On Shyness: The Smiths vs. Psychology

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Shyness is nice, and

Shyness can stop you

From doing all the things in life

You'd like to

“Ask” by The Smiths (Morrissey-Marr), 1986

It’s now over 30 years since Morrissey of The Smiths opened the Top 20 song “Ask” with words of wisdom on the psychology of shyness. I wondered how Morrissey’s take would compare with psychologists’ understanding of shyness. Based on my own everyday experiences and observations I didn’t doubt that “shyness can stop you”. But I became intrigued by Morrissey’s suggestion that shyness can be “nice”, which is to say, can be a positive influence. Could such a seemingly implausible flight of lyrical fancy have any shred of support from the psychology research literature?

A recent research paper written by psychologists Louis A. Schmidt and Kristie L. Poole of McMaster University in Canada looked like it might contain some answers. In defining shyness as an approach-avoidance conflict leading to social inhibition and feelings of anxiety, it offers no contest to Morrissey’s depiction of shyness as a stopping force. But, intriguingly, the main question that the study was designed to answer relates to a possible benefit of shyness.

The researchers reasoned that shyness would not exist unless it served some beneficial purpose to humanity—otherwise evolutionary processes would have deleted it. They go on to make the tentative suggestion that shyness may reflect neoteny, a term describing the lengthening of childhood by delaying physiological maturity. They thought that extending childhood may allow additional time for learning while the immature brain is still highly plastic. This is an ideal time for learning because a highly plastic brain can more readily reorganize the patterns of connections among its many neurons. This greater learning would offer survival benefits that could be very useful in later life.

By this reasoning, shyness is not merely a by-product of slowed brain maturation but, rather, is one of its causes. The reduced level of stimulation resulting from the dampening of tendencies to approach others could contribute directly to delayed brain maturation. In turn, this would produce neoteny and the benefits described above. If all this were true, it follows that shyness in childhood should not only be related to slowed brain maturation, it should actually cause slowed maturation.

The McMaster University study looked at the rate of maturation of the frontal lobes of the brains of 30 six-year-old children over a period of one and a half years. This part of the brain is known to be particularly densely packed with neurons during childhood compared with adulthood. The children were organized into two groups: those with a greater tendency towards shyness, and those with lesser signs of shyness, based on ratings made by their mothers.

Brain maturity was measured using electrical activity taken from electrodes placed on the scalp in a procedure called the electroencephalogram, or EEG. The children watched clips from movies while the EEG measures were recorded. The specific measure of electrical activity used in the study was the ratio of faster-frequency electrical waves to slower-frequency waves. This was on the basis that higher values of this ratio indicate a more mature brain.

The study found that while all the children had similar fast-to-slow brain wave ratios initially, as time wore on, differences appeared. The children identified as shy showed no change in the fast-to-slow wave ratio—they flattened out over the entire 18-month study period. However, the children identified as not shy showed a steady increase in the ratio. The development of the brains of the shy children seemed to be stalled relative to that of the non-shy children.

The study findings support the neoteny explanation of shyness, by which shy children gain additional time for learning as the brain matures more slowly—and thus remains relatively plastic. But the evidence is not yet fully convincing and the authors themselves specifically drew attention to limitations of their study. One problem was the relatively small numbers of children that took part. This is a concern as there are recent examples in other areas of psychological research where repeated versions of studies with small numbers of participants showed different results the second time round. Another issue was the possibly unreliable way of measuring shyness through the subjective opinions of the children’s mothers, who may avoid labelling their child as shy because they perceive it as a criticism. At the moment, we should treat the neoteny explanation of shyness as interesting but not well-supported by evidence.

Still, it has been estimated that around 40 percent of children self-identify as shy. This seems too high a proportion for us to conceive of shyness as a psychological malady. Morrissey may have been onto something.