Reddit mentions of Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are (Oxford Landmark Science)

This is a good rundown for beginners. Fairly quick reading, accessible and well referenced.

Disclaimer: I am not a psychologist. I merely have an interest and am currently studying for a degree in a related field.


I found a "fake it till you make it" approach somewhat helpful. If you take it in baby steps, just putting it on a bit, consciously thinking about body language or how you speak, or what to say. If you feel yourself burning out, just take your foot off the gas a bit, both in the present moment and in the long term, because if you push too hard too fast then you'll end up having a bad night or an identity crisis. It will take time, it will feel like work and it may not even help you honestly, but it may be worth it in the long run if this is something that is bothering you.


In psychology there are 5 fundamental factors of personality, one of which is extroversion. While informally used to mean socially outgoing, extroversion is more accurately understood as how strongly someone feels positive emotion. While this does mean that extroverts are generally more social and outgoing (because the rewards are more worth it for the effort put in/ risk taken) how someone places on the introvert/extrovert spectrum, or any other 5 factor spectrum can be expressed in many different ways.


From what you say it sounds like you are quite introverted and possibly somewhat neurotic (another of the 5 factors) as well. introverted people tend to struggle to connect with others at first, but will form more long lasting relationships in the long run. I find that understanding where you lie on these spectra can be helpful in making you more comfortable with yourself and how you behave and view the world. Everybody loves extroverts because they're more fun at parties, but the world would be a very different and much worse place without people on the other side of the spectrum.


If you want to know more about this, I highly recommend Personality by Daniel Nettle (Amazon link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Personality-makes-Oxford-Landmark-Science/dp/0199211434 ) He explains in a clear and easily understandable way where the 5 personality factors come from and goes through how where you lie on the scale may affect you. Most importantly though, as he says himself, the aim of the book is to help people understand that they can't change where they lie on these scales (and that in all but the most extreme cases, they shouldn't want to) but that you can change how you express your fundamental personality type in order to be happy and content with yourself.

Sorry to reply to a post this old, but reading eg. Daniel Nettle's brief introduction to personality psychology, one thing he notes is a negative correlation between the two:

>When I talk about Conscientiousness, people often respond by saying 'what you are describing just sounds like intelligence'. People who set goals and follow them, and avoid bad decisions, are just smart. This is reinforced by the feeling that frontal lobe inhibitory mechanisms, whose functioning I have argued to be the essence of Conscientiousness, sound like ‘higher’, sophisticated, cognitive functions which are close to a lay person’s definition of intelligent behaviour. This view is really a misunderstanding of what psychologists mean by intelligence. Patients with orbitofrontal damage can become impulsive without loss of general intellectual ability. Many very smart people can develop addictions. This is because intelligence is not to do with the functioning of any one set of mental mechanisms. Rather, it is a global measure of how well—how fast, how efficiently— our whole nervous system is working. Thus, in someone with a high IQ score, everything works efficiently, from basic reflexes, to motor skills, language, memory, the reward system, and the inhibitory system. This says nothing about the relative strength of those different systems in that person, and therefore makes no predictions about the level of Conscientiousness.
Or so I used to think. This clarification of the nature of intelligence predicts that there will be no relationship at all between personality and intelligence, but research in the last decade has shown that this is not quite true. There are no very strong relationships between personality and intelligence, but some relationships there are, though debate about their nature and significance goes on. Most strikingly, though, in a couple of studies where relationships between Conscientiousness and intelligence have been found, they are not,as you might imagine, positive, but weakly negative.The smarter people are, the less conscientious they are.

He quotes a relatively recent study:
>Conscientiousness and intelligence: Moutafi, Furnham, and Paltiel
2005

Wikipedia notes that studies of IQ v. Conscientiousness seem to yield results in both directions.

This one's pretty good, although a little out of date ... although The Bell Curve is even more out of date! There's been tons of research on intelligence in the last 25 years. Here's a good recent scientific book on it.

Extroversion is associated with reward-seeking behaviors, meaning more risk-taking. Depending various factors, this may or may not be advantageous for survival. :)

Daniel Nettle has a very well-researched book that goes into talking about this (as well as the other 4 of the big five personality traits): http://www.amazon.com/Personality-What-Makes-You-Way/dp/0199211434/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407569635&sr=8-1&keywords=personality

Or for something shorter and scholarly, here's his paper on The Evolution of Personality Variation: http://www.academia.edu/449430/The_Evolution_of_Personality_Variation_In_Humans_and_Other_Animals