[…] the id – Leon Tsao I dont agree completely with the video but it sure has some valid points.Question of the Day: INTJ or INTP? – Personality Type in Depth Reply With Quote […]

I am an INTx. I am pretty sure I am P, but some problems here I have run into about MBTI typing include (we’re talking about P vs. J):
“Do you like working with deadlines?” Yes. I need to to survive life.
“Do you like completing work ahead of deadlines?” This is ideal, but I would take this ability for granted, and I don’t feel as though a life full of extremely early prep would grant effective work.
“Which do you prefer?” I get stressed out from deadlines more but also have a considerable amount of productivity increase with a goal of end setting of some sort.

“Do you like working with concrete topics?” Yes.
“Do you like abstraction and metaphors?” Yes.
“What kind of topic interests you more?” Hard to say;
In abstract topics I look a lot for conclusions.
In concrete topics I find potential controversy and apply critical thinking as well as give thought for artistic representation and identify gelatin-like topic niches and Easter eggs during internalization. I guess you could say that I prefer moderation here unless my judgmental self is restless or my perception runs into something intriguing.

“What do others criticize you for?” Not being on top of my schedule, being ‘quiet’, too centered in solitude, being indecisive, being too formal during conversations.
(Mostly INTP typical)
“What do you criticize yourself for?” Inadequacy, feeling annoyed or annoying, not living efficiently and effectively, with actions that lack calculation, whatever others criticize me for, provided it makes sense, and I strongly agree with it or see an exceeding amount of logic involved in arguments.
(Mostly INTJ typical)
“What do you criticize others for?” Acting and talking irrationally, freeing anger and letting it guide conversation and confrontation. Not putting full effort into something as to mock the whole assignment entirely. Having very illogical, distorted, ignorant opinions put often in debate, which I hold as principles or obvious truths, but sometimes I’m more intolerant than that, feeling a powerful discomfort upon moderately distressing opinion-related things.
(NT, or analyst, typical)

Yes, I know not all of that was relevant.

I have run into stereotypes of INTJ’s as chess enthusiasts chess and INTP’s an affiliation with the Rubik’s cube. I find that comical as I go about this… Two years ago was ALL about chess. Last year I tried the Rubik’s cube on for size. I have an infinite number of interests (All topics save contemporary dance, no offense to dancers, as well as idyllic social skills (though culture and etiquette in a non-applicable application seem like a good topic to browse)) though some things (physics, Latin, calculus, engineering, coding and video game making, classical and ambient music composition) have ways of demanding a lot of time and energy from me. I have ten to twenty things going at once and have a sense of long term projects fairly well. However, I will generally give an intensive effort to no more than three projects per time frame ranging between one week to three months for projects. I keep a “Brain Diary” for putting refined ideas I think of in. I organize that well, but my time? Not always so well.

I think I am an INTP artifact with concrete, judgmental paint on, but inevitably J ore mixed in as well, and it depends on the situation. My philosophy is one of, “Learn first, then apply, then store it to a dream of being a man of intellectual AND objective contribution to the world. (I tell everyone my neurological self is undergoing an identity crisis).

If you haven’t already guessed, I’m a middle scholar, and my philosophy is, now is the cramming week before the test, which, the test is the stereotypical teen object but I’m talking about 26, the age when my synapses close. (This analogy isn’t fitting for me, though, as I only study for tests once in a blue moon) However, I do reserve a moderate amount of time for fun (or fun that doesn’t fry my brain like an egg on the sidewalk). After the test I may choose to forget what I learned by losing the information initiative by reviewing after the test, or I can apply it and grow. Interesting enough, I theorize strongly that the INTP that runs all my thoughts and inner conversation may reverse into J as I grow up and ease into a long-term interest. Possibly.

My rationale behind calling my “temperament” INTP is that I have read articles and identified with the majority of the things said, perhaps weakened by playing down things that are more important to me.

Another reason against a diagnosis of INTP and towards INTJ is that I have tested as INTJ consistently, but I read something that suggested that to be common for INTP’s as the test is set up in ways that will highlight J parts on questions where the P reason for answering a specific choice is different, if I understood it correctly.

I didn’t lie here, though maybe some tailoring of the facts to support my thoughts on my status of ambivalence. I strive to balance these types, P and J. Because, P is better than J at thinking open-mindedly, as life requires a ton. J has an edge in action and organization, and keeps me practical enough to keep my ideas and desires from taking place in the sky due to helium filled pants as far as where ideas come from. The J can also be easier on my life so I can keep from stewing hours where I shouldn’t. The P is best employed in blocking judgments of people and getting along disregarding emotionally). Hopefully my brief notion doesn’t offend anyone whose type was explained poorly and in a bad light.

Well, thanks for finishing my novel, now you get to know why I was rambling like I was. I see myself as an interesting figure here, and I want to have input from people about this, in terms of if it is valid to call myself INTx for my personality test results, if I have to be one side or the other on the Mbti tightrope, and perhaps if anyone else identifies with me. I feel like if you are an INTx I’d appreciate opinions, if you are an ESFx I’d feel different insights would be cool, as well as with anyone in between.

Thank you for your reply. I was actually thinking about this the other day as well. And came to the same conclusion that becuase its conscious the experience is different, adding to that if the lower function is by no means differentiated and by means conflated with other functions, a direct linked between what cuases the achilles heal and the lower functions stack could be difficult to obtain as the energy will not have any direction. But from what I experiences as an INTP, before I knew about the function stacks. I always got the feeling when seeing people with high Fi such as an ENFP in the eyes as soul less, and emptiness in them. And this is often how I type Fi users and has been reliable for me and usually just take a sec. It is only when I figured out that my Fi is demonic that I could somehow explained the soul less feeling I got. But that would also mean that my Fi is somewhat directing energy at least to my inferior that gives me that soul less feeling and that perhaps should at least been my achilles heal.But no, nothing destroyes me as much as Si my third fuction than my fourth. Another explanation I got from RDondurer on youtube was that because Si is irrational and automatic, it is difficult to controll the information that is coming in, that is why the achilles hell could either be 3 or 4 depending if it is irrational or not. As rational function would somehow be controlled therefore allowing a space to digust the information and not being the achilles heel. I do not know. I am so much less knowledgeable then most her. But like I am actually being heard. And in my mind at least taken serious. 🙂

Hi there, just wanted to say, I enjoyed this
article. It was helpful. Keep on posting!

Hi Mark. Thank you so much for taking the time to give me such a throughly answer and definately going to take your advice. I’m going to try to join the webinar on archetypes the 30th october by Bob. Eventhough perhaps its not going exactly to answer my question directly I hope it will expand on my limited knowledge. My understanding of the function and the associated archetype have certaintly increased, but I’m still not there. But hopefully soon I can see it at work 🙂

Is the third function or the fourth function the achilles heel. And if so why is not the 8 function the achilles heel considering its least known to the person? Does anyone know please answer me. Si is really what bothers me the most, it hits my nerve when someone is constant on it. Trying to understand why. Would be happy to hear some thougths.

Just to echo the last comment, I got here by googling ‘example critical parent role 6 introverted thinking’. I am trying to better understand the archetypes, and get a more innate understanding of the differences between Te and Ti, and I find real life examples very useful.
I’ve seen the definition of Te as organizing:systematizing/structuring, and Ti as analyzing/categorizing, but that didn’t resonate with me as much as reading here that Ti can be hair-splitting.

I’m fairly new to this, but there seems to be a disproportionate amount of discussion online about differentiating between INTJ and INTP, but this article has also been helpful in clearing up why that distinction seems to be a particularily difficult one for some.

As an INTJ who lives with an INTP, it boggles me that there could be any difficulty in identifying the differences in these types. He is lazy and never takes care of basic life stuff like paying for parking tickets because he’d rather spend time picking fights about things he doesn’t even believe. I, on the other hand, am completely uptight and suck the fun out of every situation by asking boring logistical questions such as, ‘If you install a pool, who will maintain it? What will the legal liability be if we have a party? Does a pool have to be built to code? Did you realize you have to kill every tree in our small hard for this? You hate nature, exercise, and the sun, so what is the purpose?’ Logically, I should just avoid the long, boring discussion about this since he will never get around to building a pool anyway because he will tangentially veer off to correcting my grammar, and will get too distracted by clumsy attempts at self expression to build the pool. Or he’ll start considering hot tubs instead.

I apologize for taking this away from the more enjoyable scholarly tone of the previous posts. This is my first time at this site, and I look forward to (quietly) exploring more. Thank you!

Thank you for your feedback, well appreciated. And excited for the June issue 🙂

Hi, Mark Hunziker, I would like to thank you so much for your brilliant book and sharing your knowledge with us. I’m referring to “building blocks of personality types”. I was so happy reading it.

Anyways I have a question. I’m pretty sure that my best fit type is INTP, my problem is I know that I’m using Ni a lot. And specially in theory building, I use it along with my Ti and Ne. And Ni feels like a knowledge has been givin to me. I get really excited when that happens. But also tiring becuase, as is its like stream of consciousness, images streaming into my head. And I feel the pressure to share it, but by then my Ne and Ti is interigating my Ni insigth and images. Til I have understood it and my excitment seems to vanish.

My problem is that I truly believe that I experience Ni, and usually explain Ni better then dominant Ni user becuase my Ti allows me too. My problem is what does that mean to me as a person why is my Ni behaving like that. Would be appreciate some feedback.

‘@Mark

Einstein was an INTP.

Jacks description of INTJs being ‘most often cast as brainy folks’ like Einstein got me thinking. I too believe that INTJs are more often labeled as ‘intelligent’ than other types. Though as an INTJ myself, I love this kind of flattery as much as anyone; I also view it as an incorrect and unfortunate bias –a carry-over from the ‘IQ’ concept of intelligence that can undermine the more sophisticated ‘gifts differing’ view. Most people view me as very intelligent. And if some things I say strike people as ‘brilliant,’ then I’m inclined to believe that sometimes I must, indeed, be brilliant. But I’m also quite aware that in many ways, such as remembering where I put things or noticing what’s right in front of me, I am also a certifiable idiot. These tendencies fit with the ‘absent-minded professor’ stereotype (which is tolerated and lightly dismissed because it’s presumed that she’s busy thinking brilliant thoughts). But I’ve always been curious about why this particular set of gifts and deficits is ranked as higher ‘intelligence’ than, for example a brilliant auto mechanic or building contractor who maybe couldn’t anticipate the consequences of her actions 24 hours into the future if her life depended on it.

It’s obvious to most type users that we’re simply dealing with how people can be so differently intelligent. So why is the INTJ particular kind of intelligence so often viewed as higher intelligence than the others? Why don’t we evaluate the great auto mechanic similarly?

I think the explanation probably starts with the nature of introverted intuition. Ni is often so ’out there’ than other types can’t even relate to ‘how they got there.’ This introduces a ‘wow’ factor. Sensing, by contrast, is a function that we’re all forced to develop at least a bit. We engage extraverted sensing to enable us to drive down the road with crashing into things and introverted sensing to find our way back home. (Please forgive the gross over-simplification.) So even if we’re not very skilled users of sensing, there’s less ‘wow’ around brilliant sensing because we can at least relate to how they got there.

The extraverted mode of intuiting is often done in public. Ne may generate 20 possibilities in a brainstorming session; and though one may turn out to be ‘brilliant,’ other options may not work so well; so this transparency of the whole process undermines the ‘wow’ effect. Ni insights, on the other hand, are usually honed internally and only made public as ‘finished product.’

INFJs’ ‘knowing’ can be as visionary as INTJs’; but usually lack the logical explanations that INTJs’ auxiliary can lend. So INFJs’ brand of intelligence is often either dismissed; or even when appreciated, usually seen as belonging to the realm of ‘mysticism’ –i.e., a different, separate kind of gift from what we usually think of as intelligence. INTJs are generally able to explain their insights to others, through their Te auxiliary, in ways that can be understood. Others may not buy into or even be able to follow these explanations –especially at first. But it at least ‘sounds intelligent.’

Many outside-the-box thinkers such as Jung and Steve Jobs, are dismissed at first –then, when the rest of us have caught up enough to understand or at least appreciate, they are reevaluated and we call them geniuses. I think this is typical of most notable INTJ thinkers. But are Rembrandt, Dali, Mozart, Lao-tzu, Shakespeare, or Siddhartha Gautama any less intelligent? Obviously not –just differently so. It seems to me that the ‘IQ’ notion of intelligence that we all carry is simply an INTJ notion of intelligence, and that it is of marginal use at best; and may well cause more confusion and harm than it’s worth.

(Plse forgive the mispellings in this post. It doesn’t have spell check.)

This is a very interesting article and a great discussion. Once again, this issue is a huge success for Personality Type in Depth.

I would have to say that as a business consultant who uses the 16 types for organizational design and team building,if a person can’t spot the differences between an INTP and an INTJ, the person would also have problems with telling a giraffe from a ground squirrel. INTP’s are most often brainy folks who are mathmeticians, professors, actuarialists,and theoreticians. They live for the big picture. They inhabit laboratories and rseach centers. I would disagree that they are action prone people. They are often so insightful that others follow up on their theories, as in the case of Einstein, who could have very well been an INTJ. Their strategic threat is being so high in the stratisfere they never come down.

INTP’s on the other hand do not see the big picture because their passion is in the details. I have known more INTP’s in the personality type community than any other type, and they love to break type, preferences, attitudes, into every increasingly small pieces that they can endlessly discuss in forums like this. They love to study people from under the microscope, because that’s how they know them best.

INTP’s are often drawn to journalism and social science investigation because whole systems are made to the taken apart, to be evaluated, and yes, to find the fatal flaw. INTP’s are often a part of my classes–they can be great computer programmers and other things that requree focus on the miniscule. If there is one type that raises a hand at the beginning of the class and declares everything we’re going to say about applying type to business as useless voodoo, it will most often to an INTP. Yet, the INTP is often incredibly valuable because they won’t let you run off the cliff. INTP’s detail folks, INTJ, the view from way up high.

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INTJ AND INFP BOTH !
by
Douglass J. Wilde
Stanford University
wilde@stanford.edu

Quantitative analysis [9] of the MBTI® scores shows that the answer to the question “Is it INTJ or INTP?” is — BOTH! This is because when the J/P score is less than the I score, as seems to be assumed in this discussion, the type is “doubly-introverted”, as proven rigorously in pp. 67-9 of Wilde, D. J. (2011) “Jung’s personality theory quantified”, Springer, London, subsequently referred to as “JPTQ”. Consequently it has dominant and auxiliary attitudes that are BOTH introverted. The “doubleversion” phenomenon has been noted previously by (June) Singer and Loomis, Spoto, and Geldart.
For INTj, (here the “j” is lower case to emphasize its smallness) introverted (not extraverted) thinking Ti is thus in the second “good parent” position rather than in the sixth “critical parent” position where Te truly resides. So Ti is not “hijacking” Te; the confusion comes from using conventional “type dynamics” (TD) theory instead analyzing quantitatively.
Disturbingly for MBTI® practitioners, quantitative theory contradicts TD’s “attitude balance” rule that the auxiliary attitude must differ from that of the dominant, which for INTj would have extraverted thinking Te auxiliary to contrast with the dominant Ni. It happens however that Te is in this case a third “subsidiary” function-attitude (hereafter called “(cognitive) mode” to avoid confusion with the previously defined words “function” and “attitude”). The two subsidiary modes, which complete the quartet formulated by Jung, are overlooked by TD’s consideration of only the dominant and auxiliary modes. For INTj, the second subsidiary mode Ne will usually have a negligible “slight” score less than 20% (6 out of MBTI®’s possible 30).
Mark, your discussion makes you sound like a double-introvert. Send me your MBTI® scores and I’ll unpack them to obtain your mode scores. You’re in for another surprise if your T score exceeds your N score, contradicting another unreliable TD assumption.
If you would like a feel of the arithmetic before tackling the rigorous JPTQ book, here is a “packing table” showing the cognitive mode scores for a set of INTj scores reasonably describing the situation at hand. The questionnaire scores 60%I, 60%N, 60%T, 20%j “unpack” into the mode scores 50%Ni, 40%Ti, 20%Te, 10%Ne. Each row gives the score points generated for each questionnaire variable by the row’s mode. The column sums then match the questionnaire scores, PROVING the correctness of the transformation of questionnaire scores into mode scores.
The mode scores show why the personality description for INTj should involve both INTJ and INTP type table descriptions. The INTJ description combines those for the Ni and Te mode descriptions; INTP, for Ti and Ne. A crude way of understanding the distribution of emphasis is given by averaging the questionnaire scores to obtain 50% for INTJ and 40% for INTP – almost equal. Thus INTj can be seen as “bi-typal”, to coin an uncomfortable new word.
To keep this note from being too upsettingly long, discussion of the subsidiary modes, which seem to drift into the shadow, will be withheld until you ask for it.
INTj PACKING TABLE

Mode Mode P-mode 60%I 60%N 60%T 20%J
identification scores or J-mode?
Dominant 50%Ni J 50i 50n 50j
Auxiliary 40%Ti P 40i 40t -40j
Dominant subsidiary 10%Ne P -10i 10n -10j
Auxiliary subsidiary 20%Te J -20i 20t 20j
Check: algebraic sum – – 60i 60n 60t 20j

One thing I’ve repeatedly noticed that is different between me, the INTJ, and my INTP friends is my commitment to putting ideas into action. I can theorize all day long with an INTP, but eventually I end up saying “OK so how do we turn this into a project and get it going.” I start strategizing. But often the INTP doesn’t really want to stop theorizing and go into action and just changes the subject to continue discussing. This can get frustrating for the INTJ. But this might be one little tip to use when trying to decide which one someone is.