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Originally Posted by athenian200
For instance, saying "Hello." to someone could be due to several motivations. It could be Extraverted Feeling, desiring to connect to others and express one's interest and concern for the other person's emotional state. It might be Introverted Sensing, displaying what it believes is the proper and accepted "form" for social interactions. It could be Introverted Thinking, having developed or recognized a system for social interaction. It could be Extraverted Intuition, wishing to see what new potentialities arise from the greeting. It could be Extraverted Thinking, viewing the greeting as a step in working towards a specific goal. It could be Introverted Feeling, believing that this interaction will result in an emotional intensity for them. I could continue, but I think you probably see the point.
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Definitely. This is exactly why people in general often misinterpret each other and end up in conflict; they all bring different assumptions to the table as to what a particular behavior is indicative of.... because they're using the wrong lexicon (i.e., their own) to interpret the other's action.
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How can anyone actually know their type, if actions aren't necessarily caused by any particular function, and one cannot always be certain of what one's primary motivation was in the first place, whether you had more than one motivation, or whether this particular set of motivations is even valid or complete? This seems to be quite a mess. How can anyone really understand this?
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Because personality is holistic and each data point is interpreted in light of OTHER data points. when you try to figure out someone's personality, you need a certain assortment of points before you can accurately interpret what a behavior means.
(As a similar situation, professional interrogators know this, when trying to interpret whether someone is lying to them or not. There are no "singular" behaviors that prove that someone is lying; it's rather a COMBINATION of behaviors that can highly signify that someone is probably lying. The behaviors are all taken in relation to each other, to make an assessment.)
I think S's (most of them) have more trouble with this, because they focus so much on the outer behavior, and some will try to extrapolate mnotivation from too few behavioral clues. N's are more inclined to be in "pattern recognition" mode and think holistically.
There's also the sense that the picture is not black/white, it's various shades of gray. So any "guess" as to type has to be constantly adjusted as new behavior is observable, and someone's type is still always just a probability rather than a certainty. And there's also a lot of variability WITHIN types! (Not all ISFJs look alike, for example. They can be reduced to general common motivations, but they can all look very different in terms of cosmetic details, interests, etc.) We are all unique.
Anyway, to figure out a type, you need to have a good sense of the possible motivations for a particular behavior, and you also need a collection of behaviors from "all over the map" -- then you check the motivations for each behavior, see which motivations are most prominent, and how prominent they are.
Note: Each guess at someone's type contains not just the "guess" itself but also must contain the "strength" of the guess -- i.e., how probable the guess is to be the right answer.
And, for example, if I had to figure out your type: Your post is the sort of question that could potentially fit under Ni. And I would have noted that your example referred to a social nicety -- which often is an Fe way of thinking. Still, there are various reasons you might have selected these examples and these questions, so they are WEAK data points with nothing else supporting them, so I wouldn't have felt comfortable basing a type reading on them; but they are examples of two data points I would have used to get a holistic picture of you, and they happen to fit with your expressed type. The more data points I get to work with, the more distinct the picture becomes.