroverts against eachother, like two absolutes only hurts both sides. Extroverts not daring to call themselves extroverts because they aren't popular enough, feeling like they are faking this need to see people, and introverts forcing themselves to see people they don't like. No one is happy. Don't buy into this fake dichotomy. Destroy the system. Extraversion is not the norm. And even if it was you shouldn't be ashamed to talk about what makes you happy, you don't have to pretend to hate people because you don't have friends when you want some deep inside. They will come. It's better to find the right friends than to be reliant on a thousand fake ones, or to straight up reject everyone. You do need to form relationships with other human beings, whether introverted or extraverted (or ambiverted or whatever).

Because of this lockdown, of this crushing loneliness, maybe you became depressed. Maybe you told yourself you were happy that way (or maybe you genuinely were happy I'm no one to tell you how you should feel). Either way I hope it doesn't take you 5 years, and thousands spent on therapy like me when to realise what you needed most was to get away from your toxic family, and get away from your house, spend time with people, make them laugh and bathe in the sun, or walk under the rain (and maybe a diagnosis for whatever mental illness I think that'd help too). I'm not saying it's all you need, but it's worth trying.

Social AnxietyPhoto courtesy of Pixabay. Don’t confuse social anxiety with being an introvert. By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Counselor. Having social anxiety does not make you an introvert. Many people seem to be mistaking social anxiety for being an introvert. Several people have told me they think they are introverts because they are shy and anxious in social settings. I…

Carl Jung coined the terms introversion and extraversion, and he originally defined them as follows:

An introvert is a person who begins their thinking process with a subject, then moves to an object, and then finishes their thinking process with the subject. An extrovert is the reverse- they begin their thinking process with an object and also end with an object.

Essentially what this means is that introverted thinking begins with something in ones internal world of thoughts and feelings and also ends there, while extroverted thinking begins with something outside of one's internal world and ends there. These days we tend to think of introversion and extraversion as the degree to which one is comfortable in social situations, but if anything this is only auxiliary to the original definition.

For example, it's common for extroverted thinkers to come up with moral codes by which they believe the whole world should operate. For them the source of morality comes from somewhere external, such as religious dogma, philosophy, etc (and sometimes introverted thinkers get forced into this kind of thinking unnaturally). The result is a rigid worldview based on "objective" principles, and when some aspect of themselves or the world goes against this principle, they either subtly alter the principle in their thinking or experience neurosis.

And it probably goes without saying that people who think this way are not always social, although it also isn't impossible.

If you're an introvert, you probably start with yourself in your thinking and end there as well. Which makes it especially difficult to hear all of these people telling your you're a bad person if you do x or y thing, because you can internalize it in a way that the people moralizing really can't. And that's kinda sad because that voice that you internalize that says you're a bad person for having the experience that you're having is a major block to your creativity.

In this society we're conditioned to believe that it's bad to stay in your internal world of thoughts and feelings, and that we should focus all of our attention on things outside of us. I'm here to tell you that it's a bunch of bullshit. The way that you think and interact with the world is beautiful. It's the way of thinking that births real original art.

Beyond physical appearance,recent study found that #dogs & their #owners also share similarities in the 'Big Five' personality dimensions: #extraversion, #agreeableness, #openness, #conscientiousness, #neuroticism.

#cars're social class marker for owners