Quote:
Originally Posted by Economica
The title says it all except:
- Please make separate lists for each gender.
- By know well, I mean that you have either intensive experience with at least 2 exemplars or decent experience with at least 3 exemplars. The idea is that there should be reason to believe you can provide qualified personal recognition input in one of my typing threads.  (Consider yourself duly warned!  ) |
Those are pretty stringent criteria. Maybe I'm interepreting your criteria too strictly, or maybe I'm too typically INFP-fuzzy in my application of MBTI, but I'm going to have trouble listing anything.
I didn't learn about MBTI until I was in my early 40s. All my acquaintances tend to be middle-aged or elderly, and most of them are kind of fuzzy on at least one letter of the four letters due to maturity, socializing, development of weak functions, etc.
For example, at my age Extraverts tend to be very fuzzy on their types. By middle age they have usually socialized around enough that they've picked up and even internalized the external markers (vocabulary, habits, and even analytical methods) of other types. Also, the more voluble Extraverts talk so freely that it's hard to pick out which expressions or stories or modes of thought were originally "theirs" and which were "borrowed" at some point from other types.
Middle-aged Introverts, on the other hand, seem easier to type presumably because they have socialized less and have remained more true to their original template (or maybe just because I'm an Introvert myself and I'm able to "tune them in" better). But even with Introverts, there are often surprises. For example, sometimes they are hiding a "stealth" function. That is, by middle age they may have gotten so good at camouflaging an "awkward" function (one that doesn't suit their gender, background, or profession) that they simply appear as neutral on that letter or have a carefully-studied veneer of the opposite function.
Also, some functional differentiations simply don't seem to matter as much when one gets older. For example, the difference between N and S matters a lot when people are young. But as people get older, both types tend to move more to the center and everyone's attention tends to focus increasingly on dealing with the practical matters of life (which are often located in the grey zone between N and S). Older Ns and Ss can usually relate to each other pretty well in conversation, if not mimic each other outright.
I used to think that each individual MBTI type had a strong "atmosphere" or "scent" or "look" associated with it. But with my middle-aged acquaintances I've been burned so many times by "stealth" or "borrowed" functions forcing me to revise my guesses of their types, that I no longer trust typing much past the most obvious letters or functions. With my middle-aged acquaintances, I usually don't think in terms of them being a specific type. I tend to categorize them as "strong xNTJ" or "strong Fe" or "probable ENFP", and I'm quick to revise even long-standing assessments or assign an "x" to a function when I see a new angle on them.
IOW, I can usually type everyone to 2-3 letters or a strong function. And that's usually enough for practical purposes. When interacting with my acquaintances I can just "play to" or "feed" the more obvious letters (since their obviousness probably indicates strong preferences in those areas), and there's usually no need to worry about or address any "mystery" letters until such time as some exceptional incident highlights a strong preference there as well.
I'll make an attempt to inventory which types I can identify positively. But don't hold your breath waiting for a list from me. Like I said, I often don't think in terms of my friends and acquaintances as being solidly and definitively one type or another, and it would take a lot of agonizing and qualifying and footnoting for me to put them firmly into one MBTI box or another.
For a quick rule of thumb, though, I'm usually stronger at typing Introverts than Extraverts.
