Shyness

Definition

Shyness is the ordinary language term most often used to label the emotional state of feeling anxious and inhibited in social situations. As would be expected from a social psychological perspective, situations differ in their power to elicit reactions of social anxiety. Ratings of shyness-eliciting events reveal that interactions with strangers, especially those of the opposite sex or in positions of authority; encounters requiring assertive behavior; and explicitly evaluative settings such as job interviews provoke the strongest feelings of social anxiety. Quietness, gaze aversion, and awkward body language are the most common behavioral signs of shyness.

Emotional State and Personality Trait

Viewed as an emotional state, shyness is an almost universal experience, with less than 10% of respondents to cross-cultural surveys reporting that they had never felt shy. The ubiquity of shyness raises the question of its possible adaptive value. Contemporary psychologists who take an evolutionary perspective on emotional development point out that a moderate amount of wariness regarding strangers and unfamiliar or unpredictable situations may have considerable adaptive value. Social anxiety is functional when it motivates preparation and rehearsal for important interpersonal events, and shyness helps facilitate cooperative group living by inhibiting individual behavior that is socially unacceptable. Moreover, the complete absence of susceptibility to feeling shy has been recognized as an antisocial characteristic since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. Situational shyness as a transitory emotional state thus appears to be a normal and functional aspect of human development and everyday adult life.

For some people, however, shyness is more than a temporary situational response; it occurs with sufficient frequency and intensity to be considered a personality trait. About 30% to 40% of adults in the United States label themselves as dispositionally shy persons. Three quarters of the shy respondents said that they did not like being so shy, and two thirds of them considered their shyness to be a personal problem. Although shyness does have some positive connotations, such as modesty or gentleness, it is generally rated as an undesirable characteristic, especially for men. Recent research supports this negative image of the trait by documenting how shyness can be a barrier to personal well-being, social adjustment, and occupational fulfillment.

Some people prefer to spend time alone rather than with others but also feel comfortable when they are in social settings. Such people are nonanxious introverts, who may be unsociable but are not shy. The opposite of shyness is social self-confidence, not extraversion. The problem for truly shy people is that their anxiety prevents them from participating in social life when they want to or need to.

Individual Differences

One way to approach the distinction between shy people and those who are not shy is simply quantitative: Dispositionally shy people experience physical tension, worry, and behavioral inhibition more frequently, more intensely, and in a wider range of situations than do people who do not label themselves as being shy. There are also qualitative differences in psychological processes. For example, shy people perceive various situations as being inherently less intimate and more evaluative, and they perceive the [Page 875]same interpersonal feedback as being more evaluatively negative, compared with those who are not shy. When they encounter social difficulties, shy people also tend to make more self-blaming causal attributions and to remember more negative details than do people who are not shy.

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