Introvert or extrovert?

What your answers add up to

Nobody has found a way to measure how fast a day with people empties you. What researchers have measured for decades is how outgoing people are, and these 24 questions come from one of the standard sets.^{1, 2} So your score shows how strongly you’re pulled toward wherever the noise is, not how soon you run out. The running out, as the next part shows, happens to almost everyone.

Your score is built from six smaller ones, four questions each: making friends, enjoying a busy room, taking charge, keeping busy, chasing a buzz and plain good mood. Taking charge and good mood are in the mix because, in large surveys, they tend to go up and down together with liking company.³ Each part gets its own score, so you can make friends in a week and still hate a packed bar.

Your scores are set against a large group of adults who answered the same questions online. Most of them were young Americans, with an average age of 28, so if you’re 50 or 60, you’re being compared with people much younger than you. Most scores bunch up near the average. The middle result covers the middle 4 in 10 of that group, and about 3 in 10 lean each way.³ “Ambivert” is the everyday word for a score near the middle.

If you answer again in a few weeks, expect some movement. Each part rests on four questions, so reading one of them differently on a tired day can shift it a fair way. The overall score uses all 24 and is steadier, and of the six parts, the pace one wobbles most.³ The thrills part asks about being reckless and wild, so it leans toward wild nights more than a love of travel or long hikes.¹

When does a lively hour catch up with you?

This comes from a 2017 study in which 48 people noted how they were acting and feeling five times a day for 12 days. In the hours when they’d been chatty and lively, they felt better right then, and about three hours later, more tired. That held for quiet and outgoing people alike.⁴ So if a good evening leaves you flat by bedtime, your score here doesn’t explain it, and you aren’t unusual.

The same people also swung a long way from one moment to the next. When researchers check in several times a day, most people range across nearly the whole scale, quiet at one moment and lively at another.^{4, 5} Your result is where your days tend to sit. Any single day can land well above or below it.

Quiet people get a lift from company too

In a 2002 study, people noted every three hours for two weeks how outgoing they had acted and how they felt. Nearly everyone was happier in the stretches when they’d acted outgoing, and the quieter people got as big a lift as the rest.⁶ The tiredness comes later, and it comes for both.⁴

Why are both ends still so common?

If being outgoing feels good, why isn’t everyone loud? The psychologist Daniel Nettle asked 545 British adults about their lives. The more outgoing ones had had more partners over the years, and they were also more likely to have ended up in hospital after an accident or illness.⁷ In a later paper he argued that outgoing people gain partners and allies and also take more risks, so neither end wins everywhere.⁸

People also shift with age. Across 92 groups followed over years, taking charge tended to grow between about 20 and 40, while the pull toward a busy social life tended to drop in old age.⁹

Loving a crowd is not the same as feeling close

You can score high here and still feel that nobody really knows you, or score low and have two friends you’d trust with anything. This test asks how much company and noise pull you in. How close you feel to the people in your life is a separate question, and feeling lonely with friends around you is about that one.