I very nearly re-wrote a post I already wrote in 2010, drawing out a chord from two passages from Nietzsche and Buber, both distinguishing between dialogue that takes place between individuals and discussion that takes place among members of a group — what Buber called interhuman versus social phenomena.

The reason I was going to write it was to jot down my intention to express these ideas as venn diagrams. A sketch:

Each individual has a certain set of personal things they can/will discuss. Two individuals are likely to have some amount of overlap. But with each additional individual the overlap diminishes.

But each individual also has a larger set of things they can be expected to be able to discuss — a more public or social mode of discussion. This set is a combination of very accessible topics, which approach pure sensory fact (the weather, for instance) and convention: the manners we have all been taught, the attitudes to which we are expected to adhere, the shared values we all are expected to uphold. The more people present, the more the conversation will have to follow the public mode.

I think introversion and extraversion has less to do with numbers of people than with what kind of interaction is more or less likely to happen as people are added or subtracted. So, as Buber noted, two individuals can be alone but still interact in a public or extraverted mode. And three or four introverts with similar interests can still interact in an introverted mode.

When introverts get finicky over chemistry of groups, I suspect it an attempt to preserve a possibility of introversion. Likewise, extraverts will often invite a wide range of people into a situation in order to make boring introverted conversation less possible. And some  introverts will do the same thing, to get relief from themselves, temporarily or permanently. Conversely, extraverts will sometimes enlist introverts to help them excavate their privacy.

Now that I’ve written this out, it is very unlikely I will draw the idea.