Social anxiety rising

Anybody working with a lot of young people nowadays knows that social anxiety has been increasing in the past twenty years or so. Many possible causes have been proposed, from smartphones to genetics. While I don’t think that smartphone “abuse” is a cause (rather a symptom) I do think the genetic part has a lot to do with personality.

The following personality traits (OCEAN) are linked to social anxiety:

• Neuroticism
• Introversion
• Openness to experience

The “People who are introverts and very open to new experience tend to have the highest levels of social anxiety” (see here). While neuroticism and introversion are perhaps no big surprise, openness seems to be in need of an explanation.

Openness correlates strongly with the trait “intuition” or “N” in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI, not recognized by most scientists, but easier to operate with than the OCEAN).

About 10-15% of preschoolers are already painfully shy, so there definitely seems to be a strong genetic component. This figure also corresponds to the number of introverted intuitive (IN) types. IN types are rare and many often realise as kids they are different from the majority of people, probably increasing their inborn social sensitivity. When I started using MBTI for my research I quickly found out that it was not only me (INFP) who was very shy as a kid, but also pretty much of my IN friends, my two IN sons and many of my IN students at school.I take the test with all of my classes, and the very shy students are almost always IN, occasionally also IS and to my initial surprise also EN students, as I didn’t expect extraverted teens to suffer from social anxiety.

So, what’s the story? My sons, even though a bit shy (which is not unusual for little kids) didn’t seem to display unusual social behaviour until they started kindergarten and school. My oldest son was a gifted kid and couldn’t really connect to anyone in kindergarten and neither later in school. My younger son (INTJ) seemed to be more “normal”. He did have two friends in kindergarten but suddenly found himself more isolated in elementary school. He does have two boys he talks to, but otherwise doesn’t talk to anybody else and calls himself “asocial”. What happened?

My hypothesis is that social anxiety depends a lot on (not) making connections with others. In kindergarten, my INTJ son had and ENJT best friend and an ENFJ friend who he did like a lot, but grew tired of more quickly.  IF you see the four letters as “magnets” that attract each other, it is easy to see how kids connect with each other. Both boys were rather technologically minded (T) and had what I call “hunter-gatherer minds” (N). The biggest differences were that my son was more careful, less active and wanted to have fewer social interactions due to his introversion. In elementary school, the kids he gets along best with is ISTP, so much more different than him already. In Myers-Briggs, the biggest obstacle for a successful relationship is the N/S dimension.

Basically, this is what happened to my oldest son. He couldn’t find any other (I)N types with similar interests and therefore didn’t find anybody to connect to. IN kids, therefore, are already aware early on that they are different and become shy because the have a feeling of non-belonging. A lot of people on Quora have told me that they felt like aliens in their childhood, some of them desperately waiting for a UFO to pick them up and take them to their “species”.

If childhood can be bad for IN kids, their teens can be much worse. IN kids often look younger and may show delayed bodily development compared to other kids. What happens is, that the precious kids (often SPs, as these are often the first to enter puberty) tend to establish a social hierarchy with bullying and teasing and their easiest victims are the IN kids, as they are both behind in development and “egalitarian”, i.e.  they are not “programmed” to fight for an “alpha position” or to fight at all. It is easy to see how shyness can quickly develop into social anxiety under such circumstances. Even without bullying social isolation can get worse as IN kids can’t understand the other kids' obsession with sex, cars, competitive sports, branded clothes, make-up, etc.

The same can be true for extraverted intuitives (EN). Even though they might have many friends in elementary school, they increasingly don’t understand them and become isolated, too. Whereas their IN counterparts might have already been diagnosed with ASD in childhood, the EN kids might get diagnosed with ASD now that they are in their early teens, because they didn’t show many signs of social isolation before.

Why is social anxiety rising? Because kids are less and less connected in early childhood: fewer siblings, fewer possibilities to get connected, particularly if they are introverted. In that case, even their parents' encouragement to make or meet friends are often futile. One father told me that he had to bribe his son with buying video-games for him if he agreed to meet kids from his school. He said, it cost him a lot of money, but it did help in the end.