Kamal Ghorui
Automobile tycoon Henry Ford once famously said that you could have his popular car in any colour you wanted – provided it was black.
Modern psychology is more liberal in granting us a choice of personality types. For years, psychologists categorised only two different personalities: extraverts and introverts.
Extraverts are very sociable and outgoing, and are the life and soul of a party, even when there is no party.
Introverts avoid large groups and gatherings when they can, and prefer to be left alone to pursue their individualistic interests, such as reading, or just thinking their own thoughts, instead of listening to the thoughts of others. Notable introverts include Isaac Newton, Einstein, Gandhi, and JK Rowling.
According to traditional psychology, you were either an introvert or an extravert. Couldn’t make up your mind which? Toss a coin.
Then last year, a New York psychologist, Rami Kaminski, came up with a third vert to add to the introvert/extravert duality: the otrovert.
In his 2025 best-selling book, The Gift of Not Belonging , he defined an otrovert as someone who remains an ‘eternal outsider’ – otro being the Spanish word for other – in group situations, even while appearing to be friendly and socially engaged.
While otroverts might participate in collective activities – like joining a club, or taking an organised package tour – they tend to do their own outsider thing, such as having minimal interaction with fellow club members, or going off to do their own sightseeing instead of following the tour guide.
But it seems that even this trinity of verts wasn’t enough. Psychology has since unearthed from the human psyche two more personality types: the ambivert and the omnivert. An ambivert is midway between an extravert and an introvert and is, as the name suggests, ambivalent about one or the other choice. An omnivert swings like a trapeze artist from being a full-fledged extravert some of the time to being a total introvert at other, randomly determined, times.
All these versions of vert are enough to make one’s head spin. And give one vert-ego.
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