Among the Big Five Personality Traits, certain traits like extraversion and emotional stability are generally viewed as positive and so people tend to prefer these trait dimensions as opposed to their counterparts.
However, these traits are found to be normally distributed across populations. So that leads us to wonder, if we were to look at it from the evolutionary standpoint, wouldn't it be logical for natural selection to weed out these traits from the population?
This might be explained by a concept called balancing selection. Dan Nettle and Helen Clegg wrote a paper regarding the subject.
They stated that the reason why traits such as introversion, neuroticism, and other less popular traits persist is because there are benefits and risks for each side of the dimensions.
They basically argue that each of the Big Five, foundational traits has a distinct set of evolutionarily relevant costs and benefits. And for this reason, we tend to see a healthy balance of these different personality trait variants across a broad array of human populations.
Extraverts enjoy such benefits as increased social status, increased social network size, increased number of sexual partners, and being rated as relatively attractive as mates. On the downside, they are more likely to die young, they have increased risk of accidents, and they are more likely to experience harsh relationship dissolution related to such things as infidelity.
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