#hiii niks thank you !!! i havent thought about mbti in YEARS i honestly missed this its so fun..

[woodfrogs]

wait wait can u expand on the mbti thing i dont know that much about it and im curious

yes!!! im bleaching my hair rn so thank you for giving me something to do :D

basically, online quizzes interpret the eight letters in pairs, right? youre either introverted or extroverted, intuitive or sensory, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. and the four you get are completely independent of one another.

the cognitive functions interpretation is based on jungian theory. here, there are only four traits describing how you interact with and interpret the world/yourself: intuitive/sensory (N/S) and thinking/feeling (T/F). introverted/extroverted (I/E) is a description of those four traits - whether they're in relation to yourself, internally, or the world around you - and is written with Ni, Se, Ti, Fe, etc.

judging/perceiving (J/P) is related to the position of a specific function in your "stack". the stack is basically four of these functions - one of each N/S/T/F; two I and two E - in the order you're most comfortable using. someone with a judging function (T/F) as the first E in their stack is J, and someone with a perceiving function as the first E in their stack is P. basically J/P comes from how you interpret the world around you. T/F and N/S is determined from which comes first in your stack.

so for example, an Fe-dominant will be very conscientious of the emotions of people around them, of societal morals, etc. and those things will factor in their worldview and decision-making a lot. an Fe-inferior (fourth in the stack) might struggle with noticing others' feelings or not take them into account. auxiliary and tertiary functions have their own roles but they're more complicated and i forget the details since it's been a while since i thought about this lol.

the stack is built out of alternating I/E functions (so _i_e_i_e or vice versa) and whichever function is dominant, its pair is always inferior. (ex. T_N_S_F_ is valid (either ENTJ or INTP depending on whether their dominant function is Ti or Te), but S_N_T_F is not). this leads to 16 combinations - the 16 types.

so this is where my complaint comes in. someone who just took a quiz might look at ENTP and go wow! that person is extroverted! when really it's just that they interpret the world primarily through Ne, which is about seeing many different possibilities and getting bored when stagnant for too long (that's how it externalizes, at least). compare that to an INTP, which is an introverted ENTP when just looking at the letters, but in cognitive functions suddenly reveals that their dominant function is Ti, much more focused on their own internal logic and having a specific purpose in life than ENTPs who's Ne might cause them to jump from thing to thing. and this is just looking at the dominant functions of two types with the same functions in their stack, just dom-aux swapped - the different positions of the other three also obviously play a role, even if they're also only shifted by one.

i suppose there is a connection between social intro/extrovertedness and this but its nothing more than an EXXX will be more comfortable and able to externalize themselves than an IXXX, who has to express things and function through their auxiliary function when interacting with the world - which is easier for an EXXX who is functioning with their dominant in that case. but it doesn't mean that, say, someone with an Fe auxiliary (IXFJ) won't be more comfortable with others than someone with Fe tertiary (EXTP).

anyways. that was long. but i do wish that more people used MBTI as a character-building tool because i think it's a very useful thing, to think about how a character goes about interacting with and internalizing the world. what's their go-to? what can they lean on if that doesn't work? what do they struggle with? and that's not even going into things like dominant-tertiary loops (when they skip over their auxiliary and start relying on their tertiary too much, often used in MBTI analysis of fictional character Going Through It).