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Apparently large swaths of healthy, neurotypical humans have been experiencing emotions and ethical decision making in entirely different ways from each other and no one ever told me?
I took a one week break from TheMotte because I was writing an entire freakin' novel about all the weird and wonderful facets of human subjective experience I was learning about from my study of the MBTI personality system (it's actually not a theory of "personality" per se, it's more like a theory of perceptual cognitive architecture of which personality is just a nondeterministic byproduct, but, whatever). And then I realized that if I broke the 10k word mark, there would probably be no one who would actually take the time to read it. So you're getting a hyper-condensed version of what was going to be "chapter 1", because this concept in particular was just so fascinating to me, and so immediately applicable, that I really felt compelled to share it.
I quickly learned from discussions with the MBTI community that many of us are subjectively experiencing the world in quite dramatically different ways, and I had let some of these differences go underappreciated before. This reddit thread was one the earliest signs that something interesting was going on; it asked the question, "Do you feel emotions as physical sensations or intense thoughts?" My immediate reaction was, "well obviously intense thoughts, right? Or, I guess it's a little more abstract than that, it's more like a thought plus something else that's kind of ineffable. But not a bodily sensation. What would that even mean? Stuff like 'getting red hot with anger' is just a metaphor, right? I mean, ok, I guess if you hooked me up to a machine when I was angry you could measure an increase in body heat, but I don't think I've ever been consciously aware of that in the moment. The only emotion that comes with a physical bodily sensation is anxiety. Now that one is very palpable, the characteristic stomach-twisting nausea of intense anxiety is unmistakable. Thick weights dragging you down, unable to move. One of the primary, perhaps the primary, sources of unhappiness and discomfort throughout my entire life. Surely this sensation is a universal part of the human experience, yes?"
And then I scrolled down to the replies:
What the heck are you talking about how do you have it exactly backwards, also what do you mean you have no internal dialogue how can you just admit to being an NPC like that.
Ok, so what I thought was universal from birth, turned out to not be universal. Got it. What else could I have gotten wrong?
Each of the 16 MBTI personality types is classed as either an "introverted feeler (Fi for short)" or an "extroverted feeler (Fe for short)" (you can check here if you're curious which one is which). What these terms actually "mean" is... not entirely clear, because this whole thing was based on some notes that Carl Jung scribbled in a book in 1921, and people have just been kinda wingin' it since then. But I had independent reasons to believe that there was a legitimate phenomenon going on here that was worth investigating. If you just engage in a cursory "surface level" investigation for the actual definitions of Fe and Fi, you'll often be presented with something like the following: Fe means "placing the group above the individual; orienting one's value judgements based on what the group thinks, rather than what the individual personally values; acting in accordance with commonly accepted values", and Fi means "placing the individual above the group; orienting one's value judgements based on one's own internal moral compass, independent of the moral judgements of others; acting primarily to maintain one's sense of authenticity to one's own values". And those concepts seem... bizarre and not particularly helpful. Surely everyone's a bit of one and a bit of the other? Few people, under these definitions, would want to admit to being a "Fe user" (as the MBTI jargon goes). Value judgements are always a complex interplay between self and world; they are never purely internal nor purely external. Furthermore, a number of self-identified "Fe types" were making what seemed to me to be highly bizarre claims such as, "I'm not even sure if I have any opinions of my own sometimes, I can't really know what I'm feeling until I externalize it somehow". How can someone not know what they're feeling at any given time?? Nonetheless, I was intrigued enough that I had to keep digging.
The breakthrough really came when I realized that I had to stop thinking in terms of grand philosophical examples and life-defining choices and focus on how people act in ordinary, everyday, non-stressful social situations. At that point, a clearer dichotomy between "Fe" and "Fi" (or, we might say more uncharitably, "neurotic people pleasers" and "selfish assholes who seem to be unaware of the existence of other humans") starts to emerge. Michael Pierce gives probably the best "definition" of Fe and Fi (aside from my own definition that I'm going to give right after this):
In either instance, the default instinct (in the girl's case, to act amiably, and in the boy's case, to act according to whatever is rendered by his own internal value judgements) can be overridden by rationality if the situation calls for it, but this is a picture of the default "pull of gravity" in the introverted feeler and the extroverted feeler.
The account of the introverted feeler here seems to be approaching an almost mythological level of detachment from social norms and practical concerns, an ideal standard that no mortal could ever reach. Like, barring mitigating circumstances, how can the goal of social interaction not be to make the other person feel good, or at least avoid causing offense? Hello?? But, if the accounts that I've been reading are correct, this is essentially how a great number of people go about experiencing life on a daily basis (or at least this is how they subjectively experience life, regardless of how much they must actually modulate their behavior due to social norms out of rational self-interest).
After a great deal of ruminating on various anecdata and my own personal experiences, I arrived at the following "distilled" definitions of Fi and Fe. My highly speculative hypothesis is that these are not just statistical generalizations of clusters of traits that are observed in the population, but may be related to actual neurological differences between individuals; sort of like two different architectural versions of the Human Morality Processing Chip, Intel vs AMD. Both of these architectures are very much designed for functioning in face-to-face interactions in tribal hunter-gatherer societies, and should be thought of in that context, rather than as generators of abstract moral beliefs:
Fe is more of a quick and dirty algorithm, like an embedded system that can only do one thing: the directive is simply to minimize human suffering in the immediate physical environment, and that's about it. The Fe user takes in as much emotional data from other people in the environment as possible and unavoidably factors that data into the decision making process; negative emotional states in other people will almost always produce some level of felt discomfort, resulting is an instinctual pull towards alleviating that discomfort or extricating oneself from the situation, though obviously there will be many mitigating circumstances where this empathetic pain reaction can be blunted, e.g. in cases of self-defense. Fe users tend to feel emotions in a less intense and more transient manner than Fi users, and, speculatively, they may in some sense have less emotional introspection on average than Fi users. It seems that things are set up this way so that their own emotions will not override the "prime directive" of focusing on others' emotions, and this all seems to be tied into their tendency towards greater emotional expressiveness as well. (I tried doing an experiment myself. Normally I like to be walking around while listening to music, or at least doing something active. I tried sitting absolutely still, not even any facial expressions, while listening to a song that normally makes me quite happy. The emotional reaction did seem to be significantly blunted, almost to the point of disappearing entirely. I'd be interested to know how common this reaction is.)
Fi is more like a programmable CPU; it can do almost anything, and the exact "software" that is being run will vary greatly between different Fi users. The "instinctual pull" in this case is towards the fulfillment of the Fi user's own judgements, and not towards the alleviation of suffering in other people. Fi users certainly can factor another person's internal subjective emotional statement into their decision making process, but this is only done contextually when the Fi user has decided that it's relevant according to their own internal value standards. It is not the same automatic, unavoidable process that it is for the Fe user. As the name "introverted feeling" implies, Fi naturally sees its own feelings as, well, introverted: private, unique, generated wholly out of the self, and therefore, not something that needs to be shared or discussed. In a sort of automatic typical-minding, the Fi user assumes that I have my feelings, you have yours, they have no particular relationship to each other, and so there's no need to express them in outward displays of emotionality. (This is not the case for the Fe user, as their emotions are quite literally dependent on the emotions of those around them.)
It is not the case that one can straightforwardly say that Fi = male and Fe = female, although that is the general trend, despite numerous exceptions. According to random images on Google image search that had data that was probably pulled out of someone's ass, the two most common MBTI types in men are ISTJ and ESTJ (both Fi types), and in women the two most common types are ISFJ and ESFJ (both Fe types).
We can now see where the earlier surface stereotype of "Fe = herd animal" came from. If your body has told you on a literal, physical level from birth that your value is dependent on the value judgements of the people around you due to the palpable discomfort you feel at the negative emotional states of others, then the general trend will be to align your more abstract moral views with the views of those around you, in order to seek their approval and minimize internal cognitive dissonance. It takes an intelligent and independent-minded individual to develop their own independent moral thinking in these circumstances. (I'm not throwing any shade at women here -- this is absolutely how my own body works too, and I'm frankly shocked to discover that this may not be a universal human experience!)
My entire life I've been perpetually flabbergasted at how so many men could just... do things, without seeming to care much for the impact that their actions have on others. These things could be anything from aggressive sexual advances on women that any reasonable person could predict would cause them distress, or it could simply be a tendency towards perpetual rudeness and bluntness in situations where I would be instinctually driven to sugarcoat my words and attempt to elicit agreement. A generalized weakening or strengthening of the anxiety response in different individuals is probably part of the explanation, but it's not an entirely satisfactory theory on its own, as one individual may be highly neurotic about one thing but not neurotic at all about others. (It is easy to imagine, for example, a ruthless corporate attorney who ruins lives for a living while also being a huge germaphobe, or perhaps he feels palpable fear over issues of immigration.)
I never really thought about the issue that deeply; I suppose I just accepted it as a fact of life. If I had a theory for how some individuals were able to act so boldly in matters of interpersonal conflict, it would have been something like... a total obliviousness to the potential consequences of their actions? As in, they just weren't "thinking" as much as me, and if they "thought" more then they would align themselves closer to me in terms of choosing to act cautiously. Or else they had access to some infinite wellspring of courage and willpower that I did not. But this new theory seems quite a bit better: some people are literally capable of just not weighting their decisions based on the emotional states of others, even in the absence of significant stressors. (This might sound like a huge "duh" moment, but keep in mind that when I talk about "weighting" data in the decision making process, I'm talking about palpable, involuntary, bodily instincts; it's very easy to typical-mind and assume that everyone is feeling the same physical sensations as you, and they're just choosing to deal with them in different ways.)
In spite of how highly speculative this concept is, I feel like it's been so immediately applicable for me that I can't throw it out. There are certain people in my life whose behavior used to mystify me; now that I understand them as "high Fi users", it suddenly all makes sense, and I'm much more empathetic to their point of view.
Anyway, that might all sound insane because I had to cut out multiple examples and intermediary reasoning steps, but if this idea sounds interesting then I'm certainly willing to discuss it further.
(As a parting gift, I was fortunate to come across this today, although it should perhaps be renamed to "Real Fe vs Fi moment")
As an INTP, it falls to me to point out that MBTI are basically zodiac signs for nerds.
That is not to say that categorizing people in somewhat arbitrary boxes can not provide useful insights sometimes. Categorizing people by their dominant humour or Hogwarts house or Middle-Earth species can might all lead to true discoveries about how people are different. Astrology is hampered by not categorizing based on personality traits, but personally I would not be shocked if there are minor systemic differences between people born in spring and autumn on which they can capitalize beyond the Barnum effect.
This looks like another mapping from the MBTI. Each MB type gets assigned an ordered list of length four of two-letter types. The first letter is any of N,T, F, S (intuition, thinking, feeling, sensing), the second is either e or i -- extro/introverted. Each first letter appears once in the list. The list is in orders of decreasing priority. Also, suffixes have to be assigned alternately. If your first "function" is -i, then your third suffix will also be -i and the 2nd and fourth suffix will be -e. Obviously.
Naturally, there are 4! ways to arrange the first letters, and for each possibility you can pick the first suffix, so you should have 48 types in total. Luckily, 32 of these are swept under the rug and the remaining 16 are assigned to MBTI signs using some mapping. The first MB letter -- I or E -- decides with what suffix you start for your first function. Your second MB letter (N/S) will end up in one of the first two functions on your list, as will your third (T/F). Your last MB letter (P/J) will determine the order of the first two letters according to something which may or may not be systematic.
So INTJ maps to Ni, Te, Fi, Se, while INTP maps to Ti, Ne, Si, Fe.
Each of these letters then gets a paragraph reading like a horoscope:
I would introduce another level on this analysis. Most but not all of these types also correspond to chemical elements.
Fe is iron, a common element on earth instrumental in building civilization.
Fi is not a known element.
Se is selenium, a rare element. In low doses, it is essential for humans, but in high doses it is toxic.
Si is silicon, another common element, which famously is used in microelectronics.
Te is tellurium, another rare element, but without a known biological function.
Ti is titanium, a metal known for its excellent strength to density ratio.
Ne is neon, a noble gas. The lightest of the personality type elements, it will not easily form compounds.
Ni is nickel. Another metal, which is commonly used to prevent the corrosion of steel.
So the PSE personality type for INTP aka Ti, Ne, Si, Fe would be:
The model certainly does predict that you would be predisposed to do that, yes!
As an INFJ who naturally wants to see everything, particularly other people, in terms of patterns and underlying meanings (even in cases where these "underlying meanings" may admittedly be delusional), there are few things that tickle my brain more than systems like MBTI which allow me to view people as individuated instances of stable generic archetypes, whose behavior can be explained by (or at least, statistically correlated with) underlying hidden variables. But it is precisely because I am highly conscious of this subjective bias within myself that I am all the more conscious of the need to submit my thinking to critical inquiry.
Well, no, they're not swept under the rug. It's simply an axiom of the system that when one of the perception functions is introverted, the other must be extroverted, and similarly with the judgement functions. "You're seeking on the outside what you lack on the inside", would be the poetic way of phrasing it I suppose.
With a large enough sample size and a precise enough conception of all the "cognitive functions", this could ultimately form the basis of a research program for empirically checking the model's predictions, although, as I have to reiterate, it's ultimately not behavior we're looking to validate, but rather internal phenomenology and underlying thought patterns. And because two distinct underlying thought processes can manifest as the same external behavior, any attempt to empirically validate the model will result in endless fractal complexity (you have to ask people to introspect, and you have to trust them to be honest, and you have to verify that we all agree on the meanings of the key terms and we're not talking past each other, and so forth. This does not in any way imply that the study of internal phenomenology is fruitless or pointless. It simply means that phenomenology is more of a task for philosophy than it is for empirical science).
Funny that you bring up Si in particular, because the most dramatically successful empirical prediction of the model to date for me came when I asked someone about Si, which I'll get to in a moment. I agree that the description of Si you quoted is vague and vulnerable to the Barnum effect. You really need to synthesize a lot of examples and a lot of different descriptions of the functions from different angles before a clearer picture starts to emerge. But nonetheless, I would submit that even the vague description of Si you quoted is already more interesting and less horoscope-like than you might expect.
What does it mean to think in a "stable" and "linear" fashion, anyway? Does everyone think the same, or do we think differently from each other? Could some people legitimately be described as thinking in a more stable and linear fashion than others? Consider for example the description that urquan (who I believe to be an INTP) gave of his thought process, and compare it to the description that FistfullOfCrows (who I believe to be an INTJ) gave of his thought process. urquan's is intrinsically highly verbal, while FistfullOfCrow's is only verbal after some conscious effort. I would submit that based on these descriptions, they don't think in the same way, and that furthermore urquan would be described as the more stable and linear one. This immediately raises a number of further questions: how many different "ways" of thinking are there, anyway? Are the two descriptions I cited just mere idiosyncrasies that are unique to the individuals in question, or could they represent isolated instances of more general patterns? Could your "way of thinking" be correlated with other psychological and behavioral traits?
Si-dominants (so, people who use Si as their "dominant function", the ISTJs and the ISFJs) seem to be more likely to report experiencing the external world through a sort of hyper-subjectivized lens, where direct sense perceptions are automatically associated in a literal, ineluctable way with memories and concepts that have personal meaning to the individual (I will simply include as a universal qualifier over all statements here that everything in individual psychology must ultimately be statistical rather than deductive, and not all "Si-dominants" will report the same experiences). An ISTJ on reddit described his experience as follows:
This is not how I experience the world. There's no Barnum effect going on here. The phenomenological experience described here is completely and utterly alien to me. I don't believe I've ever had any experience that could really be termed as a "flashback", much less an "automatic" one, even much less to the point that they became "annoying". I have personal memories, certainly, but choosing to explore them is always a voluntary process.
The Si-dominants seem to report experiencing the highest rate of involuntary flashbacks, although I have seen them sporadically reported among "secondary" and "tertiary" Si users as well. In general, any type that uses Si as one of their main functions seems to report an increased vividness of detail in personal memories, and simply a greater capacity for retaining personal memories in general (this could include both memories of personal life events, and "personal" memories in the sense of "I have a vivid memory of exactly what was on that Wikipedia page that I looked at last night"). One INFP (tertiary Si user) said that they were one day struck by a flashback of an unpleasant memory that was so vivid it was almost as if they were reliving it. I have simply never experienced anything like this, and I'm not even sure if I'm capable of having such an experience. In terms of raw sensory impressions, personal memories of actual events from my life seem to be about as vivid as imagined simulations of experiences I've never even had before.
Back to that "empirical success" I was talking about: based on a few facts about my mother's behavior and biography, I immediately narrowed her type down to ISFJ. There were simply no other choices. This is a Si-dominant type, so I would expect her to be more prone to experiencing these flashback sensations. She's never talked before about experiencing anything like this phenomenon in her life. But, I decided it would be an interesting test of the model, so I simply went and asked her, "mom, kind of a weird question, but do you ever just look at something, say in the house or when you're out walking or whatever, and you get a strong flashback that's kind of like-" and before I could even elaborate further, she immediately responded with, "oh my God yes, all the time!" And she launched into quite a vivid description of the experience. Frequently these flashbacks are to specific events from different points in her life, although sometimes they have a more abstract and ineffable "ancient" quality, which she always interpreted as visions of a past life (she's devoutly religious). She learned from a young age that not everyone has these types of experiences, so she learned to keep quiet about them and not share them. When I asked her if this is where her preference for routine comes from (she is extremely ritualistic in her behavior), she responded with "yes, that's exactly it! New experiences won't give me the flashbacks. I always like to have them with me, they help me feel safe and grounded". (I do not consider this to be a leading question. I too am rather a creature of habit, but in my case, that's simply due to a generalized anxiety about future possibilities. Describing my preferences as being related to any sort of "flashback" process is, as I have already stated, simply absurd to me.)
So, all in all a very fascinating event. Of course, one data point does not a successful model make. But, if nothing else, I am extremely grateful to MBTI for alerting me to the existence of these "exotic" phenomenological experiences, even if the distribution of these experiences in the general population does not ultimately match the distribution that would be predicted by MBTI.
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