Are you an extrovert or an introvert? You don’t recognize yourself in any of these character traits? You may be ambiverted.

Publicized in the early 2010s, the term ambiversion describes individuals who are neither extroverts nor introverts, but rather a mixture of the two. A flexible personality who would represent the majority of the population.

Until then personality traits seemed to be divided into two categories: extroverts and introverts. Two concepts introduced in the early 1920s by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung in his book Psychological Types (ed. Georg).

Ambiversion presents a new perspective on personality traits. An ambivert person is at the center of the two notions put forward by Dr. Carl Gustav Jung. She is both extroverted and introverted.

Particularly flexible and adaptable, these people are more apt than others to understand people and adapt to social situations.

It was psychologist and former president of the American Sociological Association Kimball Young who first used the word “ambivert” in his Source Book for Social Psychology (ed. Forgotten Books) published in 1927.

The term resurfaced in 2013 in a study conducted by Adam Grant, a researcher at the University of Wharton in Pennsylvania and published in the journal Psychological Science. After an in-depth observation of 340 volunteer employees, the research highlights the fact that “ambivertes achieve greater business productivity than extroverts or introverts” and would therefore be better salespeople. More adaptable, they would also be easy to learn, regardless of age or level of study.

“They naturally engage in a flexible model of negotiation and listening, ambiverts are likely to express enough self-confidence and motivation to persuade and close a sale but are more inclined to listen to their clients’ interests and less likely to appear overly enthusiastic or presumptuous ”, details Adam Grant in the conclusions of his study.

If the measured personality of ambivertes seem to present advantages both on a professional and personal level, the researcher nonetheless underlines more frequent difficulties for these people to identify their different sources of fulfillment.

The American journalist and author Daniel Pink has devised a test of twenty questions allowing you to calculate your ambiversion rate by answering by: totally false, rather false, neutral, rather agree, completely agree. Among the points mentioned, we can mention in particular:

• Do I like to draw attention to myself?
• Do I feel good in a group and do I like working in a team?
• Do I have good listening skills?
• Do I tend to be quiet when I’m around strangers?

Ambivertes would be able to oscillate between the natural tendencies of introverts and extroverts, depending on the context of a situation or their current mood.

Conceptualizing character traits into two unique categories – extraversion and introversion – would be like looking at psychology in a binary way. Each personality is imbued with nuances of introversion and extraversion that fluctuate according to the different moments of our lives.

In 1920, in his work Psychological Types, Carl Gustav Jung already distinguished 16 psychological types defined according to the dominant cognitive – thought, intuition, feeling, sensation – and the introverted or extroverted orientation of the person. “There is no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert. Such a man would be condemned to spend his life in asylum, ”he stressed.

So are we all ambiverts? May be. In the columns of the Wall Street Journal, Adam Grant, estimates that half, even two thirds of the population would be ambiverted. In an article published on her site, Florence Servan-Schreiber, graduate in transpersonal psychology and trained in Neuro Linguistic Programming, details: “Everyone will learn to take care of themselves according to their temperament. And sometimes crosses and mixtures will coexist. This is how I prefer to work alone, in the silence of a warm room these days, but I enjoy speaking in front of a room full of unfamiliar faces. ”