Extraverted means outward-turning: someone who talks readily, seeks out company, and comes away from a busy room with more energy than they took into it. Extroverted is the same word, spelled the way most English speakers now spell it.
Psychology uses a narrower version of that everyday word, and the narrower version is more useful, because it can be measured. In the Big Five, Extraversion names one dimension of personality — how strongly a person seeks out and reacts to positive stimulation, social and otherwise — and a score on it is a position, not a verdict. That is the difference between a dictionary entry and a measurement, and it is most of what this page is about.
Extravert or extrovert: which spelling is right?
Both, and the story is short.
Jung built the term from Latin: extra, outside, plus vertere, to turn. Turning outward. His English translators wrote extraversion and extravert, and the research literature has kept that spelling for a century — every technical paper cited at the bottom of this page uses it.
Ordinary English went the other way. Introvert takes intro, and once that word was common, people naturally matched the pair by writing extrovert with an o. It won decisively: it is what dictionaries list first, what newspapers print, and what nearly everybody types into a search box.
So: extravert is older and technically tidier, extrovert is standard modern English, and neither changes a thing about what is being described. This site writes Extraversion for the measured trait, because that is the spelling used by the research literature and by the IPIP-NEO-120, the public-domain instrument behind our scores, and answers to both.
What Extraversion means in personality psychology
Start with the thing most articles get wrong. Extraversion is a dimension, not a pair of boxes. There is no line where introverts stop and extroverts start — scores spread along a continuum, thickest in the middle, thinning toward both ends. "Introvert" and "extrovert" are convenient names for the two directions of travel, the way "tall" and "short" are useful without an official height at which one becomes the other.
Most people sit near that middle, and the middle is a real answer rather than a failure to be interesting. What it looks like: mid-range Big Five scores.
What makes the psychological version worth the trouble is that it is scored rather than asserted. An Extraversion score is a percentile: your answers to a standardised set of items, compared with a large norm sample, expressed as where you sit relative to them. The comparison is the entire point, because an answer pattern means nothing on its own. The instrument, the norms and the scoring are set out in our methodology; the idea itself is explained in what a percentile actually means.
If you have never been sure which side of the middle you fall on, the adjudication page is am I an introvert or an extrovert. For the two words on their own, see introvert: meaning and definition and extrovert: meaning and definition.
What a high scorer actually looks like
Concretely, and stripped of flattery.
A high scorer talks to the person next to them on the plane. They arrive at the party without a plan for leaving it, and leave later than intended, in a good mood. They think out loud, so their first opinion in a meeting is often not their final one, and they are comfortable with that in a way quieter colleagues find slightly alarming. Silence in a conversation feels like a problem to be solved, so they solve it.
At work they volunteer early, take the front of the room without being asked, and are visible to senior people out of proportion to their output. Recovery from a bad day runs through other people rather than away from them: the instinct after a setback is to call someone, not to close the door.
The failure modes are the same traits with the brakes off. Saying yes in the moment because the social reward is immediate and the calendar cost is three weeks away. Filling the pause that a quieter person needed in order to speak. Confusing the confidence of speaking first with the accuracy of what was said. Those are unpacked in extravert blind spots.
What a low scorer actually looks like
Not shy, not sad, not broken. Low Extraversion is a different setting on the same dial, and the day-to-day version of it is unremarkable.
A low scorer prefers one person to six, and a long conversation to several short ones. They can run the meeting perfectly well and would rather not go to the drinks afterwards — a pair of facts that confuses anyone who assumes social skill and social appetite are the same thing. Company is enjoyable and finite: past a certain amount of it the tank reads empty, and the refill is solitude rather than more contact. They tend to speak once they have something worked out, which makes them slower to volunteer in a fast group and often more precise when they do. A day chopped into meetings flattens them in a way extraverted colleagues genuinely do not feel.
One distinction is worth more than all the rest: shyness is not introversion. Shyness is fear of being judged, and it tracks with Neuroticism, not with this trait. A shy extravert — someone who badly wants to be in the middle of the group and stands frozen at the edge of it — is a common and miserable pattern, and it is not fixed by accepting a label that says you prefer to be alone. If groups are hard, the useful question is whether the feeling is drained or scared. Different signal, different response.
More on the low end in introvert strengths and introverts in extravert workplaces.
Is being extraverted good?
Honestly: it is an advantage in some rooms and a liability in others, which is the same answer every Big Five trait deserves.
On the credit side, higher Extraversion is one of the more reliable correlates of positive day-to-day emotion, and the pattern holds across very different cultures rather than being an artefact of one sociable society 1. Extraverts report more frequent good moods, more social activity, and more of the small rewards that come from being in the room, and they are more likely to be picked for leadership. Extraversion and happiness and Extraversion and leadership set out the studies behind those last two.
On the debit side, being picked is not the same as being right: the extraverted leadership advantage reverses with proactive teams that need listening rather than direction, which the leadership page above unpacks alongside the experiment that found it. The reward sensitivity that makes good news feel good also makes commitments feel cheap at the moment of agreeing to them. And across jobs in general the trait is a weaker predictor of performance than its reputation implies; the roles where it clearly helps are narrower than the word suggests.
The low end has the mirror-image ledger: fewer of the rewards that come from visibility, more of the output that comes from uninterrupted attention. Neither column is a score you should want. What you can do is know which one you are working with.
The six facets of Extraversion
A single Extraversion score is an average of six narrower things, and two people with the same overall score can be built completely differently. The facet pattern is where the useful information sits. The version we use, the public-domain IPIP-NEO-120, names them Friendliness, Gregariousness, Assertiveness, Activity Level, Excitement-Seeking and Cheerfulness 2. Older labels for the same content — Warmth for Friendliness, Activity for Activity Level, Positive Emotions for Cheerfulness — still turn up in textbooks and on some of the pages linked from here.
Friendliness. How readily you warm to people and show it. High scorers make contact easily, use first names quickly, and are demonstrably pleased to see you; low scorers are formal at the start and warm later, which reads as coolness and usually is not. This is the facet most often confused with Agreeableness, and the confusion matters: friendliness is about how fast you approach someone, agreeableness is about how much you accommodate them once you have. A blunt, argumentative person can be extremely friendly. A polite one can be reserved for years. Read more on friendliness.
Gregariousness. Appetite for groups, as distinct from appetite for people. High scorers default to plans involving several others and feel better in a crowd than out of it; low scorers like company in smaller doses and find that a group of eight delivers less than a dinner with one. This is the purest "how introverted am I" facet, and the one most people are actually reporting when they call themselves an introvert. It says nothing about whether you like anybody — only about how many at once. Read more on gregariousness.
Assertiveness. Willingness to speak up, take charge, and steer a group rather than follow it. High scorers volunteer opinions early, take the front of the room, and are comfortable being the one who decides. Low scorers wait to be asked and are content to let someone else run things. The word people confuse it with is aggression, which is a different trait entirely — aggression pushes against others, assertiveness simply moves first. It is also the facet that shifts most with role and practice, which is why it is worth reading on its own. Read more on assertiveness.
Activity Level. Pace. How busy your ordinary week is, how fast you move through it, how many things you keep running at once. High scorers walk quickly, dislike empty afternoons, and stack the calendar because a full one feels right. Low scorers do fewer things at a more deliberate speed. This is not Conscientiousness: activity level is about tempo, conscientiousness is about direction and follow-through, and a fast, disorganised person is a perfectly common combination. Read more on activity level.
Excitement-Seeking. Appetite for stimulation — noise, novelty, speed, risk, the loud end of fun. High scorers get bored in low-input environments and go looking for something to happen; low scorers find the same environment pleasant and see no reason to raise the volume. Do not confuse it with Openness. Openness wants a new idea or an unfamiliar country; excitement-seeking wants intensity, and is just as happy getting it from a rollercoaster as from a book it has already read. Read more on excitement-seeking.
Cheerfulness. How readily you feel joy, enthusiasm, and optimism — the positive-emotion engine of the trait. High scorers laugh easily, are visibly delighted by small things, and carry a baseline that runs above neutral. Low scorers are not unhappy; their neutral simply is neutral, and it takes a genuinely good event to move it. Worth separating from Neuroticism, which measures the negative side: a person can be low on worry and low on cheer at the same time, and that steady, unexcitable profile is common. Read more on cheerfulness.
Extraverted, outgoing, confident: the words readers mix up
| The word | What it actually names | How it differs from Extraversion |
|---|---|---|
| Outgoing | Approaching people readily | Roughly the Friendliness and Gregariousness facets: about a third of the trait, leaving out pace, assertiveness, thrill appetite and cheer |
| Confident | Believing you can handle the thing in front of you | Sits closer to low Neuroticism and self-efficacy; quiet people are often quietly confident, and loud people are sometimes loud because they are not |
| Sociable, in the sense of socially skilled | A learned ability to read and handle people | Skill, not disposition. Extraversion is the appetite; skill is the training. High scorers can be clumsy; low scorers with a decade of client work can be superb |
| Shy | Fear of negative evaluation | A Neuroticism pattern. Shy extraverts want the room and dread it at once, and the introvert label does not fix that |
| Introverted | The low end of this same scale | Not a separate trait and not the opposite personality — one dimension, two directions |
| Ambivert | Sitting near the middle of the scale | A useful everyday word for an unremarkable statistical position, not a third type |
Can Extraversion change?
Somewhat, slowly, and less than the self-improvement industry implies.
Across large longitudinal studies, Extraversion moves gently over the life course, and its two halves do not move together: the assertive, take-charge component tends to rise through young adulthood, while the sociable, high-energy component holds steady across those same years and eases off only later in life 3. Roles do some of this work — a job that requires you to run rooms will pull assertiveness up over years, not weekends.
Behaviour is a different and much faster story. Anyone can act extraverted for an evening, whatever their score, which means the trait constrains your defaults rather than your options. Acting outgoing at a conference is a state; how you feel about the next three conferences is the trait. What that costs a quiet person, and whether it lifts anything, is taken up in Extraversion and happiness. More on the long arc in how trait scores age.
How to find out your own score
A guess is not a score. A self-estimate can tell you roughly which side of the middle you sit on. What it cannot tell you is whether you got there through friendliness and cheer or through assertiveness and pace, and that shape is the part that changes what you actually do. The measured version needs a standardised instrument and a norm sample to compare against, which is what the full Big Five test gives you: your Extraversion percentile and all six facets, scored separately.
Screen one trait free (3 min) → or take the full Big Five test (12 min, $2, report included) →
References
Footnotes
-
Lucas, R. E., Diener, E., Grob, A., Suh, E. M., & Shao, L. (2000). Cross-cultural evidence for the fundamental features of extraversion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(3), 452–468. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.3.452 ↩
-
Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2014.05.003 ↩
-
Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: a meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.1.1 ↩