The whole concept of *verts is an early 20th century psychological concept from an era which produced practices and ideas which are now mostly antiquated.
It has become pop psychology and never had much meaning.
It seems relatively true that some people gain energy from socializing, while others expend energy to do so; extrovert vs introvert; which is what I been told is the difference between extroverts and introverts. It's not that introverts _can't_ socialize, it's just that they have a limited capacity to do so (with the caveat that there are people who have social anxiety that cannot socialize, who _also_ fall into the category of introvert).
Given how obviously true it _appears_ to be when talking to people about their experiences, why do you say that?
> with the caveat that there are people who have social anxiety that cannot socialize, who _also_ fall into the category of introvert
Interestingly, I know people who say they are socially anxious extroverts—they need to be with people to draw energy but have high levels social anxiety. This usually means they need to spend a lot of time with people they know well and trust.
the five factor model suggests nothing about "gains energy/drains energy", it simply measures tendency toward extraversion and identifies it as a highly explanatory factor in personality. There are 5 factors because those 5 are the factors that when measured appear to be independent variables, and explanatory.
the goal is for them to be independent variables in the statistical sense. science is a process of refinement so there will undoubtedly be improvements, but they are as independent as they can be based on current knowledge, they can be measured separately, and people exist in every combination (the scales of each measure are not dependent on one another), and we can't describe what we know about personality without including all of them. Myers-Briggs comes to mind as a comparable metric which has more dependence among its variables, and essentially ignores neuroticism.
> the goal is for them to be independent variables in the statistical sense.
No, it isn't. The goal is for them to have high explanatory power. They aren't independent variables, and the fact that they aren't is a frequent criticism of them. But it's not relevant to whether they are useful descriptors or predictors.
> In many studies, the five factors are not fully orthogonal to one another; that is, the five factors are not independent. Orthogonality is viewed as desirable by some researchers because it minimizes redundancy between the dimensions.
Considering we're talking about real people and the real conversations you have with them, definitely. The 5 people I talk to and the patterns I've come to expect from socializing with them, and the way that those patterns interact with my own behavior, don't really have a neat apples-to-apples comparison with your 5 people and their patterns and how you interact with those patterns, etc. We could both be calling ourselves introverts and extrapolating wildly different chains of observations and predictions about how those hypothetical conversations would be affecting the other one's energy levels, etc.
It has become pop psychology and never had much meaning.