"Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" by Susan Cain (2013)

The book is a cultural critique. It asserts that individuals differ in temperaments, on which one can build (personality), but which cannot be altered and must not be cured. The plurality of tastes has been championed by markets. The plurality of both tastes and values has been championed by democracies. The plurality of temperaments may have been underappreciated by the education system and the labour market; extroverts carry a premium, possibly undeserved.

It is not obvious that motion pictures are to blame. Roger Thornhill, of "North by Northwest," may have been an extrovert or an introvert (indeed, his wives left him because he led too dull a life). These are only his superior social skills that are apparent. Movies do tend to promote characters with such skills (because a mumbling hermit would typically be an inept ambassador for the director's ideas), but by doing so, movies educate at least as much as they promote a particular temperament. Instead, it is the higher-density living (which raises the rewards to socialising) and possibly the pharmaceutical industry (which cashes in on the desire to conform) that are complicit in the rise of the extrovert ideal.