As a card-carrying ambivert who prefers the company of quiet people, I’ve cheered from the sidelines when others have decried the “extrovert ideal” in Western culture. Yet the evidence shows that modest efforts to move slightly in that direction can be helpful. For instance, Seth Margolis and Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, have found that asking people simply to act like an extrovert for one week appreciably increased their well-being.[2]
