Revisiting the Types: INTJ

[Forever]

Behold its glory, uploaded today:

 

[Coriolis]

OK, but Gershwin? Why? Just why?

 

[chubber]

I'm typing this as I'm listening.

The parts where they talk about being lonely. Why don't they just think? and the difficulty of expressing the idea, concept. The use of metaphors constantly. Expressing themselves through art.
Haha, the part where I experience Fe-types..
Uh huh, don't want to be arrogant.
Tertiary Fi, the ultimate goal.
Ugh, and that skipping over the facts... My Achilles heel.

 

[Ene]

I am glad he addressed the artistic bent of many INTJs.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

"Nietzsche is loading..." XD

 

[IZthe411]

Watched it last night.
Loved the discussion of Si vs Ni...I have long observed and believed that Si and Ni starts at a same place, but Si seems to stop where Ni takes it deeper.
I too resonate with that need to discuss things down to the bare bones....Sometimes it's hard to understand other people's need not too...especially when they are the ones who ask the question 'why'?... But then I think about my SP friends who seem to linger at one point in a discussion, as If I'm expected to stay there too........ I love this stuff.
I know he said there was not a lot to say about inferior Se, but there has to be more than that.

 

[serenesam]

I really enjoyed Michael Pierce's video and would have loved to see a transcript associated with that video so I can spam the "Favorite Quotes" thread with beautiful quotes line by line over the course of several weeks perhaps months to come in the future.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

I really enjoy his profiles and I am watching this a second time.

 

[IZthe411]

It would take another Ni user to look beyond the obvious the way he did in this video. Seeing past the death stare and perceived arrogance as noise, he really hit on the fundamental ideals and goals of the INTJ.

 

[Forever]

It would take another Ni user to look beyond the obvious the way he did in this video. Seeing past the death stare and perceived arrogance as noise, he really hit on the fundamental ideals and goals of the INTJ.

Micheal Pierce reports himself to be an INFJ.

 

[IZthe411]

Micheal Pierce reports himself to be an INFJ.

Yeah I remember him saying that once or twice.

I wonder if the types where he shares no functions (STJs and NFPs) agree with his videos.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

Yeah I remember him saying that once or twice.

I wonder if the types where he shares no functions (STJs and NFPs) agree with his videos.

I think that it would be ideal if type profiles were written by people who shared the same or similar types.

 

[Forever]

I think that it would be ideal if type profiles were written by people who shared the same or similar types.

Nobody is stopping them lol.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

Nobody is stopping them lol.

Alright. Let's make it happen. Come on, let's go. Get this thing going.

 

[reckful]

I certainly don't consider Michael Pierce a good MBTI source.

As one jaw-dropping example, he's got a long E vs. I video where his main illustrative example of extraversion vs. introversion involves two jungle explorers, where one explorer is to be tasked with writing down their "personal, subjective interpretations" (emotional, philosophical, theoretical, etc.) of the things they encounter, without being concerned with anything like an accurate representation of the things' objective, physical qualities, while the other explorer is to be tasked with meticulously recording only the objective, physical qualities of the things they encounter.

And Pierce's perspective is that, if one of the explorers is an extravert (let's say an ENFP) and one is an introvert (let's say an ISTJ), you should choose the ENFP to be the meticulous, just-the-facts recorder and choose the ISTJ to be the one who, as Pierce describes it, ignores the objective facts and records stuff like "how she thinks the creature appeared rather horrid, and how that seems to reflect an interesting idea about possible morality and justice in the animal kingdom, and the philosophical implications of such a thing, and how this compares with her personal values and ideas."

And the way for a guy to arrive at that kind of blinkered perspective on ENFPs and ISTJs to is to spend too much time poring over Jung's works (like some medieval Biblical scholar), while both ignoring the many changes Myers (rightly) made to Jung's original type concepts, and maybe more importantly, failing to get out much and actually interact with any significant number of real-world ENFPs and ISTJs.

I believe Isabel Myers would have said that, in choosing which explorer was best suited to which of those two tasks, the S/N (first) and T/F (secondarily) preferences were the most significant ones, and that an ST was best suited for exclusively focusing on "just the facts" and the NF was best suited to be the recorder of subjective emotional/aesthetic/philosophical impressions — and that that two-explorers example was a very poor one to choose as an illustration of "extraversion" vs. "introversion."

And if that's what Myers would have said, she would have been correct.

And anybody who's of the view that, pffft, personality types are just a matter of opinion anyway, and one wanker's MBTI is just as good as another's — so there's nothing wrong with Pierce just keeping his nose in his books and emerging every few days or so to make another picture-filled video — are hereby advised that, in fact, personality psychologists working in the respectable districts of the field have actually been validating typologies by means of psychometric analysis of suitably large samples for many years now. McCrae & Costa (the leading Big Five psychologists) long ago acknowledged that the MBTI's dichotomies (unlike Jung's original concepts) basically passed muster by modern standards, and a very large meta-review and supplemental study in 2003 found that the MBTI was more or less on a par with the Big Five from a psychometric perspective.

And for anyone who's interested, there's more discussion of those kinds of issues here.

But unlike the dichotomy-centric perspective that's always dominated the official MBTI and its use by academic researchers, the so-called "cognitive functions" have no respectable body of empirical support behind them. And in particular, the Harold Grant function stack — the one that says INTJs are Ni-Te-Fi-Se, INTJs and INTPs have no functions in common, and INTJs and ESFPs have quite a lot in common because they're both "Fi/Te types" and "Ni/Se types" — predicts correlational patterns that virtually never show up, no matter what aspects of personality anybody's correlating with MBTI types.

And Pierce is a wholeheartedly wanktastic subscriber to that function stack and its corresponding "axes," and spends quite a lot of that linked video talking about an INTJ's "tertiary Fi" and "inferior Se" — not to mention their "shadow ISFP," which leads them to share with ISFPs, in Pierce's words, "this need to express things that are extremely difficult to express." Yeah, baby ... unlike INTPs (since they're "Ti/Fe" and "Ne/Si" types), and INFJs, whose "Fe" means those two introverted types mostly don't experience that typical INTJ "need to express things that are ... difficult to express."

Like the similarly wanktastic Linda Berens with her latest "lens" (which she calls "Intentional Styles"; discussed in the next linked post, below), Pierce groups INTJs and ESFPs together — socionics-quadra-style, baby — in a foursome that he refers to as the Conjecturing (Ni/Se) and Operationalizing (Fi/Te) types, while putting INTPs and ESFJs in the opposite quadrant, as the Examining (Si/Ne) and Translating (Ti/Fe) types.

I'd say it takes a singularly piercing (pardon my pun) perspective on the types to see deep enough down into the psychic depths to realize that, when it comes to personality cousins, it's INTJs and ESFPs who belong together, and not INTJs and INTPs (or ESFJs and ESFPs).

Or maybe not.

And for anyone who's interested, there's more discussion of the bogosity of that function model — not to mention its inconsistency with both Jung and Myers — in this post.

And speaking of Jung and Myers, it's maybe also worth noting that the "Sources" Pierce lists at the end of that INTJ video include Jung's Psychological Types (not to mention CelebrityTypes.com) — but funnily enough, there's no mention of Isabel Myers.

Or maybe that's not very funny, now that I think about it.

As discussed in those previously-linked posts of mine, Carl Jung — mystical streak notwithstanding — was a believer in the scientific approach, and Myers took Psychological Types and devoted a substantial chunk of her life to putting its typological concepts to the test in accordance with the psychometric standards applicable to the science of personality. Myers adjusted Jung's categories and concepts so that they better fit the data she gathered, and by the start of the 1960s, she had a typology that was respectably tapping into four of the Big Five personality dimensions — long before there really was a Big Five.

The aspects of Pierce's characterizations of INTJs in that video that can make the most respectable claims to applying to many real-world INTJs owe at least as much to Myers' corrections, adjustments and expansions to Jung as to Jung's original conceptions of his types — and Pierce's failure to acknowledge that doesn't speak particularly well for him.

As one big example, and as discussed at length here, Jung didn't think an Ni-dom would have Te — or any other extraverted function — as their auxiliary.

And related to that Jung/Myers difference, the qualities of personality that get someone typed J on the MBTI were ones Jung associated with J-doms generally — rather than Je-doms and Pi-doms, as Myers had it. So what you might call the "best fit" Jungian type for an MBTI INTJ is really a Ti-dom (with an N-aux), rather than an Ni-dom.

But if you're willing to indulge Pierce with his "Ni-Te" (i.e., Myersian) framing for an INTJ while simultaneously looking to Jung's function descriptions to understand what that would mean, then it must be noted that, far from "auxiliary Te" giving INTJs the "drive" and "tenacity" to follow through on their Ni-based visions and "actualize" them (as Pierce describes things), Jung said that, with or without an auxiliary in gear, an Ni-dom's visions tended to be too far out of touch with "present-day reality" to be realizable, with the result that, in the typical case, the Ni-dom ended up being a "voice crying in the wilderness" — which is why Jung also noted that, from the standpoint of actually accomplishing anything in the real world, Ni-doms were understandably viewed (together with their "introverted irrational" cousins, the Si-doms) as the "most useless of men."

Now, it's true that Pierce acknowledges — while constantly referring to, quoting and paraphrasing Jung — that he's hardly a strict Jungian (and a good thing, too), but that hardly excuses his frequent mischaracterizations of Jung's views, which go hand in hand with the underlying implication that his own function model and corresponding descriptions are far more Jungian than they really are.

The bottom line is that Pierce is basically one more in the tiresome parade of online MBTI "theorists" in the Berens/Nardi mold, peddling one version or other of the myth that pretty much all Myers did was find a nifty way to test for Jung's cognitive functions, and then serving up a mishmash of type notions in a way that reflects a startling lack of understanding of what Jung actually said, of the changes Myers made to Jung, and of the things that 50 years of actual MBTI data has taught us about what the types are like — and maybe more importantly, that reflects a disheartening lack of respect for the extent to which (as Myers very much understood, and demonstrated) the personality field can be governed by respectable scientific (albeit soft-scientific) methods.

As a final note, Jung spent more of Psychological Types talking about the things he thought all extraverts tend to have in common, and all introverts tend to have in common, than he spent talking about all eight of the functions put together. And Myers' psychometric analysis led her to the conclusion that it was the four dichotomies, rather than the functions, that appear to be the principal underlying components of type.

But Myers also recognized that there were notable personality characteristics associated with various dichotomy combinations. Gifts Differing includes countless references to things that INs, ESs, NFs, STs, ITs, ESFs, ISTs and types with various other preference combinations tend to have in common, and the 1985 MBTI Manual (which Myers co-authored) included a brief description corresponding to each of the 24 possible two-letter combinations. What's more, Gifts Differing also includes Myers' explanation for why she believed that the most significant dichotomy combinations were NF, NT, SF and ST — a foursome that is noteworthy in the sense that each member consists of four types with four different "dominant functions." So Myers certainly didn't omit the combinations — e.g., NJ (Ni) and TJ (Te) for an INTJ — that supposedly correspond to the functions, but she hardly treated them as if they were the exclusive (or even the main) contributors to the MBTI-related aspects of someone's personality.

Which leads me back to Michael Pierce, and the fact that virtually his entire 24-minute description of INTJs consists of the personality characteristics that he claims are associated with Ni, Te, Fi and Se.

What about the things all introverts tend to have in common, Mr. Pierce? Both Jung and Myers — not to mention the Big Five folks — are pretty big on those.

*crickets*

Well, you know, maybe he felt sufficiently embarrassed after he made that jungle explorer E/I video I already talked about that he decided he'd keep his mouth shut on introversion for at least a while.

What about the things all NTs tend to have in common, Mr. Pierce? Both Myers and Keirsey had quite a lot to say about those.

*crickets*

And what about N and T and J and IN and IT and IJ?

*crickets*

Hey, those components I've asked about don't correspond to anything in that HaroldGrantian function foursome, do they? How silly of Jung, Myers or me to think they'd correspond to any personality characteristics worth mentioning.

But honestly, Mr. Pierce, and although I'm about as far from a Linda Berens fan as it is possible to get without falling off the edge of the Earth, I can't resist pointing out that even Linda Berens knows better than to totally ignore any of the dichotomies. And she also finds room for Keirsey's foursome, among other respects in which her total (multi-"lens") perspective on personality, although it foolishly includes the Harold Grant stack, also benefits by venturing beyond it into some of the more psychometrically supportable districts of the MBTI.

 

[Forever]

[MENTION=18736]reckful[/MENTION]

I think you're giving too much credit to Isabel Myers when actually a lot of the Jung work was from Katherine Briggs, her mother. I saw no mention of her name. There's a reason why there is a "B" in MBTI. Not MTI lol. And Briggs in that book Gifts Differing has an explanation at least a table of the individual jungian cognitive functions. So jcf wasn't like pulled out of thin air. Myers made the system really, while Briggs had the theory on lock.

So what if Pierce makes a mistake, everyone does. He's nice enough to spend his time to explain in a way that the mainstream descriptions tend to keep overlooking with exaggerated beliefs.

Whether you like him or not isn't my issue. But please don't treat him as a phony. If you'd love to "replace" his work by doing your own videos or websites, that'd be great. You seem to have a lot to say.

 

[IZthe411]

Pierce even acknowledges that his videos are a journey- as his understanding is refined he updates his videos, which is why he's revisiting the types.

Personally, I don't think I liked the E vs I video; it seemed half baked.

But I resonate with much of what he has discerned in his research, like identifying functions vs 'letters', his discussion of the function axis, and observing less the behavior or a person and more of trying to determine what's going on inside their head.

I believe that we are all created with the ability to use all 8 functions, and everybody has a 4 function stack preference. I also believe there is some kind of order. Whether it's the Ni Te Fi Se or some other combination - I don't know. Like most things human, there's a framework- basic elements that are inherent in each of us, so while there are 16 outcomes there are billions of flavors of each, some easier to identify than others.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

His Si description in the video might leave something to be desired, but then I wouldn't have expected a deeper analysis in a video devoted to a Ni-dominant type.

 

[reckful]

[MENTION=18736]reckful[/MENTION]

I think you're giving too much credit to Isabel Myers when actually a lot of the Jung work was from Katherine Briggs, her mother. I saw no mention of her name. There's a reason why there is a "B" in MBTI. Not MTI lol. And Briggs in that book Gifts Differing has an explanation at least a table of the individual jungian cognitive functions. So jcf wasn't like pulled out of thin air. Myers made the system really, while Briggs had the theory on lock.

So what if Pierce makes a mistake, everyone does. He's nice enough to spend his time to explain in a way that the mainstream descriptions tend to keep overlooking with exaggerated beliefs.

Whether you like him or not isn't my issue. But please don't treat him as a phony. If you'd love to "replace" his work by doing your own videos or websites, that'd be great. You seem to have a lot to say.

You're confused about Briggs and Myers. Briggs got the ball rolling and made some substantial early contributions, but Myers was the one who educated herself in psychometrics and conducted the years of research that led to the development of the modern MBTI. But in any case, in chiding Pierce for failing to credit Myers, I wasn't making a Briggs-vs.-Myers distinction. I could just as well have said "Briggs and Myers."

As further discussed in this post, there's no question that Myers and the official MBTI folks have always given a certain amount of lip service to the cognitive functions, but there's also no question that the dichotomies have always been, and remain, what the official MBTI is really built around.

It was Myers who wrote Gifts Differing, and you've referred to the summary functions table in Chapter 8. As Myers explained at the start of that chapter, those descriptions were "drawn by Katharine C. Briggs during her initial study of Psychological Types." And as noted in that previously-linked post, those four pages were simply Briggs' summaries of Jung's function descriptions, and Myers ignored (and/or adjusted) substantial portions of those — based on where her research led her — in creating her own preference descriptions and type portraits. As one example, and as discussed at length in this post, Myers' IS_Js bear little resemblance to Jung's Si-doms.

I have no idea whether Pierce is a "phony" to any significant degree, and in fact, I'd say he comes across as pretty sincere to me. But how sincere he is has nothing to do with whether he's done the appropriate homework for purposes of understanding (as I previously noted) "what Jung actually said, the nature of the changes Myers made to Jung, and the things that 50 years of actual MBTI data has taught us about what the types are like" — and it also has nothing to do with whether the Harold Grant function stack that he's peddling (sincerely or not) has any respectable validity, or instead is a silly model that, on top of being inconsistent with both Jung and Myers, is past due to be discarded as a result of its near-total failure in the data-support department.

 

[Ursa]

I have no idea whether Pierce is a "phony" to any significant degree, and in fact, I'd say he comes across as pretty sincere to me.

Yet, sincerity is also not a scientific or logical criterion. Why is any of this being judged as true or false?

Using scientific, peer-reviewed articles, preferably within the past five years, prove MBTI is a reliable model. Include counter-arguments also posted in scientific, peer-review journals in your analysis.