Are extraverts really suffering more than introverts?

Photo by Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash

Since the pandemic began, I have seen a lot of tweets like these:

The logic behind these tweets goes something like this: 1) extraverts like to be around people (true), 2) people are spending a lot less time around others because of social distancing (also true), and 3) because of these two truths, extraverts must be suffering more than introverts right now.

But we really don’t know whether or not this last piece of logic is true. Why? Because this is the first time in history that massive numbers of extraverts and introverts all around the globe have been socially isolated—or, at least, the first time that this has happened since researchers started measuring introversion/extraversion in any meaningful way.

We now have some data to try to get a little closer to the truth of whether extraverts are suffering more than introverts during the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m going to walk through several analyses that I recently conducted from the Love in the Time of COVID research project. These data were collected during the two-week period of March 27-April 10, 2020, when many U.S. states and European and Asian nations had recently begun social distancing. There were 2,580 respondents who completed our survey (a map of where those respondents came from can be found here).

We assessed extraversion with the BFI-2-XS (Soto & John, 2017). Respondents were asked to indicate, on a 5-point scale, how much they agree or disagree with the following statements about themselves: “tends to be quiet” (reverse-scored), “is dominant, acts like a leader,” and, “is full of energy.” It’s a short measure, but a well-validated and reliable one.

Here’s how our sample looks in terms of levels of extraversion/introversion:

As you can see, there are more extraverts than introverts, but there are plenty who score at or below the mid-point (i.e., introverts).

So that we can make sure that we are looking at those who are most likely to be social distancing, I selected those who indicated that social distancing had been ordered in their community, a total of 1,899 people in our sample.

I first looked at the correlation between extraversion and things that most would probably agree are indicative of suffering: feeling socially disconnected, lonely, isolated, feelings of distress, irritability and depression. The correlation table showing links between extraversion and these indicators is below.

Okay, so what do we see here? If the hypothesis that extraverted people are suffering more from social distancing is correct, we would expect a positive correlation between extraversion and our suffering indicators. That’s not what we see. Extraversion has zero, and I mean zero, correlation with feeling more or less connected with others as a function of the COVID-19 pandemic. This means that levels of extraversion/introversion appear to have no bearing on how socially connected people feel during the pandemic.

For the other suffering indicators, we see small but consistent negative correlations with extraversion. The more extraverted people are, the less lonely, isolated, irritable, distressed and depressed they reported feeling over the prior two weeks. So, if any group appears to be suffering more here, it is introverts. Later on in this post, I speculate about why this might be.

Included in the roughly 1,900 people in this sample are a lot of people who live with others (1,591 people) and fewer who live by themselves (301 people). “Aha!” you might be saying to yourself, it’s really those extraverts who are living alone who are suffering. We know that those living alone are suffering more than those living with others, so perhaps it’s the extraverts in that group that are especially suffering. This would be a reasonable hypothesis.

However, we see the same pattern effects for those who live alone as we do for the sample as a whole:

And for those who live with others:

These data indicate that people who are more extraverted—whether they live alone or live with others—are decidedly suffering less than those who are more introverted.

The next question you may be asking yourself is why are extraverts suffering less than introverts? Well, we know that extraversion is a protective factor against depression. So we would have to see the negative association between extraversion and depressive symptoms that we usually see completely flip if extraverts were suffering more.

We also know that the happiest people tend to be highly social and maintain close social ties. In our data, we see that extraverts are Zooming more (i.e., using video chat) than introverts:

In addition, extraverts are exercising and spending more time outdoors than introverts:

Both exercising and spending time outdoors have been shown to be associated with greater well-being.

So, in a lot of ways, it’s not surprising that extraverts seem to be suffering less than introverts during this time of social distancing. They have a slight advantage in warding off depression to begin with, are Zooming more in the pandemic, exercising more, and spending more time outdoors.

Interestingly, controlling for extraverts’ tendency to Zoom more, exercise more, and spend more time outdoors does not diminish the associations (at all) between extraversion and indicators of less suffering in this sample.

Does all of this mean that the people who say that extraverts are suffering are completely off the mark? Not necessarily. My hunch is that perhaps those who are more extraverted are suffering more now compared to how they were before the pandemic. This is what behavioral scientists call a “within-person” effect, in that we would be looking at increases in suffering within extraverts from before the pandemic until now (or from now until later in the pandemic, when people might be suffering even more—we will be able to test this idea in the weeks to come).

It’s also possible (probable?) that we might see an equivalent increase in suffering among introverts over time as a function of social distancing. The need to be around others is a fundamental human need. Although extraverts like to go to parties more than introverts and like to talk more (especially in large groups) than introverts, that doesn’t mean that introverts don’t need to be around people.

So, the message for now, if anything, should be: Look after your introverted friends and family, because they may be suffering (but probably only slightly more than extraverts are).