Personal connections are crucial for job search. As I often repeat, “Friendship rules the world.” Yet most empirical studies fail to find any connection between extraversion and career success. This recent literature review reports that over 75% of empirical studies fail to find that extraversion significantly raises earnings. What’s going on?
Some possible theories: Extraverts develop attachments to their coworkers and feel content in their workplace despite less pay. Extraverts value interactions in the work environment more than money, so they will pick socially comfortable environments over making money. Jobs like engineer or programmer are more about objects than about people and sometimes don't have a lot of interaction. Possibly some blend of all of the considerations results in something like little to no effect.
I wish the personality research was as good as the research in cognitive ability. I do think that it calls on self-reflection and that is going to face some self-distortion.
I am introverted and I strongly believe I am being underpaid relative to my more extroverted peers. I work at Amazon as a Software Development Engineer. There, they give titles like SDE1, SDE2, SDE3, etc., where a higher number implies higher skill level and thus higher pay. I am currently an SDE2.
Almost everyone who interacts with me says I should be SDE3. Managers and peer describe me as the highest performing member on my team. And yet, other people get promoted to SDE3 and I remain an SDE2.
One of the main cause for this discrepancy is that to get promoted, you need to be boastful and constantly selling yourself to people you would otherwise not interact with. Specifically, it's not your manager's decision whether or not you get promoted. All managers try to get their SDE2s promoted to SDE3, but all these requests get presented to a committee of higher-ups. And having good relations with these higher-ups (even though there's no business justification for why you would ever interact with them), and especially having them recognize your name in a pile of applications, greatly enhances the odds that you will be promoted.
There's apparently a scarcity mindset for these promotions, where the higherups don't want to promoted too many people to SDE3. So while I do great work, and my manager can tell them that I do great work, every manager says their SDE2s do great work too. And the extroverted ones, the ones that the higher-ups have heard of and interacted with and get a general impression of confidence and high energy, are the ones that get promoted.
I am an introvert. On the personality tests, I score really high on Openness and Neuroticism. Low on conscientiousness. I would say I am moderately successful but am behind about 5 to 8 years my peers. My 20s was full of indecisiveness and exploration. It wasn't until I got married in my early 30s that I stuck with a job. My first job after marriage was an entry level somewhat lower paying job. No connections but hired into a cohort of younger people. I rose through the ranks to where I am today by the connections I made in this job. I think 2 things have set me a part from other coworkers. I am socially self aware and generally kind. I don't gossip or bad mouth people in general. There are a lot of people out the who are just too awkward and quiet or are overbearing and share too much. I also am plagued by anxiety and fear screwing up. That drives me to work hard and compensate for my natural disorganization.
I'm an extreme extravert who gave up on academia despite loving seminars, conferences, and other close interaction with smart people more than just about anything else, because it became increasingly clear that sitting alone at a computer trying to turn my own thoughts into linear strings of words was never going to not drive me crazy. It's truly as if I only fully think in groups.
For 15 years, I've been teaching English to kids in foreign countries, while learning languages myself, and I feel like I'm using the subject I love (linguistics) every day while being true to my skills, and maintaining a comfortable lifestyle with responsible savings, despite giving up the "success" I might have forced myself into.
The only regret I have is from an EA perspective: it sometimes nags at me that I may have had an ethical obligation to focus on earning more in order to give more to world hunger or veganism-promoting charities.
If you are high on extraversion, it is easier for you to get social utility, lots of which is derived at the cost of focusing on work. So I find your argument along these lines very plausible as a negative effect on career success.
My first thought is that this doesn’t align with my experience in finance. I sure wish I could sell and network more naturally.
But then I think, most people don’t work in finance. And also jobs that benefit from extraversion tend to be more visible -- waiters vs chefs for example.
A “regular guy” job that would seem to benefit a lot from introversion is truck driver. Long hours alone with your thoughts. I also have an introverted friend who manages an Amazon warehouse. He came in at the ground floor and as he tells it, he kept getting promoted because he stayed on task and met his quotas while others were goofing off, hanging in the break room, etc.
There's probably a name for this, but we seem to assume the characteristics of people on the extremes reflect the whole distribution. In this case, the highest earners (CEO's, etc) are generally extroverted, but the avg extrovert doesn't make more than average introvert.
It's similar to how the avg man isn't much more aggressive than the avg woman, but society's most aggressive people are almost always men.
We are surprised to see actual personality distributions because public perception is driven by the shape of the tail, not mean or median.
First, it shouldn't be surprising that introversion has some benefits and extraversion has some costs, in general. Otherwise, introversion wouldn't be very prevalent. My observation is that my extraverted friends appear to spend more time on social pursuits because they need it more. The quality of certain types of work may suffer from requiring this social stimulation. At least in some jobs, being able to focus more on things versus people seems to be an advantage. This variation makes the effect of introversion ambiguous even if it hurts on some dimensions of job search.
Second, introversion is not simply a phobia of others. If necessary, I, like many introverts, can be reasonably charming and effectively pursue social contacts. It just takes more mental effort. The increased cost means introverts may be more selective, potentially giving them a quality advantage in their social networks.
> The straightforward view, naturally, is that while personality predicts many life outcomes, it simply isn’t very important for money-making.
Vote-counting is one of the worst meta-analytic methods there is, and cannot show this. All vote-counting does is provide a crude measure of statistical power. It does not quantify effect sizes, posterior probability, or practical importance.
This paper in general seems to dabble in I/O psychology and do a poor job of it. They don't apply any of the psychometric meta-analysis techniques they should and reinvent some weirdly (using 'number of items' as a meta-regression variable is a truly bizarre way to try to correct for measurement error). They would've seen Hunter & Schmidt, which explains how to do this correctly, cited in many of the papers they had to read for this, and it's available for free online, yet they apparently chose not to.
I am wondering if these psychological tests are too crude a measure to predict earnings. if there was something reliable that worked (besides things like criminal history and credit check) employers would have already adopted it
Some possible theories: Extraverts develop attachments to their coworkers and feel content in their workplace despite less pay. Extraverts value interactions in the work environment more than money, so they will pick socially comfortable environments over making money. Jobs like engineer or programmer are more about objects than about people and sometimes don't have a lot of interaction. Possibly some blend of all of the considerations results in something like little to no effect.
I wish the personality research was as good as the research in cognitive ability. I do think that it calls on self-reflection and that is going to face some self-distortion.
I am introverted and I strongly believe I am being underpaid relative to my more extroverted peers. I work at Amazon as a Software Development Engineer. There, they give titles like SDE1, SDE2, SDE3, etc., where a higher number implies higher skill level and thus higher pay. I am currently an SDE2.
Almost everyone who interacts with me says I should be SDE3. Managers and peer describe me as the highest performing member on my team. And yet, other people get promoted to SDE3 and I remain an SDE2.
One of the main cause for this discrepancy is that to get promoted, you need to be boastful and constantly selling yourself to people you would otherwise not interact with. Specifically, it's not your manager's decision whether or not you get promoted. All managers try to get their SDE2s promoted to SDE3, but all these requests get presented to a committee of higher-ups. And having good relations with these higher-ups (even though there's no business justification for why you would ever interact with them), and especially having them recognize your name in a pile of applications, greatly enhances the odds that you will be promoted.
There's apparently a scarcity mindset for these promotions, where the higherups don't want to promoted too many people to SDE3. So while I do great work, and my manager can tell them that I do great work, every manager says their SDE2s do great work too. And the extroverted ones, the ones that the higher-ups have heard of and interacted with and get a general impression of confidence and high energy, are the ones that get promoted.
I am an introvert. On the personality tests, I score really high on Openness and Neuroticism. Low on conscientiousness. I would say I am moderately successful but am behind about 5 to 8 years my peers. My 20s was full of indecisiveness and exploration. It wasn't until I got married in my early 30s that I stuck with a job. My first job after marriage was an entry level somewhat lower paying job. No connections but hired into a cohort of younger people. I rose through the ranks to where I am today by the connections I made in this job. I think 2 things have set me a part from other coworkers. I am socially self aware and generally kind. I don't gossip or bad mouth people in general. There are a lot of people out the who are just too awkward and quiet or are overbearing and share too much. I also am plagued by anxiety and fear screwing up. That drives me to work hard and compensate for my natural disorganization.
Do studies of personality and earnings generally control for IQ and sex? Depending on the answer, it would change the plausible theories alot.
Do extraverts also tend to be agreeable (negative earnings effect)?
I'm an extreme extravert who gave up on academia despite loving seminars, conferences, and other close interaction with smart people more than just about anything else, because it became increasingly clear that sitting alone at a computer trying to turn my own thoughts into linear strings of words was never going to not drive me crazy. It's truly as if I only fully think in groups.
For 15 years, I've been teaching English to kids in foreign countries, while learning languages myself, and I feel like I'm using the subject I love (linguistics) every day while being true to my skills, and maintaining a comfortable lifestyle with responsible savings, despite giving up the "success" I might have forced myself into.
The only regret I have is from an EA perspective: it sometimes nags at me that I may have had an ethical obligation to focus on earning more in order to give more to world hunger or veganism-promoting charities.
If you are high on extraversion, it is easier for you to get social utility, lots of which is derived at the cost of focusing on work. So I find your argument along these lines very plausible as a negative effect on career success.
My first thought is that this doesn’t align with my experience in finance. I sure wish I could sell and network more naturally.
But then I think, most people don’t work in finance. And also jobs that benefit from extraversion tend to be more visible -- waiters vs chefs for example.
A “regular guy” job that would seem to benefit a lot from introversion is truck driver. Long hours alone with your thoughts. I also have an introverted friend who manages an Amazon warehouse. He came in at the ground floor and as he tells it, he kept getting promoted because he stayed on task and met his quotas while others were goofing off, hanging in the break room, etc.
There's probably a name for this, but we seem to assume the characteristics of people on the extremes reflect the whole distribution. In this case, the highest earners (CEO's, etc) are generally extroverted, but the avg extrovert doesn't make more than average introvert.
It's similar to how the avg man isn't much more aggressive than the avg woman, but society's most aggressive people are almost always men.
We are surprised to see actual personality distributions because public perception is driven by the shape of the tail, not mean or median.
Hmm. This doesn't puzzle me at all.
First, it shouldn't be surprising that introversion has some benefits and extraversion has some costs, in general. Otherwise, introversion wouldn't be very prevalent. My observation is that my extraverted friends appear to spend more time on social pursuits because they need it more. The quality of certain types of work may suffer from requiring this social stimulation. At least in some jobs, being able to focus more on things versus people seems to be an advantage. This variation makes the effect of introversion ambiguous even if it hurts on some dimensions of job search.
Second, introversion is not simply a phobia of others. If necessary, I, like many introverts, can be reasonably charming and effectively pursue social contacts. It just takes more mental effort. The increased cost means introverts may be more selective, potentially giving them a quality advantage in their social networks.
Extroverts are a pain in the ass?
> The straightforward view, naturally, is that while personality predicts many life outcomes, it simply isn’t very important for money-making.
Vote-counting is one of the worst meta-analytic methods there is, and cannot show this. All vote-counting does is provide a crude measure of statistical power. It does not quantify effect sizes, posterior probability, or practical importance.
This paper in general seems to dabble in I/O psychology and do a poor job of it. They don't apply any of the psychometric meta-analysis techniques they should and reinvent some weirdly (using 'number of items' as a meta-regression variable is a truly bizarre way to try to correct for measurement error). They would've seen Hunter & Schmidt, which explains how to do this correctly, cited in many of the papers they had to read for this, and it's available for free online, yet they apparently chose not to.
I am wondering if these psychological tests are too crude a measure to predict earnings. if there was something reliable that worked (besides things like criminal history and credit check) employers would have already adopted it