Perhaps you've never wanted to join an intramural basketball league. Maybe you don't identify with a political party or religion. There's a new personality type that might speak to those who don't feel the need to belong to groups: otroverts.
Dr. Rami Kaminski, a psychiatrist in New York City, developed the idea of the otrovert after he spent years observing patients who seemed to share a similar set of traits. He coined the term—otro, coming from the Latin root for “other,” and vert, the Latin verb for “turn toward”—in his 2025 book The Gift of Not Belonging: How Outsiders Thrive in a World of Joiners.
Otroverts are people who embody the quality of not wanting to belong to a group, says Kaminski, who identifies as an otrovert. They’re not social outcasts, though. “Unlike those with relational disorders, otroverts are empathetic and friendly, yet struggle to truly belong in social groups, despite no apparent behavioral distinctions from well-adjusted individuals,” Kaminski writes in his book.
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Although many people might identify with this new category—or another one—“it’s pretty clear at this point, just empirically, that there’s no such thing as ‘personality types,’” says Colin DeYoung, a professor of psychology and director of the DeYoung Personality Lab at the University of Minnesota. “There aren’t clear categories of people; what there are are dimensions that people continually fall along.”
These dimensions, called the Big Five personality traits, include things like extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and neuroticism. Although they’re important, these dimensions don’t capture every last aspect of personality, says Aidan Wright, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Michigan whose work centers on personality.
Wright says it’s unlikely that otroversion is a brand-new personality type that’s just been discovered; instead, otroverts probably embody a particular configuration of traits from the broader personality landscape. “Do these people exist? Yes, absolutely,” Wright says. “Are they a special type that is different in the same way we think about the difference between a cat and a dog? I would say almost certainly not.”
