Channeling identity: A study of storytelling in conversations between introverted and extraverted friends

Abstract

This narrative study examined the process of personal storytelling between college-age friends who were similarly introverted or extraverted. Participants were 19 introverted and 20 extraverted samesex pairs (49 percent female) who had been friends for an average of 18 months. Stories emerged spontaneously during 10-minute catch-up conversations. Extraverted friends more often told stories that changed the topic, and more often co-constructed story plots. Introverted friends more often told stories that were embedded in a developing theme, and constructed story plots solo. With regard to content, extraverted friends told stories about romance more so than introverted friends, whose stories more often concerned family/hometown, and older events. The findings suggest that the traits of extraversion and introversion channel the identity-making process. Keywordsintroversion; extraversion; friendship; stories; identity; narrative; discourse; traits; conversation One cannot grasp the most profound logic of the social world unless one becomes immersed in the specificity of an empirical reality (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 271) With the advent of narrative psychology (Bruner, 1990), the concept of personality has expanded beyond the domain of traits, such as extraversion, to encompass identity, or the sense that people make of their lives through telling stories (McAdams, 2001). This expansion of the concept of personality to include life stories has enhanced the degree to which personality psychology attends to the whole person (McAdams, 1995), but the expansion has not been easy. A notable difficulty in connecting traits and life stories is that traits tend to be construed as genetic endowments, and life stories as psychosocial constructions (McAdams, 2001). However, it is now widely recognized that traits such as extraversion, while genetically based (e.g., Plomin, Chipuer, & Loehlin, 1990), become developmentally elaborated through psychosocial processes (Caspi, 1998).The present study builds on the idea that traits help to channel the development of other domains of personality (McLean & Pasupathi, 2006;Winter, John, Stewart, Klohnen, & Duncan, 1998). We investigated this channeling by exploring how people actively construct or "do" personality in everyday life (Cantor, 1990). A performative approach to the development of personality traits has been well-articulated by Caspi (1998), whose model of developmental Address correspondence to: Avril Thorne, University of California, Santa Cruz, Department of Psychology, 277 Social Sciences 2, Santa Cruz, CA 95064,, E-mail: avril@ucsc.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, an...

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