| seeing as personality is defined as a preferred set of reactions to external events, your preferred style of social interaction is part of your identity by definition. this is shorthand for saying "I prefer alone time to recharge" or "I am energized by the company of others," which is a fundamental aspect of identity. factor analysis of personality breaks down personality into related sets of consistent behaviors. introversion/extroversion exists in even the simplest model. the distinction was first noticed by Jung. it was even observed in dogs by Pavlov, who found that dogs that were active around other dogs fell asleep when left alone, where as dogs that seemed exhausted by the same events perked up when isolated. introversion/extraversion is not a constant preference. sometimes introverts like parties. but individuals have a preference for one or the other that forms a preferred set of responses to external events, which makes it part of the definition of personality. this is an article based on folk psychology written in ignorance of thousands of articles on this subject, starting with Jung, experimentally noted by Pavlov in animals, and made rigorous in the work of Hans Eysenck. Eysenck used factor analysis to rigorously define extraversion and identified it as a basic dimension of human personality. this is an incontrovertible finding of modern psychology. extraversion/introversion form one of the parts of the five factor model, which uses factor analysis to identify five core factors of human personality. some models have more, some less - that's the art of the technique. but they all have introversion/extraversion. there is a distinction between shyness and introversion, where the former is mostly likely meant to mean socially anxious. however, introversion is an enduring personality trait that factor analysis consistently identifies. |
(Note that "identity" has the same meaning as in pg's article, above.)