It pays — in particular jobs, and partly for reasons that have nothing to do with being better at them.
Extraversion is the trait most people assume is the money trait. It is positively related to earnings, and it is the weakest of the four directional rows on this test.
The interesting part is not the size of it. It is where it applies, and why — because one of the mechanisms has nothing to do with being better at the job.
Extraversion comes out positive on earnings in the meta-analytic literature, more weakly than conscientiousness. On performance, Barrick and Mount (1991) found it a valid predictor for two occupational groups specifically — managers and sales — rather than across the board. That is a meaningful qualification. It is not that outgoing people are generally better at work; it is that some work is mostly conversations.
So the honest version of the finding is narrow: extraversion pays in roles where the product is partly the interaction, and does very little in roles where it is not. If you are an extravert in a lab, the trait is a social preference rather than a professional advantage.
Here is the finding that reframes the whole trait. Judge, Bono, Ilies and Gerhardt (2002) meta-analysed personality against leadership across 222 correlations and 73 samples, and separated two things that usually get conflated: emerging as a leader, and being effective as one.
Extraversion was the strongest trait correlate of leadership overall. And across the five traits together the relationship with emergence was substantially stronger than with effectiveness — a Multiple R of .53 against .39. Put plainly: the traits that get you picked are not, to the same degree, the traits that make you good once picked.
That is a pay mechanism. Being selected earlier and more often produces higher earnings whether or not you were the best candidate, and extraversion is unusually good at being selected. It is worth knowing if you are an extravert — some of your premium is a discount rate the room is offering you rather than a verdict on your work. And it is worth knowing if you are not, because it means the gap you are looking at is partly a selection artefact rather than a competence one.
The emergence finding cuts both ways, and the second edge is sharper. If being visible gets you selected somewhat independently of being effective, then extraverts are systematically placed in roles they may not be the best fit for — and the reckoning arrives at the level where the job stops being conversations and starts being judgement, sequencing and detail.
There is a quieter version of the same problem. Presence is rewarded immediately and output is rewarded eventually, so it is unusually easy for an extravert to be well liked, well networked and quietly not progressing on the strength of the work. The signal that something is wrong tends to arrive late, because everybody enjoys working with you.
Two pieces of good news, and they are real rather than consoling.
The first is that the effect is weak. Being introverted is not an earnings sentence, and the trait does far less work than education, occupation or hours. The second is that the mechanism above is addressable in a way a disposition is not: if part of the premium comes from being visible when decisions get made, then visibility at the right moments is a technique rather than a personality change. There is a longer version of that argument in The Anchor, in depth, including the one thing worth practising.
This is the weakest of the four directional rows, and the one where individual variation swamps the average most thoroughly. Plenty of quiet people earn a great deal and plenty of outgoing ones do not. The strongest trait on this test explains about 1.6% of earnings variation; this one explains less.
The test also cannot tell sociability from performance. Some people find contact genuinely easy; others have become very good at something that quietly drains them, and both answer these ten statements the same way. The tell is what you want on a Friday evening rather than what you manage at eleven on a Tuesday.
Not a hiring instrument — gameable, weak at selection, and legally riskier than employers tend to assume: a US appeals court has held that a clinical personality inventory counted as a “medical examination” under the Americans with Disabilities Act (Karraker v. Rent-A-Center, 7th Circuit, 2005). That case concerned a clinical test rather than this one, and we are not lawyers — but it is a reason to take advice rather than our word for it. Given the emergence-versus-effectiveness gap above, it is also the trait most likely to make an interviewer confident and wrong.