[Jungian Cognitive Functions] For those who are new to the cognitive function theory

[wolfnara]

- I thought I could take this post from my blog for people to reference to. I noticed many people on here who ask for feedback about their type are new to the theory. Basically I am trying to explain how the functions work and all the rules involved from it in one post. I also would like to have some feedback or suggestions for my new mbti blog -


1. THE ORIGINS OF PERSONALITY THEORY

Both the Myers-Briggs and Socionics theories are based on the writings of Carl Jung, who observed and analyzed behaviors and put specific facts into his own logical framework. This study is known as psychological types. Jung’s writing was highly abstract and complex, much of which is difficult for the average person to understand. At the end of this posts I will reference the translation of the analysis, found on a website called Wikisocion. At first Jung organized four different categories, which is alike to MBTI. These are sensing, intuition, thinking, and feeling. This analysis breaks down into more complex theory, so this is where this gets to the hard part (and more interesting). Jung proposed 8 psychological functions. These are:

Introverted Feeling (Fi)
Extroverted Feeling (Fe)
Introverted Thinking (Ti)
Extroverted Thinking (Te)
Introverted Sensing (Si)
Extroverted Sensing (Se)
Introverted Intuition (Ni)
Extroverted Intuition (Ne)

2. INTROVERTED VS EXTROVERTED

Both MBTI and the individual cognitive functions are really about preference. A personality type consists of 4 functions not because it is what they can do, but rather, this is what they value. You either value Ti or Te. Fi or Fe, etc, but not both.

A function that is introverted is known as being Subjective.

A function which is extroverted is known as being Objective.

This means how you interpret an object/situation that is based on the outer world.
Introverted functions can also be called "abstract" because subjectivity does not see the object/person/situation as it is, but instead it is interpreted subjectivity/by the individual self. Ti and Te both deal with logic, but each prefer to analyze and interpret this information in an entirely different way.This applies to all versions of the 4 dichotomies. The functions that are truly the opposite of each other are those that are displayed on the same spectrum in each personality type. Si-Ne. Ni-Se. Fe-Ti. Fi-Te. Do you notice this pattern that shows up when someone is explaining each personality type? These pairs are technically the opposite functions. The definition of each of these pairs are the opposite.

3. THE FUNCTIONAL STACK

Now to the last part. How does talent correlate with the personality types? What are the strengths, and what are the weaknesses? This is a perfectly relevant question because we use all eight functions. We value 4 of those functions, and dislike the other four. It is important to realize that seeing the use of a cognitive function in your own personality does not necessarily mean it is a dominant function. Just because you recognize the use of intuition in yourself for example, this does not eliminate the possibility that you are a sensing type.

To help you understand the functional stacking better and provide a much more visual explanation, here is a type comparison video from youtube: HTTPS://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=0WALL99VDN4

The “dominant” and “auxiliary” functions are strong and valued.
The “Tertiary” and “Inferior” functions are weak but still valued.

 

[Igxfl]

I like the emphasis on the Tertiary and Inferior being valued.


It's interesting that you talk about opposites, since there sort of three opposites for each function.

To make up some terms:

Inverse: Fe ~ Fi
Contrary: Fe ~ Te
Complementary: Fe ~ Ti

It's quite easy to confuse Complementary with Contrary when noticing lack of acumen with a particular function.

 

[reckful]

2. INTROVERTED VS EXTROVERTED

Both MBTI and the individual cognitive functions are really about preference. A personality type consists of 4 functions not because it is what they can do, but rather, this is what they value. You either value Ti or Te. Fi or Fe, etc, but not both.

A function that is introverted is known as being Subjective.

A function which is extroverted is known as being Objective.

This means how you interpret an object/situation that is based on the outer world.
Introverted functions can also be called "abstract" because subjectivity does not see the object/person/situation as it is, but instead it is interpreted subjectivity/by the individual self. Ti and Te both deal with logic, but each prefer to analyze and interpret this information in an entirely different way.This applies to all versions of the 4 dichotomies. The functions that are truly the opposite of each other are those that are displayed on the same spectrum in each personality type. Si-Ne. Ni-Se. Fe-Ti. Fi-Te. Do you notice this pattern that shows up when someone is explaining each personality type? These pairs are technically the opposite functions. The definition of each of these pairs are the opposite.

It's true that Jung thought that all introverts tended to be abstract in their orientation, and that all extraverts tended to be concrete. But that was one of Jung's biggest mistakes.

And mystical streak notwithstanding, Carl Jung was a believer in the scientific approach, and Isabel Myers took Psychological Types and devoted a substantial chunk of her life to putting its typological concepts to the test in a way that Jung never had, and in accordance with the psychometric standards applicable to the science of personality. And one of the more important things that Myers discovered was that there were abstract extraverts (ENs) and concrete introverts (ISs), and that there was no significant correlation at all between whether someone was extraverted or introverted and whether someone tended to be more focused on concrete facts or on abstract theories and interpretations.

And this is not a dichotomies-vs.-functions issue. Virtually all the reasonably well-known modern MBTI sources — including function-centric theorists like Thomson, Berens and Nardi — agree that concrete/abstract is basically part of the S/N dimension, and not the E/I dimension.

And there's a long discussion of this issue in the spoiler.

Anybody who thinks that, as between an ENTP and an ISTJ, the ENTP will tend to be the more concrete/objective one and the ISTJ will tend to be the more abstract/subjective one is either treating Jung with too much reverence or has otherwise succumbed to reality-challenged cognitive function analysis.

In the Introduction to Psychological Types, Jung confessed that, as reflected in several of his earlier publications on the types, he'd previously believed that Thinking was part of Introversion and Feeling was part of Extraversion — i.e., that all introverts were thinking types and all extraverts were feeling types — and that he'd only recently figured out that T/F was a separate dimension.

But as McCrae & Costa (the leading Big Five psychologists) have noted, Jung's I/E-T/F mashup was far from the only example of Jung's inclusion of too many aspects of personality in his overbroad conceptions of what extraversion and introversion entailed. And the most fundamental mistake he made along those lines — and one that he had emphatically not corrected at the time he wrote Psychological Types — was arguably his conflation of E/I and concrete/abstract.

And unlike a number of issues involving Jung's types, this really isn't a matter on which reasonable people can disagree.

Jung spent more of Psychological Types talking about the personality characteristics he thought extraverts tended to have in common and introverts tended to have in common than he spent talking about all eight of the functions put together — and he loaded up both extraversion and introversion with quite a few characteristics that decades of MBTI (and Big Five) studies have firmly established don't statistically cluster together in real-life people. And among those characteristics was the difference between people who are more interested in the "facts" (extraverts, as Jung saw it) and people who are more interested in "abstractions" and "theories" (introverts, per Jung).

For Jung, the core inner dynamic that caused introversion in the first place involved a projection of negative unconscious contents by the introvert onto the people and things of the external world, which in turn caused the introvert to falsely perceive that those people and things were charged with negative energy (libido), which in turn caused the introvert to feel threatened by those people and things, and fear them, and mount a defense which took the form of, among other things, (1) avoidance, and (2) a process of "abstraction" by which the introvert reduced people and things to their abstract qualities, thereby (as Jung saw it) "withdrawing libido from the object ... to prevent the object from gaining power over him."

In the first chapter, describing the ways in which several of the bitterest doctrinal controversies in the early Christian church reflected the E/I divide, Jung wrote that beneath those controversies "lies the great psychological schism. The one position attaches supreme value and importance to the sensuously perceptible; ... the other maintains that the chief value lies with the abstract and extra-human."

"The man who is oriented to the idea [— i.e., the introvert —] apprehends and reacts from the standpoint of the idea," Jung explained. "But the man who is oriented to the object [— i.e., the extravert —] apprehends and reacts from the standpoint of sensation. For him the abstract is of secondary importance, since what must be thought about things seems to him relatively inessential, while for the former it is just the reverse."

And the same abstract/concrete dichotomy is also reflected in Jung's conceptions of the introverted and extraverted forms of each function, with the introverted form being oriented toward the inner world of abstract ideas, values, etc. and the extraverted form being oriented toward the physical world. For example: As further discussed in this PerC post, Jung described a Te-dom's thinking as "concretistic," and hence overly tied down by the "facts" and "objective data" at the expense of abstract "interpretation" of the facts. And conversely, and as further described in this PerC post, Jung described Ti-doms as highly abstract thinkers who, as a result, were prone to be overly dismissive of the facts and end up concocting theories that bore no substantial relation to reality.

Chapter 8 of Psychological Types was titled, "The Type Problem in Modern Philosophy," and revolved around William James's round-up of "tough-minded" and "tender-minded" philosophers. Jung explained that many of the fundamental differences in their philosophies stemmed from their psychological types, and in particular, whether they were introverted or extraverted. As far as Jung was concerned, extraverted philosophers were what he called "empiricists," because they had "the temperament that favours concrete thinking," while introverted philosophers were the "abstract thinkers" who were interested in "abstract ideas" rather than "facts." And I've put some of his discussion in the spoiler.

From Chapter 8 of Psychological Types (with bolding by me), here's Jung describing the characteristic differences between extraverted philosophers ("empiricists") and their "concrete" extraverted thinking and introverted philosophers and their "abstract" introverted thinking:

When the empiricist attributes a resistant substantiality to his concrete thinking, from the abstract point of view he is deceiving himself, because substantiality or hardness is a property of external facts and not of empirical thinking. Indeed, the latter [i.e., Te] proves to be singularly feeble and ineffective; far from holding its own in the face of external facts, it is always running after them and depending on them, and, in consequence, hardly rises above the level of a purely classifying or descriptive activity. ... A series of concrete representations conditioned by sensuous perceptions is not exactly what the abstract thinker would call thinking, but at best only passive apperception. ...

The temperament that favours concrete thinking and endows it with substantiality is thus distinguished by a preponderance of sensuously conditioned representations as contrasted with active apperception, which springs from a subjective act of the will and seeks to organize such representations in accordance with the intentions of a given idea. In a word, what counts for this temperament is the object: the object is empathized, it leads a quasi-independent existence in the ideational world of the subject, and comprehension follows as a kind of after-thought. It is therefore an extraverting temperament, for the thinking of the extravert is concretistic. Its stability lies outside in the empathized object, which is why James calls it "tough." For anyone who espouses concrete thinking, i.e., the representation of facts, abstract thinking must appear feeble and ineffective, because he measures it by the stability of concrete, sense-bound objects. For the man who is on the side of abstraction, it is not the sensuously determined representation but the abstract idea that is the decisive factor. ...

Just as concrete thinking is dominated and guided by sensuously conditioned representations, abstract thinking is dominated by "irrepresentable" primordial images lacking specific content. They remain relatively inactive so long as the object is empathized and thus made a determinant of thought. But if the object is not empathized, and loses its dominance over the thinking process, the energy denied to it accumulates in the subject. It is now the subject who is unconsciously empathized; the primordial images are awakened from their slumber and emerge as operative factors in the thinking process, but in irrepresentable form, rather like invisible stage managers behind the scenes. They are irrepresentable because they lack content, being nothing but activated functional possibilities, and accordingly they seek something to fill them out. They draw the stuff of experience into their empty forms, representing themselves in facts rather than representing facts. They clothe themselves with facts, as it were. Hence they are not, in themselves, a known point d'appui, as is the empirical fact in concrete thinking, but become experienceable only through the unconscious shaping of the stuff of experience. The empiricist, too, can organize this material and give it shape, but he models it as far as possible on a concrete idea he has built up on the basis of past experience.​

And... as noted at the start of this post, we now know that Jung was wrong to associate introversion and an abstract orientation, on the one hand, and extraversion and a concrete orientation, on the other hand. There are abstract extraverts (ENs) and concrete introverts (ISs), and no significant statistical correlation at all between Myers' (statistically supportable) versions of E/I and S/N.

And I've heard forumites try to argue that the "concrete facts" and "abstract ideas" that Jung was talking about in those quotes are somehow an essentially different thing from the concrete/abstract component of the modern S/N dimension — but that's, not to put too fine a point on it, just silly. The S/N items on the official MBTI include "If you were a teacher, would you rather teach (S) fact courses, or (N) courses involving theory?" and "Which word appeals to you most? (S) facts or (N) ideas" and "Which word appeals to you most? (S) concrete or (N) abstract." And there isn't a single E/I item that has anything remotely resembling a concrete/abstract flavor.

What's more, virtually all the leading MBTI theorists are in agreement with Myers' transplantation of concrete/abstract from E/I to S/N — including the ones whose approach is more function-centric than dichotomy-centric. For example:

• Lenore Thomson notes that "Sensation gives us an appreciation for objective facts and circumstances, as perceived by the senses, [and] excellent powers of observation," while "Intuition gives us an appreciation for the larger picture or underlying pattern, beyond the reach of the senses," with the result that N's tend to be uninterested in "facts and details."

• Linda Berens explains that sensing "is a process of becoming aware of sensory information and often involves responding to that sensory information without any judgment or evaluation of it. ... In the Sensing process, the focus is on the actual experience, the facts and the data," while intuition "is a process of becoming aware of abstract information, like symbols, conceptual patterns, and meanings."

• Berens and Nardi associate S with "tangible information" and N with "conceptual information" and specifically associate Ne with "Interpreting situations and relationships" and "becoming aware of patterns, implications and meanings," and Ni with "current perceptions sparking insights into complex situations," "becoming aware of universal meanings and symbols" and "noticing whole patterns or systems."

A-a-and it shouldn't surprise anybody to hear that the Big Five factor (Openness) that appears to be tapping into the same real underlying personality dimension as MBTI S/N is also characterized partly in terms of whether people are drawn to "abstract ideas" and "flights of fancy" or prefer to be more "realistic."

The Openness items on the NEO-PI-R test include:

• I often enjoy playing with theories or abstract ideas.
• I find philosophical arguments boring. [reverse-scored]
• I have a lot of intellectual curiosity.
• I try to keep all my thoughts directed along realistic lines and avoid "flights of fancy". [reverse-scored]
• I enjoy concentrating on a fantasy or daydream and exploring all its possibilities, letting it grow and develop.

And as with the MBTI data, the Big Five data shows that an introvert is not significantly more likely than an extravert to say they enjoy "theories" and "abstract ideas" (and vice versa). There are just as many abstract/theoretical-minded extraverts as introverts.

But again, if it's Jung's perspective you're talking about, there's no question that to Jung, whether a person tended to view "facts" or "theories" as of primary importance went to the heart of the E/I divide. And that was not a minor mistake, and it distorted not only many of his descriptions of extraverts and introverts, but also many of his descriptions of the extraverted and introverted functions.

 

[Pionart]

I like the emphasis on the Tertiary and Inferior being valued.


It's interesting that you talk about opposites, since there sort of three opposites for each function.

To make up some terms:

Inverse: Fe ~ Fi
Contrary: Fe ~ Te
Complementary: Fe ~ Ti

It's quite easy to confuse Complementary with Contrary when noticing lack of acumen with a particular function.

interestingly, the functions which -aren't- the opposite are even more different than the one's that are

which is like saying... black is the opposite of white, but they're more similar to each other than they are to the number 3

 

[Igxfl]

interestingly, the functions which -aren't- the opposite are even more different than the one's that are

which is like saying... black is the opposite of white, but they're more similar to each other than they are to the number 3

Well, sure, but "not white" is much more helpful for understanding black than "not the number 3".

 

[Pionart]

Well, sure, but "not white" is much more helpful for understanding black than "not the number 3".

Yup, because it implies you're referring to a colour (or "shade" or whatever...).

Opposites are generally very similar because they are just the opposite ends of a given spectrum - what they have in common, is that they both belong to the class represented by the spectrum.

 

[Igxfl]

Yup, because it implies you're referring to a colour (or "shade" or whatever...).

Opposites are generally very similar because they are just the opposite ends of a given spectrum - what they have in common, is that they both belong to the class represented by the spectrum.

Fair point.