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Everybody Is Shy (Sometimes!)

Stranger Danger When babies are around eight months old, they begin trying to figure out which grown-ups are trustworthy and which ones aren’t. For many babies, their instincts tell them that any person they don’t recognize is a possible threat. How intense this fear of strangers is and how long it lasts depends on the personality of the specific baby. Some are very anxious, while others are less so. But if you think about it, the reaction makes total sense. Babies are very vulnerable little creatures, so the safest response is to trust only people who are familiar, who have proven themselves trustworthy. As we get older, we learn to make better distinctions about whom to trust. But for babies, a fear of strangers is a survival skill.

Too Shy? Quite a bit of research has been done on the subject of shyness: why are some people more inhibited around others? The psychologist Jerome Kagan has theorized that some babies are highly sensitive to anything new, and that this sensitivity often results in them becoming shy kids later. But just because someone starts off as a sensitive baby, that doesn’t mean one is “doomed” to being shy forever. Some people start off shy as kids but don’t end up that way as adults. In the words of the education expert Howard Gardner, “no one is marked [shy] at birth.” A little social fear can be useful, but (you knew there was a but coming, right?) too much worry is the opposite of adaptive—which is called maladaptive .