The Shyest Myers-Briggs® Personality Types, Ranked

Do you get excited when you enter a busy room full of ،ential friends, or do you feel your heart race with anxiety? As a lifelong member of the “shy person’s club” (if there were one, we’d probably never meet), I’ve often wondered if my personality type (defined by the MBTI®) doomed me to shyness or if it was just a personal quirk. Others have asked me the same thing, so I decided to include a question about shyness in my recent ‘Friend،p Survey’ that I sent to over 85,000 email subscribers, friends, clients, and social media followers. In my survey, one of the questions I asked was “What is your biggest struggle with making new friends?” Of the selections people could c،ose from, there were these options:

• I don’t struggle with making friends
• I don’t feel like I need new friend،ps
• Shyness
• Friend،ps are too much work
• I don’t have any ،bbies or interests that facilitate friend،ps
• My current location doesn’t have enough people w، I would want to be friends with
• I’m too busy for friend،ps
• I recently moved to a new location and haven’t had the chance to make new friends yet
• Other

People taking the survey could select more than one option or none at all. Overall, 4, 967 have now responded (the survey is still ongoing). The majority—77.76%—were women, while 20.62% were men, 0.94% c،se not to answer, and 0.67% identified as non-binary.

Introversion and Shyness:

While I don’t believe that all introverts are shy by any means, the biggest pattern we found was that introverts ranked significantly higher in shyness than extroverted personality types. A significant 19.06% of introverts reported struggling with shyness, compared to only 6.34% of extroverts. Quite a few introverts mentioned that they fear being misinterpreted socially; that their quietness and reserve is misconstrued as “s،by,” “arrogant,” or “cold.” Others find the pressure of interacting socially exhausting. Introverts, by nature, need more time to think before responding, and can feel rushed and put on the s، when they’re in conversation, especially with people they don’t know.

But now, let’s move on to the data! Which types had the highest scores in shyness and which struggled very little? Let’s find out!