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NederlandsHalf an hour before the conference opens, Emma is standing by the coffee table talking to a man she has never met. In those few minutes she finds out where he works, why he changed fields a year ago and what his dog is called.
James is standing three metres away, reading the programme, waiting for the hall to open. He has not spoken to anyone and has made no attempt to. Two hours later he will walk on stage, talk for forty minutes to an audience of two hundred and then, in the discussion, calmly contradict the speaker who went before him.
So which of the two is the extravert? Answering "the one chatting over coffee" covers only a slice of what extraversion holds. James's readiness to stand in front of a full room is extraversion as well, just a different piece of it. And that is precisely the distinction the HEXACO model draws more carefully than most popular typologies.
One scale, four components
Around the turn of the millennium, the Canadian psychologists Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton worked through dictionary lists of personality adjectives in languages from Korean to Italian. They wanted to know how many independent dimensions keep reappearing when people describe one another. Across languages they kept arriving at six factors rather than five, and one of them is extraversion, the letter X in the model's name.
The important part is that in the six-factor account it does not hold together as a single block. It comes apart into four separable pieces, and in one and the same person each piece can point somewhere else.
| Component | What it describes | What lower on the scale looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Social self-esteem | What you assume about the impression you make and whether you hold your own around people | The sense that others put up with you out of politeness rather than interest |
| Social boldness | Willingness to speak in front of others, to lead, to disagree out loud, to approach a stranger | The hand that stays down in a meeting even though your point is fully worked out |
| Sociability | How much company does you good and how much you enjoy talking for its own sake | A Saturday spent alone as a reward rather than a punishment |
| Liveliness | The energy, enthusiasm and optimism you throw at things | A slower tempo, fewer excited reactions, more sober estimates |
Emma from the opening scene runs high on sociability and liveliness, much less so on social boldness, which is why nobody would get her in front of two hundred people. James is the mirror image. He lectures without hesitating, but small talk over coffee costs him more energy than the whole talk did. Average the two of them and you would get similar numbers telling you nothing true about either.
One of those four components surprises almost everybody. Social self-esteem, meaning whether you feel you amount to anything in company, is something most of us would file under emotions, or under self-confidence in general. In the older five-factor account that is roughly where it lands, usually as the opposite of neuroticism. In the six-factor model it stays with extraversion, and that has a consequence: low X need not mean you have no appetite for people. It can mean you are not sure they have any appetite for you.
When X runs high
You spot high X by how quickly someone settles into a group of strangers. Unfamiliar surroundings charge them up, talking does not muffle their thinking but starts it, and when silence falls in the room they are usually the one to fill it. Colleagues describe a person like this with words like "energy" or "the engine", even though from the inside it never feels like effort.
It pays off anywhere something has to get moving. Winning people over to an idea, arranging a meeting with someone you have never met, holding a team's mood together after a bad quarter. In all of those, high X spares everyone else work they would take on only reluctantly.
The bill comes in elsewhere. Someone who talks a lot and fast earns a reputation for competence more easily, whether or not they happen to be right. Neil MacLaren and his colleagues tested this in 2020 in groups with no formal leader, and the person the group named as leader turned out to be the one who had talked the most. The sheer quantity of speech counted for more than the quality of the contributions. If your X is high, that effect runs in your favour, and it is worth knowing about, because agreement from the room does not prove you thought the thing through better.
The second tax is paid on decisions. Liveliness pushes towards a quick "let's go for it" and mutes the uncomfortable signals a quieter person would pick up. The risk is not that an extravert makes worse calls, but that the call is made before the objections arrive.
It is worth saying what high X is not. It is not social skill. Reading the mood in a room, tailoring a message to the listener and stopping in time can be learned at any point on the scale, and plenty of very sociable people never bother. Nor is it warmth. A person who feels at home in a crowd can be perfectly indifferent to individuals, because what feeds them is the movement all around, not particular relationships.
Low X: introversion, and what it certainly is not
Introversion in this sense is no failure of contact. It is a setting that needs less social input before it has had enough. Seven people at a table is noise to an introvert; two people at a table is a conversation. Not that the first is unwelcome, it just does not send them home charged.
Which brings us to two things introversion gets confused with so regularly that a good deal of popular writing has fallen for it too. The first is shyness. A shy person is afraid of how they will come off in front of others and dodges contact for that reason. An introvert is not afraid, they merely have no need. Susan Cain drew the line clearly in her 2012 book Quiet: shyness is fear of social judgement, introversion is a preference for less stimulating surroundings. The shy extravert exists and tends to be rather miserable, wanting people and dreading them at once.
The second is social anxiety, and that belongs in an entirely different category. It is not a trait on a scale but a condition that genuinely narrows a life, and it is handled with a professional, not a questionnaire. In six-factor language it would come close to low social self-esteem plus low boldness plus high emotionality, except that no description has ever treated anybody.
How many times have you demanded of yourself that you be "more of a people person"? Try holding that question and working out which of the four components you are actually short of. The gap between "I was not enjoying it" and "I did not dare" is usually real, and each of those sentences leads somewhere else.
Four sentences we keep hearing about extraverts and introverts
"Introverts do not like people." The most common error and the easiest to dismantle. Sociability describes how much company somebody can take, not how they feel about it. Warmth, readiness to help and attachment to the people close to you sit elsewhere in the six-factor model, chiefly in emotionality and agreeableness. An introvert high in emotionality is the person who remembers your birthday and slips out of the party after ninety minutes.
"Extraverts make better leaders." Adam Grant, Francesca Gino and David Hofmann compared branch performance against the character of the managers in 2011, and turned up the condition everyone forgets. Extraverted leaders got better results with passive teams that needed a push. Where people brought ideas of their own, introverted leaders came out ahead, because they did not drown those ideas out with theirs. The question is not who leads better, but who they are leading.
The third sentence concerns selling. The notion that the best salesperson is the most talkative one held up for decades, until Adam Grant compared revenue right across the scale in 2013. Top of the list were neither extraverts nor introverts but people around the middle, able to switch between talking and listening according to what the customer needs at that moment.
And the last one: "I am an introvert, so that is that." Extraversion does not break the population into two camps; it spreads out smoothly and most people sit somewhere in the middle. The sharpest labels tend to be worn by those who are markedly high or low on one single component out of four and disregard the rest of the profile.
Why X is not the same thing as Big Five extraversion
The two scales measure something quite similar, and anyone who comes out high on one comes out high on the other almost every time. The difference lies in what the whole scale is built around. In the five-factor model, extraversion rests on sociability, activity and positive emotion. In the six-factor model, the core becomes social self-confidence, meaning how you rate yourself as a participant in social life.
In practice that shift shows up at the edges. Thrill-seeking, appetite for risk and a taste for driving fast belong to extraversion under the five-factor reading, whereas in the six-factor version they sit with emotionality, specifically with how prone a person is to worry. A fearless person is therefore not necessarily an extravert; they may simply be low in emotionality. Warmth towards the people closest to you shifts across to emotionality and agreeableness, so it does not count towards X either.
The difference is worth remembering mainly for reading your own profile. When your X comes out low, the five-factor reading sends you off wondering how often you go out among people. The six-factor one adds the question of whether you trust yourself among them, and for a lot of readers that is the more useful half. Comparison between the two models stays approximate; there is no exact bridge from one to the other.
What can actually be done about it
The worst plan is trying to shift along the scale as a whole. "I will be more extraverted" is a brief that gives nobody a first step. The individual components, on the other hand, behave very differently: sociability is a preference and changes reluctantly, while social boldness is largely rehearsed behaviour and gives way surprisingly fast.
James from the opening is the demonstration. He stands in front of a hall without trouble because he has been lecturing for eight years and has his structure ready. Small talk over coffee stayed hard because he never did any and has no foothold in it. If he prepared two questions before the event that can be put to anybody, he would get further in one afternoon than in a year of resolving to be more open.
A few things work reliably at both ends of the scale:
- Low on boldness? Agree in advance with somebody that they will back your proposal in the meeting. Outside agreement lifts the weight of your sentence before silence has a chance to sink it.
- Low sociability is not repaired by attending more events, but by staying at them for less time. An hour and out without apologising works better than three hours of drain and a week of recovery.
- With high boldness, one rule does most of the job: in every discussion, speak second rather than first. You find out how much somebody else would have said had you left them the room.
- Social self-esteem does not budge for pep talks. It budges for evidence, which means writing down after each encounter what exactly somebody valued, because memory deletes that kind of information first.
Our HEXACO test runs to 60 questions and takes around eight minutes. Besides extraversion it scores the other five factors, so you also get to see whether your low X comes from a need for quiet or from doubt about your own standing among people.
Whether or not you take the test, there is a simpler way to get the feel of your own X. For the next fortnight, note one single thing after every social situation: did you leave with more energy than you arrived with, or less? Add how many people were there and whether you were the one talking or the one listening. After two weeks a pattern falls out of those notes that no questionnaire will describe more precisely: where you charge up, where you run down and what the difference between them costs you.