Extra/oversion

Some of our new visitors (welcome all) flinched a bit at the spelling of "Extraversion" on our site, which is perhaps less familiar than "Extroversion" as it is spelled in common usage. We checked our Latin books (er, Latin websites) and both spellings are valid variants. We have no good reason for the "a" rather than the "o" except a cultural one: YouJustGetMe is based on the Big-Five personality model and our names were inspired by Costa & McCrae's 1992 take on it. (But this little citation on Wikipedia argues that psychologists tend to use "Extraversion" whereas common usage tends toward "Extroversion.") We're fans of the Big-Five because it was derived statistically, rather than theoretically like other personality models by Eysenck, Cattell, Jung, Freud and others. But the greater point, which would no doubt be emphasized by Lewis Goldberg who is the real grandfather of the Big-Five, is this: When the dust settles on the statistical analysis, naming the traits is pure art, and psychologists are welcome to wordsmith as they see fit (thus the theoretical squabbles are hardly eliminated by using statistics). That's why Goldberg named the traits I, II, III, IV, and V. So it shouldn't surprise you that we named our bubbles brand new from scratch, or that Extraversion has also gone by Extroversion, Agency, Surgency, Activity, Exvia, and Sociability. If you want to compare all the Big-Five traits to other models, check out this killer chart.

But while we're at it, let's talk about Extraversion. The Big-Five model surprised everyone by showing that Extraversion included more than just sociability like other models and the popular definition would have it. Excitement seeking, risk taking, and general cheerfulness are other traits of the Extravert. The Latin was right, Extraversion is about "turning outward" (and Introversion is about "turning inward") but it's not just turning outward to people, it's about turning outward to the whole world of which people are just one part. The best way to think of Extraversion is to think of your skin - that psychologically profound barrier between all that is you and all that is not you. Extraverts live outside their skin. Introverts live inside. And most of us do a little of both.

Final point - When you answer the 40 questions about yourself (and visit each day to answer a new question until you max out at 120), we score the results on this and other traits. But the personality summaries written by Dr. Peggy don't just spit back what you answered...they make some assumptions based on all the traits we know go together. So if you say you are a people person, we assume you also like roller coasters and smile a lot. There's a pretty big body of literature backing that up, and it lets our summaries include a few things you didn't see coming.