Shyness

541 Words2 Pages

There has always been a divide between introverted people and extroverted people; it is one of the first things noticed about a person. This has always been a characteristic that was thought to be innate, however recently there have been many studies attempting to define and find cause of these traits that have been coined “shyness and self-confidence”. An article written in the Social Psychology Quarterly by Philip Manning and George Ray entitled “Shyness, Self-Confidence, and Social Interaction” explores an experiment that was preformed at a mid-western university and attempts to define characteristics of shy and self-confident people during interpersonal interactions.
The experiment explained in the article used 20 students in an introductory interpersonal communications class and recorded the interactions between the students. First, the students were given a test to see if by standard evaluations they would be considered either shy or self-confident. Two students were placed in an observation room, both of same sex and same orientation, meaning both either shy or self-confident. This procedure was followed ten more times to look at all 20 students. The findings were relatively as expected; shy conversations were less vibrant and did not have the “topical talk” that was in most self-confident conversations.
“We show that conversations by shy participants were dominated initially by setting talk. There were many pretopical sequences, most of which did not develop into ...

Open Document