Introvert or Extrovert?

About this test

Start by clearing up the usual confusion: introversion is not shyness. Shyness is a fear of being judged, it hurts, and it can be worked on. Introversion doesn't hurt at all — it's simply how your energy gets refilled. An introvert can be a speaker, an actor or a chief executive, hold a room of a thousand people without a tremor, and then need two hours of silence to recover from it.

So the criterion is single and very concrete: after three hours around people, do you feel filled up or emptied out? The extrovert leaves a party with more energy than they arrived with; the introvert leaves happy but in debt. Neither one is more sociable, more likeable or more confident. They are two different charging systems.

Eighteen statements, each rated 1 to 5, place your slider on that axis. And since most people sit nearer the middle than the extremes, a result close to the centre isn't a failed test: it describes an ambivert, whose needs shift with the week, the tiredness and the people in the room.

How it works

Each statement pushes the slider towards one pole or the other; reversed statements count backwards, which stops you from ticking "strongly agree" all the way down the list. The resulting average sets both the dominant side and how far from centre you land.