Understanding MBTI - The Basics
If you’re curious how four letters could so accurately pin your personality or if you’re someone just interested in learning more, this post is for you. There’s a lot of information and tons of misconceptions to dispel, so let’s jump right in.
Traits vs. Functions:
We’ll start with the four letters. I’m an INFJ, for example. While these letters can tell you a good bit about how I behave in the world, they’re maybe 10% of the total picture. Think of them more as traits to be perceived. What is much more important are functions. You can get the functions from my four letters with a sort of formula, but that’s not so important, for right now.
The Functions:
There are four primary functions, each with an extroverted and introverted form, giving us eight in total. There are the perceiving functions: Extroverted Sensing, Introverted Sensing, Extroverted Intuition and Introverted Intuition. These are used to take in data from the world. Next there are the judging functions: Extroverted Feeling, Introverted Feeling, Extroverted Thinking and Introverted Thinking. Every personality type will have two of each in their “functional stack”.
Sensing and Intuition:
As mentioned earlier, these functions are used to take in information from the world or to “perceive” the world. Sensing is primarily used in a great majority of the human population. This is because it responds to what is real, literally what is experienced through the five senses. Intuition, on the contrary, is more like a mental recreation that the user creates in their head. If that’s not clear enough, it will be in a moment.
Thinking and Feeling:
These are the judging functions because they respond to data received from the sensing functions. They’re more obviously straight-forward than sensing vs. intuition and need much less explaining.
How they Operate Together:
How we function (no pun intended) is that we use our sensing or intuition to take in data and our feeling or thinking to judge that data. Without going too in-depth about extroversion and introversion on functions, I’ll give slightly oversimplified examples:
An ISFJ and an INFJ go out to a new restaurant and are eating Greek food for the first time. The ISFJ first senses the restaurant, the smells, the atmosphere, the noise, everything. When she orders her food, she strongly tastes it. All of this information is then filtered through her feeling function. She creates and stores judgments in her mind about the food, the staff etc.
The INFJ already has a mental idea of what to expect despite it being a new experience. He notices things and draws connections in his mind (ie. the food they’re serving is similar to food in Arabic culture). He uses this to update his feelings on Greek culture and create a more accurate mental image of reality.
gracieabrams
vaporwave
stormborns
turnnoffyourmind