MBTI heuristic: how to judge whether someone is a thinker or a feeler

[Carl-Richard]

I think a good heuristic for diagnosing someone as a "thinker" vs a "feeler" is how often they say "because". Because it indicates the use of logical thinking. "I think this because this is connected to this, and this is this, therefore this is this. Why? Because this is this. And because this is this, this is this." etc.

If you are a feeler, you are more likely to just say a sentence and then let it stand on its own. It doesn't need further elaboration, because it's just what you feel. It didn't come from a deep systematic process of going from one thing to the next. Maybe you could derive the process after the fact (and perhaps that would indicate or give more evidence that it would be a more consistent or "true" feeling), but the process you arrived there was through feeling.

In that sense, feeling need not be devoid of "logic", but it's devoid of conscious use of logic (logic as a declarative process). It can in a way be a shortcut to a logical process, but you have less ability to be aware of it and perhaps test if it's sound. You can of course be feeling in an inconsistent way and that would be what people usually look down on feelers for, but it may not necessarily be the case; it could depend on how accurate or attuned your feeling is.

And the way feeling works is it's semantic rather than syntactic. You judge primarily by its pure holistic quality, not by relationship to other qualities. But ironically, a feeling can therefore contain syntax (relationship between parts) because you can feel the whole as a quality. If something is coherent, if there is consistency between the parts, you can feel it. That's how you can judge whether something is coherent with your values or not (without stating your values declaratively). You can simply feel whether there is coherence.

Perhaps there is also a feeling element to whether one logical conclusion follows from the premises declaratively. But then, the distinction between a feeler and a thinker is how often or how many connections you "feel" (again, declaratively).

Edited 1 hour ago by Carl-Richard

[Eskilon]

@Carl-Richard Interesting, because it made me think and feel

Do you think Buddha was an intuitive feeler or thinker? 🤔

Edited 22 hours ago by Eskilon

[Carl-Richard]

18 hours ago, Eskilon said:

@Carl-Richard Interesting, because it made me think and feel

There can't be syntax/structure without semantics/content, so there can't be logic without feeling

 

18 hours ago, Eskilon said:

Do you think Buddha was an intuitive feeler or thinker? 🤔

Perhaps a good mix. I don't divide people neatly into feelers and thinkers (I'm a statistician, ya know), but there are moments or cases where you have the thought "that's a feeler thing to say" or "that's a thinker thing to say". I was prompted to write this topic by watching how Sam Hyde describes why he started believing in God and stopped being an atheist (it struck me as very "feeler" like, and wouldn't you know it, people on Personality Database seem to agree, those in comments who provided arguments at least). You can also observe this on the forum. Notice how some people are prone to leaving statements "hanging" and then either proceeding to a new statement or simply refusing to elaborate at all.

I will add though that raising your "awareness" (or consciousness) is in a sense a semantic (and thus interestingly feminine) quality. It makes your experience more consistent, more holistic, more interconnected, more united, more One, a single whole, a single quality. Meanwhile, raising say your analytic ability (be it through increased working memory capacity or declarative pattern recognition ≈ IQ) is more syntactic (and also more masculine), concerned about structure, about dividing things up into parts and indeed analyzing them. So someone who is spiritually inclined in the mystical sense of being connected to awareness or presence would definitely be more connected to feeling, but I would say not necessarily in a way that closes them off from thinking.

The idea behind MBTI types is that you have certain "go-to" strategies (because you just go with what you're best at, or what works most of the time, or what you're the most used to, more often than the alternative), and therefore you would naturally be slanted either towards feeling or thinking. But you can definitely train either side quite substantially as well depending on your focus, and you can also be supremely gifted such that you're slanted to one side but your other side is also way above average. That could be the case for Buddha.

Edited 4 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Natasha Tori Maru]

Heh! Interesting... I often prompt chatGPT to scan actualized.org users post histories and profile their MBTI type based on content. Obviously this is VERY context driven and it gets it wrong, as users only express a small portion of information processing / decision making through text.

But I never thought to profile based on actual word selection.

[zurew]

1 hour ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

I often prompt chatGPT to scan actualized.org users post histories and profile their MBTI type based on content.

Oh shit.

[Natasha Tori Maru]

@zurew 😶‍🌫️

[Carl-Richard]

"Because" might be a good example but in general you want to look at the use of certain connective prepositions (e.g. thus, therefore, if, so, then). And the more (or less) connected (e.g. if->then->therefore) the better.

Edited 14 minutes ago by Carl-Richard