Introversion and Public Speaking

Election night crowd, Wellington, New Zealand, 1931. Photo by Hall Raine

I recently emailed Jonathan Rauch, the author of the famous Atlantic article on introversion and asked him where he got this idea that the introverts are good public speakers? This seems completely counterintuitive, even for me personally. Jonathan replied that it was his “observation”. I still had my doubts about this. But then I stumbled on Malcolm Gladwell’s interview in the Guardian where he says rather definitively, about himself of course, that a public speaking and an introversion go hand in hand. This actually clarified the tendency of the introverts to be good actors, Robert De Niro is a classic example. De Niro does it by the introversion book – he winces at small talk and the interviews, gets easily irritated but then he morphs into a role, even his own role… This is also in character of a typical religious figure, often reclusive and socially remote but charismatic in front of a crowd. May be a crowd makes an introvert feel even more alone, it enables an introvert to channel abstractions. In fact the mechanism is to invoke transformative ideas, to abstract from people and concrete situations. And so the introverts hate socializing but they are perfectly comfortable in front of big crowds. This is a neat idea, things are finally starting to make sense.

photo via flickr/nationallibrarynz

Tagged as: psychology