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kurtcagle

(1,601 posts)
10. Competence vs Confidence
Tue Apr 7, 2020, 01:40 AM
Apr 2020

I spend a lot of time studying the concepts of introversion and extroversion. This is an innate characteristic, driven primarily by how your brain processes dopamine. Most people tend to fall into one of three clusters, though there are outliers: introverts typically have a high degree of receptivity to dopamine, and as such can be overstimulated quickly. They usually need to pull back from things such as social engagement periodically in order to let dopamine-based stimulation drop to acceptable levels. Extroverts have low dopamine sensitivity, and as such need much higher levels of stimulation before they reach that peak. Ambiverts are somewhere in the middle, though generally are more towards the introvert side of the spectrum. Extroverts make up about 50% of the populace, ambiverts about 15% and introverts about 35%.

Introverts, in general, gravitate towards activities that are self-focused - reading, writing, drawing, science, solo sports, music, programming, design and so forth. They generally are awkward socially as kids, and usually feel that the only way that they will make a difference is by becoming more skilled in certain areas, which in turn means spending more time early in gaining competence even while suffering from a lack of self-confidence. They do not start out as being more intelligent, but they spend more time engaged in learning activities, and so acquire knowledge at a more rapid clip than their extroverted kindred.

Extroverts, on the other hand, crave social interaction. They are often more sexually active earlier, become adept at presenting themselves as confident, and usually tend to reach success earlier in their lives because they are less risk-averse. However, that same glib self-assurance comes at the expense of gaining competence, and in more extreme cases (especially when factoring in socio-economic background) can result in a degree of intellectual laziness that translates into a lack of competence. What's worse is that this can be exacerbated by the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which they overestimate their own competence because they simply don't know enough to be able to make meaningful judgments about how competent they really are.

This becomes most heavily in evidence with narcissists, who are extreme extroverts who need near-constant positive stimulation, who usually come from a privileged background, and who combine the worst aspects of too much self-confidence with too little actual competence. Such people fear people who are competent, because those people can expose the lack of competence that the narcissist has, and as such, they will do whatever they can to belittle, demean, attack and vilify the competent people in their orbits.

Narcissists may overlap with psychopaths (this is actually what is meant by a malignant narcissist). The psychopath had no real sense of personal compassion and can frequently exhibit sadistic behavior because it is the only way that they can get a dopamine "buzz". They are supremely confident, and as such they likewise attract extroverts who are drawn to strong authoritarian figures, and who typically despise introverts because they don't play by social rules that extroverts recognize.

Many, as a guess as much as 80% of, Republicans are extroverts. Democrats tend to run the gamut, though perhaps 60% are introverts. Trumpians are dominantly extroverts at the extreme end, and a lot of their worldview is shaped by the belief that confidence is far more important than competence in the real world - they have no real use for (and a great deal of distrust of) introverts. They also tend to cluster around the middle of the bell curve (on both sides, but usually not far from the average IQ). Most Trumpians aren't stupid, but they are highly conformist, and general see introverts as "them".

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