James' World 2

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Leonard Baier is a graphic designer who lives in a small town in Germany. He’s the perfect person to meet at a party because he can always find a topic of conversation. If he goes into a bar alone, he comes out with a handful of new acquaintances. Yet, he also appreciates living alone in a cozy, two-room apartment. There he enjoys “closing the door every now and then and having some peace and quiet,” he says. After long visits with friends, for example, he is happy to be undisturbed for a while.

Baier meets the criteria for ambiversion, a trait in the middle of the continuum between extroversion and introversion. Whereas an introverted person draws most of their energy from being alone, an extroverted person becomes energized from interacting with other people. Introverts are more easily stressed by other people, whereas extroverts thrive in the company of others. But for Baier these dynamics depend on the circumstances: Sometimes he feels comfortable and relaxed in company. Other times people stress him out.

He’s far from the only one. Most people are not exclusively introverted or extroverted. “Ninety percent of people are somewhere in the middle,” says Jens Asendorpf, a personality researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin. People who tend to be extroverted also like to keep to themselves from time to time. “And since everyone needs social contact, introverts also seek interaction with others—just less so,” Asendorpf adds.

In other words, the vast majority of people are probably ambiverts. But it’s hard to clearly separate these categories, says psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman. “There is no magic line that clearly separates ambiversion from introversion and extroversion,” he says.

If you place people on the continuum according to their characteristics, the vast majority are probably in the middle, with fewer toward the extremes. This dimension of human personality is “normally distributed,” as the statistical term goes. There are also many more gradations than just introverted, ambiverted, and extroverted. “You could create even more subcategories—for example, mild extroversion and mild introversion,” Kaufman says.

Ambiversion: The Best of Everything?

Ambiversion combines the worlds of extroversion and introversion: When Baier’s friends spontaneously drop by on a Friday evening and want to take him to a party, he grabs his jacket and sets off. But if he has no plans, that doesn’t bother him either. On the contrary, he enjoys a quiet evening watching a TV series or drawing. “Ambivert people have a more flexible mindset, which can be very useful in everyday life,” Kaufman says.

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