Forty employees in Amsterdam were asked to describe the same five photographs out loud. When researchers later coded the transcripts against the speakers’ personality scores, a pattern fell out: the more extraverted the speaker, the more abstract the language. The more introverted, the more concrete and specific.
That is the finding, stripped of any flattering frame. Extraverts, on average, talk about what things mean. Introverts, on average, talk about what is actually there.
It is one study, not settled consensus. But it is a careful one, and what it found is more interesting than the usual advice about getting quiet people to “open up”.
What the study found
The research, by Camiel Beukeboom, Martin Tanis, and Ivar Vermeulen, was published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology. Forty employees at a large company in Amsterdam were asked to describe, out loud, the same five photographs of ambiguous social situations. They were told there were no right or wrong answers and given as long as they liked. Their descriptions were recorded, transcribed, and coded for linguistic abstraction using an established four-level scheme that ranges from concrete action verbs at the bottom to broad trait adjectives at the top. Three days later, the same participants completed a standard personality questionnaire, so the language scoring could not be contaminated by knowing who was who.
The pattern that emerged was consistent. The higher a person scored on extraversion, the more abstractly they described the photos. They used more state verbs, the kind that ascribe an internal quality rather than an action, as in “Jack loves Sue”. They used more adjectives, and they were more willing to describe things that were not actually visible in the picture, filling in motives and backstory.
The more introverted a person was, the more concrete and precise their language. More articles, “a” and “the”, attached to specific objects. More numbers. More references to particular people. More careful distinctions, the “but” and “except” that fence a claim in rather than letting it spread.
Put simply, the extraverts interpreted, and the introverts reported.
Why concrete and abstract are not just style
It would be easy to file this under harmless personality trivia. The researchers argue it is not, and this is the part to slow down on.
Decades of work in social psychology show that the level of abstraction in a sentence changes how listeners interpret it. Describe someone’s behaviour abstractly, “Camiel is unfriendly”, and people tend to read it as a fixed trait, something enduring, likely to happen again, and hard to check. Describe the same behaviour concretely, “Camiel yells at Martin”, and people read it as specific to the situation, and as more believable.
That difference travels with the speaker. “An introvert’s linguistic style would induce more situational attributions and a higher perception of trustworthiness than an extravert’s style,” the researchers wrote. The concrete speaker sounds more credible and more grounded. The abstract speaker sounds more sweeping, more confident about what things mean, and harder to pin down.
The honest reading is that the introvert’s style is doing more epistemic work. Concrete claims can be checked. Abstract ones mostly cannot. Treating them as equivalent rhetorical choices flatters the abstract speaker at the expense of accuracy.
What this looks like at work
For anyone who sits in meetings, the implication is uncomfortable.
The person who speaks in broad, abstract terms, the one who says “this changes how we should think about the whole category”, tends to sound strategic, and that style is often rewarded as leadership. The person who says “two of our last three releases slipped by a week” is doing something more verifiable and arguably more useful, but it can register as merely detailed, even small. The same content, described at a different altitude, lands as vision in one mouth and as bookkeeping in another.
The study does not say the quiet, concrete speaker is smarter or more correct. What it suggests is that their style carries less rhetorical reach by default, and that the reach of the abstract speaker is partly an artefact of how abstraction is processed, not a reliable signal of who has thought harder. That is worth knowing if you are the one running the room and trying to work out whose read to trust.
It also complicates the instinct to coach introverts into speaking more like extraverts. The concrete style is not a confidence problem to be fixed. It is a different and often more falsifiable way of reporting what is in front of you.
What the study does not show
A few limits are worth keeping in view. This was 40 people at one company in one city, describing photographs in a single sitting, and a task built around ambiguous images may pull for interpretation in a way that ordinary talk does not. The finding is a correlation between a personality score and a way of speaking, not proof that being introverted causes concrete language or the reverse. Personality here is also a dimension, not a pair of boxes: most people sit somewhere in the middle and shift their register with context anyway. A concrete introvert can speak in grand abstractions about a subject they love, and a fluent extravert can be ruthlessly specific when the stakes demand it. And it is one study, on one trait, from over a decade ago — a good prompt for noticing something, not a rule to sort colleagues with.
The quieter reading
Try this in the next meeting you sit in. When someone falls quiet after a sweeping claim, watch what you assume about them in the seconds that follow. Disengaged. Cautious. Out of their depth.
Now notice what you assumed about the person who made the sweeping claim, and ask whether you can actually check it.
If the answer is no, the room has been running on something other than evidence, and the quiet person was the only one keeping score.
