Shyness: Evolutionary Tactic?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/opinion/sunday/26shyness.html?partner=...

June 25, 2011
Shyness: Evolutionary Tactic? By SUSAN CAIN

A BEAUTIFUL woman lowers her eyes demurely beneath a hat. In an earlier era,
her gaze might have signaled a mysterious allure. But this is a 2003
advertisement for Zoloft, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor
(S.S.R.I.) approved by the F.D.A. to treat social anxiety disorder. “Is she
just shy? Or is it Social Anxiety Disorder?” reads the caption, suggesting
that the young woman is not alluring at all. She is sick.

But is she?

It is possible that the lovely young woman has a life-wrecking form of
social anxiety. There are people too afraid of disapproval to venture out
for a job interview, a date or even a meal in public. Despite the risk of
serious side effects — nausea, loss of sex drive, seizures — drugs like
Zoloft can be a godsend for this group.

But the ad’s insinuation aside, it’s also possible the young woman is “just
shy,” or introverted — traits our society disfavors. One way we manifest
this bias is by encouraging perfectly healthy shy people to see themselves
as ill.

This does us all a grave disservice, because shyness and introversion — or
more precisely, the careful, sensitive temperament from which both often
spring — are not just normal. They are valuable. And they may be essential
to the survival of our species.

Theoretically, shyness and social anxiety disorder are easily
distinguishable. But a blurry line divides the two. Imagine that the woman
in the ad enjoys a steady paycheck, a strong marriage and a small circle of
close friends — a good life by most measures — except that she avoids a
needed promotion because she’s nervous about leading meetings. She often
criticizes herself for feeling too shy to speak up.

What do you think now? Is she ill, or does she simply need public-speaking
training?

Before 1980, this would have seemed a strange question. Social anxiety
disorder did not officially exist until it appeared in that year’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM-III, the psychiatrist’s bible of
mental disorders, under the name “social phobia.” It was not widely known
until the 1990s, when pharmaceutical companies received F.D.A. approval to
treat social anxiety with S.S.R.I.’s and poured tens of millions of dollars
into advertising its existence. The current version of the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual, the DSM-IV, acknowledges that stage fright (and shyness
in social situations) is common and not necessarily a sign of illness. But
it also says that diagnosis is warranted when anxiety “interferes
significantly” with work performance or if the sufferer shows “marked
distress” about it. According to this definition, the answer to our question
is clear: the young woman in the ad is indeed sick.

The DSM inevitably reflects cultural attitudes; it used to identify
homosexuality as a disease, too. Though the DSM did not set out to
pathologize shyness, it risks doing so, and has twice come close to
identifying introversion as a disorder, too. (Shyness and introversion are
not the same thing. Shy people fear negative judgment; introverts simply
prefer quiet, minimally stimulating environments.)

But shyness and introversion share an undervalued status in a world that
prizes extroversion. Children’s classroom desks are now often arranged in
pods, because group participation supposedly leads to better learning; in
one school I visited, a sign announcing “Rules for Group Work” included,
“You can’t ask a teacher for help unless everyone in your group has the same
question.” Many adults work for organizations that now assign work in teams,
in offices without walls, for supervisors who value “people skills” above
all. As a society, we prefer action to contemplation, risk-taking to
heed-taking, certainty to doubt. Studies show that we rank fast and frequent
talkers as more competent, likable and even smarter than slow ones. As the
psychologists William Hart and Dolores Albarracin point out, phrases like
“get active,” “get moving,” “do something” and similar calls to action
surface repeatedly in recent books.

Yet shy and introverted people have been part of our species for a very long
time, often in leadership positions. We find them in the Bible (“Who am I,
that I should go unto Pharaoh?" asked Moses, whom the Book of Numbers
describes as “very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the
earth.”) We find them in recent history, in figures like Charles Darwin,
Marcel Proust and Albert Einstein, and, in contemporary times: think of
Google’s Larry Page, or Harry Potter’s creator, J. K. Rowling.

In the science journalist Winifred Gallagher’s words: “The glory of the
disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage
with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic
achievement. Neither E=mc2 nor ‘Paradise Lost’ was dashed off by a party
animal.”

We even find “introverts” in the animal kingdom, where 15 percent to 20
percent of many species are watchful, slow-to-warm-up types who stick to the
sidelines (sometimes called “sitters”) while the other 80 percent are
“rovers” who sally forth without paying much attention to their
surroundings. Sitters and rovers favor different survival strategies, which
could be summed up as the sitter’s “Look before you leap” versus the rover’s
inclination to “Just do it!” Each strategy reaps different rewards.

IN an illustrative experiment, David Sloan Wilson, a Binghamton evolutionary
biologist, dropped metal traps into a pond of pumpkinseed sunfish. The
“rover” fish couldn’t help but investigate — and were immediately caught.
But the “sitter” fish stayed back, making it impossible for Professor Wilson
to capture them. Had Professor Wilson’s traps posed a real threat, only the
sitters would have survived. But had the sitters taken Zoloft and become
more like bold rovers, the entire family of pumpkinseed sunfish would have
been wiped out. “Anxiety” about the trap saved the fishes’ lives.

Next, Professor Wilson used fishing nets to catch both types of fish; when
he carried them back to his lab, he noted that the rovers quickly acclimated
to their new environment and started eating a full five days earlier than
their sitter brethren. In this situation, the rovers were the likely
survivors. “There is no single best ... [animal] personality,” Professor
Wilson concludes in his book, “Evolution for Everyone,” “but rather a
diversity of personalities maintained by natural selection.”

The same might be said of humans, 15 percent to 20 percent of whom are also
born with sitter-like temperaments that predispose them to shyness and
introversion. (The overall incidence of shyness and introversion is higher —
40 percent of the population for shyness, according to the psychology
professor Jonathan Cheek, and 50 percent for introversion. Conversely, some
born sitters never become shy or introverted at all.)

Once you know about sitters and rovers, you see them everywhere, especially
among young children. Drop in on your local Mommy and Me music class: there
are the sitters, intently watching the action from their mothers’ laps,
while the rovers march around the room banging their drums and shaking their
maracas.

Relaxed and exploratory, the rovers have fun, make friends and will take
risks, both rewarding and dangerous ones, as they grow. According to Daniel
Nettle, a Newcastle University evolutionary psychologist, extroverts are
more likely than introverts to be hospitalized as a result of an injury,
have affairs (men) and change relationships (women). One study of bus
drivers even found that accidents are more likely to occur when extroverts
are at the wheel.

In contrast, sitter children are careful and astute, and tend to learn by
observing instead of by acting. They notice scary things more than other
children do, but they also notice more things in general. Studies dating all
the way back to the 1960’s by the psychologists Jerome Kagan and Ellen
Siegelman found that cautious, solitary children playing matching games
spent more time considering all the alternatives than impulsive children
did, actually using more eye movements to make decisions. Recent studies by
a group of scientists at Stony Brook University and at Chinese universities
using functional M.R.I. technology echoed this research, finding that adults
with sitter-like temperaments looked longer at pairs of photos with subtle
differences and showed more activity in brain regions that make associations
between the photos and other stored information in the brain.

Once they reach school age, many sitter children use such traits to great
effect. Introverts, who tend to digest information thoroughly, stay on task,
and work accurately, earn disproportionate numbers of National Merit
Scholarship finalist positions and Phi Beta Kappa keys, according to the
Center for Applications of Psychological Type, a research arm for the
Myers-Briggs
personality type
indicator—
even though their I.Q. scores are no higher than those of extroverts.
Another study, by the psychologists Eric Rolfhus and Philip Ackerman, tested
141 college students’ knowledge of 20 different subjects, from art to
astronomy to statistics, and found that the introverts knew more than the
extroverts about 19 subjects — presumably, the researchers concluded,
because the more time people spend socializing, the less time they have for
learning.

THE psychologist Gregory Feist found that many of the most creative people
in a range of fields are introverts who are comfortable working in solitary
conditions in which they can focus attention inward. Steve Wozniak, the
engineer who founded Apple with Steve Jobs, is a prime example: Mr. Wozniak
describes his creative process as an exercise in solitude. “Most inventors
and engineers I’ve met are like me,” he writes in “iWoz,” his autobiography.
“They’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In
fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone ... Not
on a committee. Not on a team.”

Sitters’ temperaments also confer more subtle advantages. Anxiety, it seems,
can serve an important social purpose; for example, it plays a key role in
the development of some children’s consciences. When caregivers rebuke them
for acting up, they become anxious, and since anxiety is unpleasant, they
tend to develop pro-social behaviors. Shy children are often easier to
socialize and more conscientious, according to the developmental
psychologist Grazyna Kochanska. By 6 they’re less likely than their peers to
cheat or break rules, even when they think they can’t be caught, according
to one study. By 7 they’re more likely to be described by their parents as
having high levels of moral traits such as empathy.

When I shared this information with the mother of a “sitter” daughter, her
reaction was mixed. “That is all very nice,” she said, “but how will it help
her in the tough real world?” But sensitivity, if it is not excessive and is
properly nurtured, can be a catalyst for empathy and even leadership.
Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, was a courageous leader who was very likely
a sitter. Painfully shy and serious as a child, she grew up to be a woman
who could not look away from other people’s suffering — and who urged her
husband, the constitutionally buoyant F.D.R., to do the same; the man who
had nothing to fear but fear itself relied, paradoxically, on a woman deeply
acquainted with it.

Another advantage sitters bring to leadership is a willingness to listen to
and implement other people’s ideas. A groundbreaking study led by the
Wharton management professor Adam Grant, to be published this month in The
Academy of Management Journal, found that introverts outperform extroverts
when leading teams of proactive workers — the kinds of employees who take
initiative and are disposed to dream up better ways of doing things.
Professor Grant notes that business self-help guides often suggest that
introverted leaders practice their communication skills and smile more. But,
he told me, it may be extrovert leaders who need to change, to listen more
and say less.

What would the world would look like if all our sitters chose to medicate
themselves? The day may come when we have pills that “cure” shyness and turn
introverts into social butterflies — without the side effects and other
drawbacks of today’s medications. (A recent study suggests that today’s
S.S.R.I.’s not only relieve social anxiety but also induce extroverted
behavior.) The day may come — and might be here already — when people are as
comfortable changing their psyches as the color of their hair. If we
continue to confuse shyness with sickness, we may find ourselves in a world
of all rovers and no sitters, of all yang and no yin.

As a sitter who enjoys an engaged, productive life, and a professional
speaking career, but still experiences the occasional knock-kneed moment, I
can understand why caring physicians prescribe available medicine and
encourage effective non-pharmaceutical treatments such as
cognitive-behavioral therapy.

But even non-medical treatments emphasize what is wrong with the people who
use them. They don’t focus on what is right. Perhaps we need to rethink our
approach to social anxiety: to address the pain, but to respect the
temperament that underlies it. The act of treating shyness as an illness
obscures the value of that temperament. Ridding people of social unease need
not involve pathologizing their fundamental nature, but rather urging them
to use its gifts.

It’s time for the young woman in the Zoloft ad to rediscover her allure.

Susan Cain is the author of a forthcoming book on introversion and a blog on
the power of introverts.