The case for shyness

For Dalton, shyness was the result not just of civilization itself, but of one of its byproducts: life lived as a kind of never-ending performance. It was an idea inspired not by Erving Goffman (or, for that matter, by his fellow sociologist Norbert Elias, who would offer a similar shyness-is-modern argument around the same time); instead, for his inspiration, Dalton looked to the large group of people he considered partially responsible for the rise of all artifice: women. Their tendency to turn life into a series of staged scenes, Dalton believed, would—it was only logical—create conditions within which those shows could fail. Thus, shyness, which is among so much else the self-conscious awareness of the many, many ways that human interaction can go wrong.

Dalton’s ideas live on, today, in the broad recognition, within anthropology and far beyond, that shyness will have cultural components as well as physiological. They also live on, however, in the notion that shyness is best understood not just as the complicated interplay between the human brain and the social world, but also, more simply, as a deviation. Sociability is normal; shyness, it must follow, is abnormal. After all, we humans are—it is a cliché because it is so deeply true—social animals. We define ourselves as a species through our shared garrulousness as much as our shared DNA, through the fact that we put our opposable thumbs to work not just building shelter and creating art, but also writing letters and grasping phones and punctuating the making of evening plans with some enthusiastic dancing-lady emojis. We are human, in some small but profound part, because we are human together.

It is on those social-evolutionary grounds, though, that shyness is sometimes suspected, and sometimes pathologized. Shy people, the sociologist Susie Scott argued, are not merely choosing solitude over companionship, or small groups over larger ones; they are conducting, each time they beg off or turn away, an “unintentional breaching experiment.” They are, in their very shyness, deviating from the broader social order.

And so, they—and the diffidence they exhibit—are suspected.