Your introversion is one of the most influential aspects of your personality, and thus your day-to-day life as an introvert.

Imagine your life is a Broadway show, and that the various aspects of your existence—including your introversion—have different roles and prominence in the production.

How significant is the role your introversion plays?

In other words:

How much influence—practically speaking—does your introversion really have on your life day to day?

Well, it’s far more than a mere bit player or extra, that’s for sure.

It’s actually one of the main characters, if not the star of the show at times.

That’s why it matters so much for you to understand your introversion and factor it in to your thinking and behaviors each day.

It’s not just a part of who you are.

It’s an influential part.

The fascinating backstory of the so-called Big 5 personality traits—openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, and of course extroversion (which, albeit backhandedly, indicates one’s introversion)—drives home the point.

The Essence of Personality

In 1936, Harvard University psychologist Gordon Allport teamed up with a colleague—Dartmouth College psychologist Henry Odbert—to tackle a seemingly impossible task.

The two men wanted to see if the thousands upon thousands of personality traits that had been identified over the centuries could be boiled down into a much smaller, more manageable set of fundamental traits of human personality.

Allport and Odbert approached the challenge by tapping into an innovative line of thinking called the lexical hypothesis, which says that the major dimensions of personality are encoded in the words we have come up with to name personality traits.

The men thus broke out the 1925 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary—which had more than a half-million words at the time—and compiled a list of just under 18,000 words that described personality, behaviors, and traits.

Of those, 4,500 met the men’s definition of a personality trait.

What now?

The Most Influential Traits

Well, Allport and Odbert ended their own work on the project, publishing their findings—including all 4,500 or so of their trait words—in a paper.

But in the years and decades that followed, others picked up where Allport and Odbert had left off, adding a technique called factor analysis into the mix.

Briefly, almost comically so, here’s how factor analysis works.

If you survey a large group of people and ask them to rate themselves on various personality characteristics, one by one, you of course get a big set of data.

Maybe, for example, everyone has rated themselves on each trait using a scale of 1 (“doesn’t at all describe me”) to 5 (“completely describes me”).

Once you have this data set, you can look at the collective responses of the group, comparing the overall ratings between one pair of assessed trait-words at a time to see if those scores correlate highly with each other—and then repeating this process for each trait-word pair.

Over time, through this factor analysis, you see—over and over and over again—that some of the trait-word pairs are measuring the same basic characteristic. In other words, you don’t need both trait-words in that pair; one—albeit one with a different name than either of the original two, perhaps—will do.

This is exactly what researchers did to (eventually … very eventually) realize Allport and Odbert’s vision.

Using factor analysis, various researchers culled the number of basic/core human personality traits down to 150 … and then 35 … and then 16.

And finally … five, which are now known—and widely accepted, given their scientific identification—as the Big 5 personality traits.

Introversion Is Highly Influential

Now, is the Big 5 idea a flawless, undebated concept?

Of course not.

Nothing is, or ever will be, perfect where human beings are concerned. And there will always be healthy disagreements to consider.

But just think about it.

Out of all the potential personality traits we’ve given names to as humans, and all that were once in the “cut” to be deemed core/fundamental parts of human personality, your introversion (again, backhandedly measured by your level of the Big 5 trait extroversion) is one of them—one of the most influential!

So you can be sure that on the playbill of your life, your introversion is on there somewhere.

Prominently.