OK, well I've heard this a few times and I know most here understand that socionics/MBTI Introverted and Extroverted traits really don't have a whole lot to do with interpersonal skills or outgoingness. The terms introvert and extrovert in that sense do not apply.

From my understanding it has a lot more to do with how they take in information to come to conclusions. I was trying to think of a good metaphor to explain this and this is the best I could come up with...

An Introvert and Extrovert walk into a room. There is a table with a cardboard box on it, a pair of scissors, and tape.

The extrovert looks at the box, tape, and scissors and then notices a roll of wrapping paper off in the corner and concludes that someone is going to wrap a package, its just manilla paper and not decorative so they are probably going to mail whatever it is.

The introvert looks at the box and notices these other things but looks within the box to draw their conclusion. To them, these other objects have a loser connection without confirming the contents of the box.

Neither is a better way to problem solving. Both ways have benefit depending on what the problem is and they actually can work very well together to see different issues of the same problem.

The introvert does not draw clues from the environment as the extrovert does and takes a more cautious approach to problem solving. They will focus more on the inner workings of a problem while an extrovert will seek resources in their environment to assist in problem solving.

Because an Extrovert does draw clues from their environment they may very well tend to be more extroverted in the social sense but that's not an absolute and there are many introverts who have excellent interpersonal skills who are extroverted in the social sense.

What do you think?