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Introvert i ekstravert: popularni mitovi

Kata Živković5 min čitanja

Introvert i ekstravert neki su od najpoznatijih termina iz psihologije ličnosti koji nalaze svoje mjesto u više teorija. Popularno su rašireni, no ponekad pogrešno interpretirani. U ovom blogu donosimo ti neke od najčešćih mitova i zabluda vezanih uz ove dimenzije u sklopu Big5 teorije ličnosti, odnosno teorije Velikih Pet.

Digni ruku ako si introvert!

Hvata li te panika pri pomisli da bi trebao/la dignuti ruku i postaviti pitanje u prostoriji punoj ljudi? Postoji mnogo razloga za taj strah, no suprotno popularnom mišljenju, osobina ličnosti introverzija za taj osjećaj nelagode nije nužna.

Ljudsko ponašanje rezultat je više faktora - kombinacije tvojih osobina ličnosti, kao i situacije u kojoj se trenutno nalaziš. Sigurno si primijetio/la da se ponekad ponašaš više u skladu sa svojim osobinama ličnosti, dok ih ponekad moraš “sakriti” jer situacija tako zahtjeva. Na primjer, možda ti javni nastup nije najdraži dio posla, no svejedno odrađuješ prezentacije i govore, jer želiš odgovorno i savjesno obavljati svoj posao - dakle ponašaš se suprotno onome čemu si inače sklon/a.

Mitovi u psihologiji ličnosti

U prethodnim smo blogovima pisali o raznim logičkim pogreškama i zašto smo njima skloni. Prirodno nam je stvarati mentalne prečace, heuristike, kako bi brže i lakše razumjeli druge pojave i osobe te se bolje snašli u svijetu oko sebe. Idealno bi bilo da zastaneš i aktivno razmisliš o svim faktorima koji mogu utjecati na osobu prije nego doneseš sud o njoj, a u tome ti mogu pomoći razne psihološke tehnike, kao što su Mindfulness tehnike ili tehnike Kognitivno bihevioralne terapije. 

Iako nam je ljude ponekad lakše “stavljati u kutije”, svaka je osoba posebna sa svojom kombinacijom gena, osobina i okoline u kojoj se razvija, stoga bi bilo pogrešno zaključivati o trajnim osobinama ličnosti na temelju ograničenih informacija, odnosno njihove reakcije u određenom trenutku.

Mit #1: Svaka je osoba ili introvert ili ekstravert

Dimenzije ličnosti u Big5 teoriji ličnosti prikazane su na kontinuumu: od introverta, preko ambiverta do ekstraverta. Introvert i ekstravert u ovom kontekstu predstavljaju krajeve ove zvonolike distribucije, što znači da se puno više ljudi u populaciji nalazi negdje između ovih krajnosti. Drugim riječima, većina ljudi u populaciji su takozvani ambiverti te se nalaze oko sredine ove krivulje te većinom nemaju problem s učestalom interakcijom s drugima, kao ni samostalnim provođenjem vremena.

Mit #2: Večeras više želim ostati doma i gledati seriju nego otići na druženje - to znači da sam introvert

Ne nužno, ono što to znači je da voliš gledati serije. Kao što smo ranije opisali, nije ponašanje u svakoj situaciji čisti odraz tvojih osobina ličnosti. Mnogi faktori situacije u ovom scenariju mogu utjecati na tvoje odluke: umor, vremenske prilike, mogućnost prijevoza, financijska odgovornost, trenutan odnos s prijateljima… Postoje mnogi ekstraverti koji bi radije srijedu navečer proveli u društvu Netflixa i HBO Maxa nego otišli na večeru s prijateljima.


Mit #3: Ekstraverti se ničega ne boje

I ekstraverti su samo ljudi. Imaju strahove i brige, kao i radosti te uzbuđenja. Ekstraverti jesu skloniji češćoj interakciji s drugim osobama, no to ne znači da ne razmišljaju o potencijalnim opasnostima nepredvidljivog života. Komunikacija s drugim ljudima i aktivnostima ih ispunjava, ali logično je da neće namjerno, neselektivno stupati u komunikaciju s ljudima koji im ne odgovaraju.

Mit #4: Introverti uvijek žele biti sami jer ne vole ljude

Introverti imaju veći fokus na unutarnji svijet nego na vanjski, no to ne znači da ne vole ljude. I oni rado provode vrijeme s bližnjima, no jednostavno preferiraju da druženje s drugima bude u kraćim vremenskim periodima. Interakcija s mnoštvom ljudi i aktivnosti više ih mentalno iscrpljuje nego osnažuje, stoga nastoje više vremena provesti ili u manjem društvu bliskih osoba ili u vlastitom društvu.

Mit #5: Ekstraverti su plitke osobe

Već neki od primjera slavnih intelektualaca mogu opovrgnuti ovaj mit, teško da bi se netko usudio tvrditi da su Martin Luther King Jr. i Oprah Winfrey bile površne osobe. Ekstravertirane osobe se osjećaju kao da imaju više energije nakon interakcije s drugim ljudima, iskustvima i aktivnostima. To ne znači da im nedostaje dubine u razmišljanju, niti da su manje sposobne za dubokoumne, ozbiljne i emocionalne misli i razgovore od introverata.

Mit #6: Introverti se mogu “izliječiti” i postati ekstraverti

I ekstraverzija, kao i introverzija, predstavljaju osobine ličnosti, koje su relativno trajne tendencije osobe da reagira kroz različite situacije. Američki psiholozi Costa i McCrae u svojim unanstvenim radovima o Velikih 5 (Big Five) osobina ličnosti navode da se ličnost oblikuje najviše do otprilike 30. godine života, dok su nakon tridesete promjene u ličnosti umjerenije, odnosno naša ličnost postaje relativno stabilna, kao i okolina u kojoj većina odraslih osoba živi. Ipak, postoje kasnije promjene ličnosti kroz dob, no one se uglavnom ne odnose na osobine ekstraverzije odnosno introverzije. Istraživanja pokazuju da se osobe većinom mijenjaju na osobinama ličnosti neuroticizam, otvorenost i savjesnost. 

Dakle, ne, introvertirane se osobe najvjerojatnije nikada neće preobraziti u ekstraverte, i obrnuto.

Zaključno

Svaka je osoba posebna i upravo te ta posebnost čini vrijednim i jedinstvenim dijelom društva. Zbog kompleksnosti svake osobe teško nam je razumjeti i predvidjeti ponašanja drugih, no nemoj pasti u zamku kognitivnih pristranosti vezanih uz osobine ličnosti.
Pokušaj uzeti nekoliko trenutaka prije nego doneseš sud o nekome, a u tome ti može više reći naš blog o Mindfulness tehnikama.koji ti može pomoći da usidreno živiš u svakom trenutku svog života.  Danas je na hrvatskom tržištu dostupno više Mindfulness tečajeva ili edukacija. Jedan od njih je i naša edukacija Mindfulness: živi u trenutku koja će se održati u lipnju 2023.

Svaka je osoba posebna i upravo te ta posebnost čini vrijednim i jedinstvenim dijelom društva.


Ako ti je ovo bilo zanimljivo i želiš naučiti više o Mindfulnessu i drugim metodama nošenja sa stresom, prijavi se na našu online edukaciju Mindfulness: živi u trenutku.

Još s bloga

Sve objave

More Than Money: Why Financial Literacy Is a Democratic Competence

Reflections from the Financial and Economic Literacy NECE Lab, Vienna, 27–28 April 2026 When we talk about financial literacy, most people picture budgeting apps, savings accounts, and the fine print on a loan agreement. Useful things, but a narrow picture. Increasingly, educators, researchers, and policymakers across Europe are making a bigger claim: understanding money is not only a personal survival skill. It is a foundation of active citizenship and democratic resilience. That claim was the beating heart of the Financial and Economic Literacy NECE Lab in Vienna, a two-day gathering hosted by THE CIVICS Innovation Hub together with Znanje na djelu and the Erste Financial Life Park (FLiP), with the support of ERSTE Foundation. We were proud to be part of it, having Magdalena Basić Alando actively participate and present our own project, Financial Literacy for Rural Youth, and learning alongside practitioners from across the continent. This post pulls together what the research actually says, and what we saw play out in the room. The problem: too many young people can't apply what they know Start with the evidence. In the OECD's most recent international assessment of 15-year-olds, released in 2024, the picture is sobering: across the 14 OECD countries assessed, 18% of students on average do not have basic proficiency in financial literacy, meaning they cannot apply their knowledge to real-life situations involving financial decisions. The gap is not evenly distributed. Socio-economically disadvantaged students are over-represented among low performers, which risks entrenching inequality as those students become adults. In other words, the young people who most need economic confidence are the ones least likely to be given it — a pattern that maps neatly onto who feels shut out of public life more broadly. There is a hopeful flip side. Financial literacy and positive financial behaviour are linked: students with stronger skills behave more responsibly with money and are more forward-looking, with high performers markedly more likely than low performers to save. Skills, attitudes, and behaviour move together — which is exactly why how we teach matters as much as what we teach. The bigger claim: financial literacy feeds democratic participation Here is where the Vienna conversation went beyond personal finance. One of the Lab's expert speakers was Anna Lo Prete of the University of Turin, whose research sits right at this intersection — and whose work is among the clearest evidence we have on the question. Lo Prete's cross-country analysis documents a positive association between political participation — measured by the number of citizens voting in national elections — and the awareness of the trade-offs behind private and public decisions that basic financial education captures. Crucially, this is not just correlation dressed up: empirical models that control for a large set of other determinants of voter turnout indicate that financial literacy continues to have a positive and causal impact on electoral participation. Why would that be? The logic is intuitive once you see it. Understanding some economics and finance helps citizens grasp the reasons behind public intervention and weigh the pros and cons of policy proposals and agendas. A voter who understands taxation, public budgets, inflation, and debt is simply better equipped to evaluate the promises on a ballot — and harder to mislead. The catch: financial literacy alone isn't enough It would be too easy to conclude "teach kids about compound interest and democracy takes care of itself." The research is more demanding than that — and this nuance came up repeatedly in Vienna's group work. A recurring critique in the academic literature is that much mainstream financial education quietly frames citizens as consumers rather than participants. One influential analysis argues that dominant financial literacy programmes can end up promoting a limited, consumerist form of civic engagement, and that what is really needed is a critical, emancipatory civic financial literacy for an engaged citizenry able to extend and protect more robust conceptions of freedom and democracy. Scholars working on integrative economic education put the point sharply: financial literacy without civic competence remains a merely reactive skill rather than a source of genuine political agency, which is why financial literacy and civic competences should be understood as parts of a single integrative concept of economic education. The two only reach their full value when taught together — money knowledge that can read the system, not just cope with it. Europe is building the scaffolding None of this is happening in a vacuum. The policy architecture is catching up with the research. In 2023 the European Commission and the OECD jointly published a Financial Competence Framework for Children and Youth in the European Union. It is not only about interest rates and risk: alongside the four core content areas — money and transactions, planning and managing finances, risk and reward, and the financial landscape — the framework deliberately integrates cross-cutting dimensions including digital finance, sustainable finance, entrepreneurship, and citizenship. Citizenship is written into the framework by design. On the civic side, the Council of Europe's Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture exists precisely to equip young people with the competences needed to defend and promote human rights, democracy and the rule of law, to act as active citizens, and to live peacefully together with others. Read the two frameworks side by side and the overlap is obvious: critical thinking, informed decision-making, and the confidence to participate. What this looks like in practice: rural youth and economic autonomy This is the gap our own project set out to close, and the reason we were presenting it in Vienna. Financial Literacy for Rural Youth: Building Democratic Resilience Through Economic Empowerment merges financial and civic education for an audience usually left out of both: young people in rural areas, who are systematically underrepresented in programmes that tend to be urban-centred. Working with our partners, the project equips rural GenZ participants in Croatia and Belgium with practical competences: budgeting, saving, investing, planning; through gamified, peer-to-peer, blended learning adapted to rural digital realities. But the design goes a step past personal finance, exactly along the lines the research recommends. Participants learn to analyse economic policies, financial products, and media narratives about money, so they can resist manipulation and make informed civic choices. The premise is that economic dependency and exclusion are themselves barriers to democratic participation, and that when young people understand how taxation, public budgets, and economic policy shape their own lives, they engage more meaningfully in democratic processes. A transnational peer exchange between Croatian and Belgian participants adds a cross-cultural, shared-European dimension, a small counterweight to the polarisation that tends to follow economic marginalisation. The pilot trainings in Croatia are already complete, with workshops in Belgium still ahead. And the methodology is being built to outlast the project and be shared amongst all stakeholders. Where the formal and non-formal worlds meet If there was one moment in Vienna that made the abstract concrete, it was the guided tour of the Erste Financial Life Park (FLiP), FLiP turns financial education into something you can walk through and touch: interactive stations where visitors make real-feeling budgeting decisions and immediately see the consequences. It is a vivid rebuttal to the idea that money education has to be dry. A theme the NECE Lab kept returning to, and one the research underlines, is the relationship between formal schooling and non-formal education. Classrooms provide reach and legitimacy; non-formal initiatives like ours provide the agility to reach underserved groups, experiment with gamified and peer-led methods, and adapt fast. The most promising path forward is not one or the other, but connective tissue between them: school systems that borrow the energy of non-formal approaches, and civic organisations whose toolkits can be picked up and used inside classrooms. The takeaway The case made in Vienna, and backed by the evidence, is straightforward but consequential. Financial literacy is not merely about helping individuals stay solvent. Done well, paired with civic competence rather than reduced to consumer advice, it strengthens people's capacity to understand the systems they live in, to resist manipulation, and to participate in the democratic decisions that shape their economic lives. In an era of rising costs, growing inequality, and declining trust in institutions, that capacity is not a luxury. It is infrastructure for democracy. We left Vienna grateful to all speakers for the intellectual grounding; to our fellow educators for the knowledge exchange and the good company; to the organisers: THE CIVICS Innovation Hub, Znanje na djelu, Erste Financial Life Park, and ERSTE Foundation, FLiP centre. The next chapter is being written in rural classrooms and community halls across Europe. We're glad to be part of it. Sources OECD (2024), PISA 2022 Results (Volume IV): How Financially Smart Are Students?, OECD Publishing. Lo Prete, A. (2024), Political participation and financial education: Understanding personal and collective trade-offs for a better citizenship, Economics Letters / ScienceDirect. Lo Prete, A., Financial education: From better personal finance to improved citizenship, Journal of Financial Literacy and Wellbeing, Cambridge Core. Arthur, C. (2012), Financial Literacy Education for Citizens: What Kind of Responsibility, Equality and Engagement?, Citizenship, Social and Economics Education (SAGE). Integrative Economic Education to Combine Citizenship Education and Financial Literacy (ResearchGate). European Union / OECD (2023), Financial Competence Framework for Children and Youth in the European Union, OECD Publishing. Council of Europe, Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC).

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