Catherine Bennett: Oh, this worship of showing-off. Let’s hear it for the shy

Thanks to a Freedom of Information request, following a trip to Iraq, newly revealed Foreign Office emails have indicated the lengths to which the mayor of London – also, allegedly, the MP for somewhere or other – will go to get himself noticed.

Since no mayoral word has emerged, to advise why Johnson needed to sprawl on a mountainside with a Kalashnikov, it looks as if this level of visible farce has simply become essential to his role as the country’s premier show-off. Albeit he is now competing principally against himself. Photographs of Johnson belly down in the dirt, purporting to “strengthen economic ties between London and Kurdistan”, had to outshine all his earlier public performances: knocking over a 10-year-old Japanese boy, giving his wife a lift on his bicycle, mussing his hair on Have I Got News for You, dancing like a loon at the Olympics.

In other words, it all adds up to the picture of a perfect modern leader. A new report, A Winning Personality, published by the Sutton Trust thinktank, has concluded that extroversion – defined as being “assertive, talkative and enthusiastic” – is now so closely associated with career success and high earnings that educators should investigate interventions “to improve beneficial personality traits”. Among which introversion is, clearly, not numbered.

……..

Although the report’s co-author, Dr Robert de Vries, of the University of Kent, does not explicitly urge children to be more like a Johnson or Branson, or Sir Alan or Bercow or – there are some female role models – a Kardashian, this, surely, is the message, when extroversion is not so much prized as taken for a behavioural norm. Even among the very sick. Reports of the deaths of David Bowie and Alan Rickman stressed the discretion of both men about their fatal illnesses, as if this were a notably Salingeresque departure from wanting to tell all of their colleagues, or post chemo selfies, or share the journey with readers of Vanity Fair.

In fact, if they really wanted their study to make an impact, Dr de Vries and his fellow author, Dr Jason Rentfrow, should probably have taken a leaf out of the Johnson playbook, hired photographers, insulted a minority and declared theirs the best and most important contribution to peace in the Middle East yet written. At a minimum, we could have expected some Instagrammed selfies, with the academic personalities doing crazy faces. Anything, really, to suppress the faintest hint of disabling, failure-ridden introversion.

“Regardless of family background,” de Vries says, “the characteristics of extroversion still have an effect on earnings. Those characteristics, such as self-confidence or assertion, are part of your personality but are also things that can be developed.” While he is careful to add that a spectrum of self-assertiveness is, mercifully, involved – “it is not about being very extroverted or not at all” – the study can only add weight to the argument, advanced by the US writer Susan Cain in her excellent book, Quiet, that society now esteems “a remarkably narrow range of personality styles”. And those styles discarded are the quieter ones, thought to characterise at least a third of the population. “We’re told,” she writes, “that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable. We see ourselves as a nation of extroverts – which means that we’ve lost sight of who we really are.”

Read her full piece here