The Big Five personality traits are used by psychologists to classify personalities. The traits are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Each trait is measured over a spectrum. For instance, most people aren't completely open or completely closed but exist somewhere in between, distributed over a bell curve. Generally, problems lie at the extremes, where some trait has gone out of balance. According to Jordan Peterson, the Big Five taxonomy has been successful because the traits can often be correlated to other social attributes. For example, high openness and low conscientious is typical of liberals, and the opposite of conservatives. The other traits play little role in political disposition, nor does IQ.
Each trait is really a set of two opposing traits, each of which can be beneficial to humans under different instances. Openness permits positive change, but also invites dangerous change. That is why the spectrums exists within the human psyche. If openness always gave a reproductive balance, then we'd have evolved to always be open. But, a highly open society is ripe for invasion and destruction. (I'm sure readers can provide their own examples.)
While Dr Peterson was able to effortlessly muse on the various benefits of the opposing traits, he struggled with the introversion/extroversion dynamic. It's easy to see how extroversion would aid survival for highly social humans. Extroversion means social engagement, which means improvements in hierarchal status, yielding greater access to resources and mates. It's hard to see what benefit could come from introversion. Peterson admitted he struggled with it as well, and that he supposed it had something to do with nature or alignment with nature. It seemed like a flimsy explanation.
An extroverted person is said to be well-adjusted. They're extroverted because they're good at social engagement. Success reinforces, failure deters. Introverted people tend to avoid social activity. Some have a natural disposition for solitude, and others are quite capable of handling socializing, but find it so stressful that they engage sparingly. Many are just poor at socializing, so they become solitary for the same reason that the short kid who can't dribble eventually quits trying out for the basketball team. Their lack of social practice means their skills degrade even further, and the natural trait becomes reinforced.
So what good could possibly come from that? Why have the introversion trait at all? What is the Darwinian benefit of not being well-adjusted? One more question gives us the answer...well-adjusted to what? Well-adjusted to society. Look around. Is this a society to be well-adjusted into? For readers here, probably not. You must be poorly adjusted from mainstream society to spend your free time reading obscure cynical blogs rather than mainstream gospels like the New York Times or the Atlantic. Being "well-adjusted" in this climate means professing a belief that sexual perversion is something to have Pride in, while family values are bigoted. Being well adjusted in this clown world means encouraging young boys to castrate themselves or cracking jokes while our churches are burned down by hostile foreigners. Just like the other traits, the benefit depends on circumstance. It is no virtue to be well-adjusted in a degenerate culture.
The survival advantage arises because degenerate cultures die. They are either invaded or they become unable to sustain the population that grew during more productive eras. The well-adjusted die the most. The old elite are hung up, often by irate mobs from their own populace. Those most dependent on the society are most in danger when it falls. Similarly, those who fostered an ethos of self-reliance are more likely to persist during the downturns. If societies were perfectly stable, there would be no selective pressure for introversion. But societies grow and die with regularity. Strong, virtuous nations become weak and degenerate, and they collapse.
As it turns out, Peterson is correct when he relates introversion to an affinity for nature. Introverts know an irrational society is unnatural and cannot survive. Their withdrawal is not just personal preferences, but a deeper survival instinct. As with the other traits, success is dependent on circumstance, and danger lies at the extremes. A pure introvert loses access to the great benefits that society provides, but a pure extrovert will happily follow the lemmings right out to sea.
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