Research Proposal

After spending a long time very unsure of the direction I wanted my investigation to take, I had a spark of inspiration and have decided that I want to write my essay about the place of the introvert in modern society, specifically modern western society.  Having spent such a long time in ideas limbo, I decided that wiping the slate clean and beginning on a new idea from scratch was the best way forward.

      -----------------------------------------------------------

Possible essay title: Birth of a salesman: Has the extrovert ideal conquered modern society, and where does leave the introvert?

In this research project I intend to inverstigate if and how Western society has been dominated by "the extrovert ideal", and what place this leaves for introverts in an increasingly busy, noisy and connected world. 

I think this has the potential to be a really interesting body of research, as there are lots of areas for potential exploration, such as:

• What is "the extrovert ideal" and where did it come from?
• Is this specifically a western pattern? Do Eastern cultures hold confident, gregarious, extroverted individuals in the same esteem that we do in the west, or are introverts valued more highly in other parts of the world.
• What impact has social media, and the fact that the whole world is now connected at the click of a  button, had on the visibility of introverts in society? Is alone time simply now more important than ever? 

     ------------------------------------------------------------

Useful reading:

• An Introduction to Theories of Personality (7th Edition), Robert E. Ewen, Psychology Press (2010)
• Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, W. Ronald  D. Fairbairn, Tavistock Publications Ltd (1952)
• A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C.G.Jung, Robert H. Hopcke, Shambhala Publications (1989)
• The Question of Psychological Types: The Correspondence of C. G.Jung and Hans Schmid-Guisan, 1915-1916, Princeton University Press (2012)
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain, Penguin Group (2012)