Chaitra Mohanan
Ms. Bolin
APEL: Period 1
February 13, 2015
It’s Always the Quiet Ones
Argument Question: Why does society favor extroverts over introverts? Does this preference have such a paramount effect in children as Cain states?
“Don't think of introversion as something that needs to be cured” (Cain). These witty words of Susan Cain are the subject of her thought provoking and bestselling book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. The book is an amalgamation filled with years of studies and research combined to teach her readers about the personality style known as introversion and its role in society. Before embarking to write her book, Cain had been spending her years as a big corporate lawyer with a Bachelor…show more content… Professor Naci Kayaoglu at Karadeniz Technical University exemplifies this in her study concerning effective methods for learning languages among students. Kayaoglu found that, “introverted learners consciously employed goal-oriented specific behaviors and mental operations to ease the acquisition, retrieval, storage, and use of information for both comprehension and production and extroverted learners used more interpersonal communication strategies. Yet, the fact that extroverted learners are relatively prone to start a conversation does not necessarily enable them to be better learners, in view of the intricate nature of the language-learning processes.” Kayaoglu’s conclusions show that although extroverts are able to create more social situations to apply their language learning, introverts are more successful at properly learning a language than extroverts. This proves that introverts although lacking social skills that society finds vital, are still able to succeed in grasping a topic fully. Similarly to Kayaoglu, renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi shows, from the results of an experiment, that introverts are actually more likely to achieve success because of their characteristics. Csikszentmihalyi explains “the evidence suggests that the creative person (artist or scientist) in general is distinguished by relatively high levels of asocial characteristics, namely introversion, independence, hostility, and ignorance […] many have argued that isolation, withdrawal, and independence are necessary conditions of creative achievement.” Csikszentmihalyi determines from his rigorous research that those who succeed in creative fields possess qualitites seen most often in introverts. His research supports the notion that in order to be successful one does not necessarily have to be
