The idea that human personalities and behaviors can be sorted into two simplistic piles or even a scale between two piles is just silly.

There’s no predictive value to it- you can’t objectively classify\quantify people’s ‘vertion’ and then predict behaviors or outcomes based on those classifications, not even statistically from a large sample set because it’s meaninglessly subjective.

People are complex. Someone might appear ‘introverted’ in a social situation they’re unfamiliar with, but in a different setting my appear ‘extroverted’ because they’re very comfortable.

And some will say “social interactions give energy to extro and take it from intro” but what the hell does ‘energy’ mean in that context anyway? If I go to a small party with close friends all talking about sci-fi I’ll enjoy myself all night and feel refreshed, but I’d be exhausted after 30 minutes at a rave and need a week to recover.

And do people migrate between intro-extro throughout their life? In my 20’s I felt compelled to meet and experience new people all the time but now in my mid-40’s I don’t really care and tend to stick to the people I know. Does that mean I turned more introverted at some point? That’s why even as a personality scale it’s nonsense.

It’s all just Myers-Briggs for dummies, which is already for dummies.

The only way it makes sense is as a description of immediate behavior, not of a personality. Someone may be ‘behaving in an introverted way’ but saying that makes them an ‘introvert’ is nonsense because they may go somewhere else and behave in an extroverted way an hour later.

  • BirdEnjoyer@kbin.social
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    3 months ago

    I just find the labels as a useful tool. Descriptive, not prescriptive.

    They get across a lot with one word- you get antsy if you get around people too much, of you get antsy if you stay in too much.

    I think you’re taking this personally for some reason and you may need to reconsider the media and/or company you’re paying attention to if this is bothering you like this. Maybe even if just for a little while.

    Same goes for whenever any use of any labels starts bothering a person- its usually just a symptom of some kind of jargon fatigue.

    You said it yourself- you think it all feels like “Pop psychology nonsense.” But do you even need all that pop psychology in your life in the first place?