[MBTI General] DEBATE: Ender Wiggin's Personality Type (SPOILER ALERT)

[Bknight]

I've been into Ender's Game for some time, and have always wondered about his MBTI type.

To me, he's always seemed like an INTP, but with a little bit of INTJ thrown in.
Yeah... I'm gonna need to back this up, as a lot of people are getting the feeling that he's I*F* or INTJ.

Introverted: This one's doubtless. He makes- and needs- few close friends. He does most of his thinking on his own. He only treats one person, Bean, as a confidante. And then there's a sentence that, in my opinion, seals it: in Ender's Shadow, page 366, Chapter 18 (directly after he kills Bonzo) that says " and [Hot Soup] said, 'Let him be alone. Can't you see he wants to be alone?"

Intuitive: He regularly performs feats of the latter that would be impossible without Intuitive being his stronger trait, such as knowing that the Formics would attempt to cut off their retreat rather than directly assaulting their fleet, knowing that Bonzo's head would be exactly where it was before he smashed Bonzo's nose in, et cetera.

Thinking: He approaches combat with such a logical and unfeeling mindset that it completely and utterly rules out Feeling being his dominant trait. His empathy is more a result of his Intuitive trait, I think.

Prospecting/ Perceiving: This is probably the shakiest one. In fact, I have begun to struggle myself with it. However, he amount of creativity he shows, his willingness to adopt unconventional tactics, his eventual "screw it" attitude that ironically led to his victory over the Formics, and most of all his ability to improvise- these together show, in my opinion, that he is an INTP.

I could see him being somewhere in the 60%-40% range when it comes to Perceiving- Judging; in my opinion, his ability to improvise pushes him over to the Perceiving section. But I'm open to debate.

Tool used for assistance in arriving at my conclusion: Free personality test - short version | 16Personalities.

 

[indra]

I have trouble reconciling good intuition from being an intuitive type.

He does have good intuition, but what main character does not? They've the omniscience of their master creator.

I'd say ISTP personally. His use of intuition is selective, guided, utilitarian. INTP is more Bean, seeing every facet explicitly. Or maybe they're both INTP and I'm letting the relative frames of reference get the better of me, I dunno.

Almost assuredly not an Ni dom. That would be his brother.

 

[Raffaella]

I've only ever seen him being typed as INTJ ("he's strategic, he must be INTJ!") but I'm not so sure. I don't buy the INTP angle, though.

Almost assuredly not an Ni dom. That would be his brother.

Why? I thought his brother was ENTJ.


Ender's type in Speaker of the Dead: JESUS.

 

[Totenkindly]

I think it can be rather difficult in movies to tease out INTJ vs INTP simply due to the active nature of protagonists -- INTPs typically don't like to make decisions (we're Informative, not Directive), but if they are forced into making decisions by the plot, then they're going to look more decisive and J. It can be difficult to tease out then whether you're dealing with TiNe or NiTe -- the needs of the plot force Ti into the open and manifested in decision-making. Add the typical scaled nature of type (versus being pinpoint) and now you've got variation within type and type overlap to contend with.

Same issue comes with confusing it with ISTP. If you force an N into real-life situations (as what happened here -- Ender was forced into external problem solving), then they either fail or rise to the occasion. So now there's a lot of type similarity. This should be a lesson in how the environment can impact type expression and make discerning someone's type confusing.

I guess if I had to pick, I'd lean toward INTJ, but i can't say that definitively.

 

[indra]

Why? I thought his brother was ENTJ.

Perhaps. Let me do some investigating and we'll see what I conclude.

 

[Bknight]

Why? I thought his brother was ENTJ.
.

Peter seems more INTJ. He's the Mastermind who created Locke and Demosthenes and brought most of the world back under the Hegemony (until things went sour with America).

 

[Raffaella]

Peter seems more INTJ. He's the Mastermind who created Locke and Demosthenes and brought most of the world back under the Hegemony (until things went sour with America).

That doesn't dispel ENTJ, though. It's really whether he's Te-dom or Ni-dom but I always thought he was Te-dom.

 

[Emotionalogic]

INFJ for sure.