It’s a spectrum - most of us are ambiverts.

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.

The field of personality psychology continues to believe it has meaning: extraversion is a factor in the five-factor model.

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.

> There are 5 factors because those 5 are the factors that when measured appear to be independent variables

This is not correct; they are not independent.

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.

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Li... :

> 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.

that description does not disagree with me.

It was developed by people fully aware of what orthogonality is, and understanding of why orthogonality is desirable. The fact that it is not perfect is indicative of the complexity of psychology and the bluntness of our tools. There is no system that is more orthogonal that explains near as much (I qualify it that way because dead vs alive is simple and pure but of little explanatory power).

We have nothing better than the Big Five (there are proposed refinements but they are not yet generally accepted), and it is better than what came before. The Big Five separates variables that used to be mixed, and can't yet explain the unexplained, but neither can any other system.

> that description does not disagree with me.

Unless you think that "these five variables appear to be independent when measured" conflicts with "these five variables are not independent".

It doesn't seem like that tricky of a question, but maybe I'm missing something.

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.

I'm not convinced it's a single dimension, either. I suspect it's less a spectrum and more of a blotch.

People say "spectrum" when they mean "1-dimensional ranged value". But a real spectrum is a bitfield of attributes.

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.

> Ambiverts

My new favourite word!

Introversion level is really just a measure of how much social stimulation you require on average. Everyone has some level above which they feel exhausted and below which they feel lonely/bored.

Most people would understand, some play dumb, and some people just have low IQ...