Quiet

self-and-identity

• We live with a value system that I call the Extrovert Ideal—the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight.

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• America had shifted from a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality—and opened up a Pandora's Box of personal anxieties from which we would never quite recover.

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• In high school, in college, and as a young lawyer, I tried to make myself appear more extroverted and less eggheady than I truly was.

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ambition-and-status

• She sits in the first row of the Colored section and watches quietly as the bus fills with riders. Until the driver orders her to give her seat to a white passenger.

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• Weekly profits of stores managed by extroverts were 16 percent higher—but only when employees were passive types who tended to do their job without exercising initiative.

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mind-and-cognition

• Introverts use up capacity by monitoring how the task is going. But introverts seem to think more carefully than extroverts.

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