Jennifer said:
So going into a situation... do you find yourself judgmental internally at all? Or do you feel very open to all viewpoints and find it easy to empathize or see their view?
Both.
My sense of my internal experience is one of both general awareness of many contrasting perspectives that I often notice at least by external observation other people seem not to see, but also a critical analysis of what I'm taking in. I engage in a judgement of both how I assess the information coming in and also of my own perceptual limitations to assessing what I'm taking in.
One thing that is particularly frustrating to me is when I can see that someone else sees something differently than I do and I either can see their perspective, but don't want to, or recognize that they have a valid perspective that differs from mine, yet no matter how much I try I cannot see it clearly enough to really grasp it. As best I have been able to understand myself, this difficulty is either because something about it threatens me and I struggle to get past a conscious protective rejection of it, or because at a deeper unconscious level something in me blocks me from truly grasping it as I sense if I did grasp it some core way of being for me would be threatened. Because it is my value to want to see things in as broad and as comprehensive a way as possible, I feel embarrassed, frustrated and disappointed in myself when I can't see or feel completely another point of view. I feel the same when I have allowed myself to slip into the arrogance of thinking I see clearly only to be made aware in a way I can't deny that I was mistaken and my vision was in fact, as I should have known all along, incomplete.
In re-reading that, I think that experience probably does reflect the reality that I have, as everyone does according to MBTI theory, both a judging and perceiving function as my top two functions, but seems to reflect the particular bent of a dominant introverted intuitive perception and secondary extraverted feeling judgement and how they might interplay.
I would expect that others would likely feel both judgement and open perception in most situations, but the difference would be in how the particular nature of each function and the degree of dominance would interplay in them.
Also not to be dismissed is the issue that there seems to be much affecting how a person interacts with the world aside from their MBTI type, like life experience and development of lesser functions.
Jennifer said:
Well, it does seem predictive and/or describes behavior well enough.
The J/P distinction can be somewhat predictive of external behavior, perhaps, but not necessarily of the dominant core personality experience, nor of the unique expression of all the different non-MBTI related aspects of an individual.