I once went through a battery of psychometric tests with one of the leading psychology consultancies. I wanted to understand them from the perspective of the client experience. For a lot of the questions, I found myself saying “From this perspective, I’d answer X; but from another perspective, I’d answer Y”. Clearly frustrated, the psychologist told me that my personality was too complicated for diagnosis!
Much of my work in the past three decades has been to some extent about not putting people into boxes. The more I work with neurodiversity, the more suspicious I become of anything that attempts to classify people in simplistic ways. Which is why I was pleased to come across a new book that debunks the classic extravert/ introvert concept. Psychiatrist Adrian Kaminski argues in his book The Gift of Not Belonging that many people sit between these two extremes. They are otroverts. I reproduce here the blurb for the book, because it explains it so neatly:
“Unlike introverts, who crave solitude and are easily drained by social interactions, otroverts can be quite gregarious and rarely tire from one-on-one socialising. And unlike loners, or people who have been marginalised based on their identity, otroverts are socially embraced and often popular ― yet are unable to conform with what the group collectively thinks or cares about…. And therein lie the great gifts of being an otrovert. When you have no affinity for any particular group, your sense of self-worth is not conditioned on the group’s approval. And, best of all, you know no other way to think other than to think for yourself.”
If Kaminski is correct, it adds further fuel to the debate about why or whether we need to pin labels on people. There’s an argument that being able to put a name to a condition or trait can be liberating, because it explains why someone is different and allows them to be more confident and accepting of their identity. Equally, labels can be convenient excuses for not facing up to our weaknesses and not putting effort into self-improvement or failing to develop appropriate coping strategies.
When we let go of the either/or restriction, we allow people to see themselves as having much wider choices of how they react to stimuli in different contexts. The human brain is the most flexible and adaptive organism in the known universe. While our neurological architecture may place boundaries on out cognition and behaviour, we all have much greater scope within those boundaries than most psychometrics allow for. So, rather than enthusiastically embrace the concept of otrovert as yet another convenient label, it may be more empowering to accept it as one more option that we have, in how we choose to respond to the social world around us. In other words, it may resonate with us, but let it not confine us.
©️David Clutterbuck, 2025