Understanding The 16 Types of Personalities (MBTI)

Have you ever wonder what personality type you are and the other people that surround you? Here's the list of 16 types of Personality based on Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator:

Introverted
	INFJ	INFP	INTP	INTJ	ISFJ	ISFP	ISTP	ISTJ
Dominant	Ni	Fi	Ti	Ni	Si	Fi	Ti	Si
Auxiliary	Fe	Ne	Ne	Te	Fe	Se	Se	Te
Tertiary	Ti	Si	Si	Fi	Ti	Ni	Ni	Fi
Inferior	Se	Te	Fe	Se	Ne	Te	Fe	Ne
Extraverted
	ENFJ	ENFP	ENTP	ENTJ	ESFJ	ESFP	ESTP	ESTJ
Dominant	Fe	Ne	Ne	Te	Fe	Se	Se	Te
Auxiliary	Ni	Fi	Ti	Ni	Si	Fi	Ti	Si
Tertiary	Se	Te	Fe	Se	Ne	Te	Fe	Ne
Inferior	Ti	Si	Si	Fi	Ti	Ni	Ni	Fi

Of course I'm not telling you to go around and encourage people to take the MBTI tests and ask for their results just to get to know them. That'll be so creepy and we don't want your geek self to come out public yet in a way, right? So I'll not push you to become like that but rather just familiarize yourself with the Functions of the personality types. That is if you are into this kind of thing, coz yours truly is a weird person so.. well.. I don't know.. I find myself so amused with people. And getting to know how they acted that way, where are they coming from is really fascinating for me. Well that's for the people I care about the most of course, or those people I find really interesting that somehow they pierce through my heart without any notice. Yeah I'm that weird.

I have already mentioned the 8 cognitive functions under the categories of Perceiving and Judging. You might want to check that out coz I've explained the shortcut of how to distinguish the cognitive functions of a certain personality type. That would really save you a lot of time, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)- Cognitive Functions

And this time we'll try to understand more of the 16 personality types through their dominant functions.

Let's go through first the Perceiving Functions:

Introverted Intuition (Ni)
Personality types with the (Ni) as the dominant function like INFJ and INTJ are perceiving information coming from their most inner thoughts or subconscious minds.

Their Ni function is the one that's processing the information coming from their inferior functions that's why they have these "aha" moments once they finally figured out something. So when they are trying to solve problems it's like effortless for them to provide solutions. Also they tend to strongly stick with their own beliefs and knowledge that helped them to be decisive most of the time.

They kind of able to predict things to happen in the future by using this function. But it's most likely by relating to what's happening to them now and guessing what would happen next.

Extraverted Intuition (Ne)
ENFP & ENTP types who have (Ne) as their dominant function are perceiving information by interconnecting ideas, theories, possibilities from the outside world. By these information they have gathered they tend to use a creative approach to solve problems.

Introverted Sensing (Si)
ISFJ & ISTJ types who have the (Si) as their dominant function are gathering information from their personal past experiences. It's like recapping what a certain situation made them feel from way back and this becomes their reference if ever they get themselves into the same situation in the future.

Extraverted Sensing (Se)
ESFP & ESTP types who have this (Se)as their dominant function means they are perceiving information on the current situation, on what's happening to the current reality. Using the 5 senses to absorb the trends, the news around. We could say that they are very much aware of the now.

Now the Judging Functions:

Introverted Feeling (Fi)
My dominant function (INFP) and ISFP's is (Fi) and it means that we judge things through our introspective feelings. We see to it that whatever we decide on, it should not be defying our own values, philosophies, feelings about certain things.

Extraverted Feeling (Fe)
This judging function being dominant to ENFJ & ESFJ means that they look out for the feelings of others before making a decision. They seek for their perspectives and outlooks about specific things such as their values, philosophies or opinions.

Introverted Thinking (Ti)
INTP & ISTP having (Ti) as a dominant function means that they are making decisions by basing on their own objective perspective, opinion or own data. They have this strong belief in their own rational thoughts and argument on certain things. They kind of weigh their reasons through pros and cons of things before they do or decide on something.

Extraverted Thinking (Te)
ENTJ & ESTJ's dominant function (Te) deals with decision making through objective reasoning and facts based on reality (the external world). It's like judging through what was effective in solving certain problems, they stick somehow on a traditional way because it is something that's already proven. Basically just pragmatic.

These functions are so amazing and they are giving me thrills in dealing with people whose functions are becoming obvious through daily conversations. At first it is really vague but as you study more on these functions and how you interconnect them to reality is somehow really fascinating. It's like you know why they did things like that, or where they were coming from. For me, understanding people is very interesting and I feel like I'm able to connect more to people in a certain depth. And I like it, so INFP.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)- Cognitive Functions

So you might have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) free tests out there from 16 personalities dot com, personality junkie dot com, truity dot com websites and they show you your match from the 16 types of personalities. But do you really understood what these four letters are for? I bet not, coz you might be one of those people who were just forced to take the test for whatever reasons. So here's a very straight forward explanation for you all.

I will take my personality result as an example, the INFP.

If you are an INFP just like me, then it'll be easier for you to understand. Coz I'm biased and that I will make it easier for my fellow INFPs to understand this. So,

I- stands for Introversion
N- for Intuition
F- for Feeling
P- for Perceiving

I and P letters on these four letter typology serves huge indicators of your dominant and first extraverted functions respectively. These are the main key points in understanding your functions.

First, if you are INFP, you are a Perceiving type. Meaning, whenever you are making decisions you prefer to gather more information before settling to an answer.

Under Perceiving function are Sensing and Intuition. Sensing means you're gathering information through our 5 senses (seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing and touching). It means they are basing the information through facts and are very much objective. On the other hand, Intuition is more of a subjective type of information gathering. We're basing more on the feeling or instincts instead of logical reasoning or thinking.

P serves as our indicator in recognizing our 1st extraverted function, in the case of INFP, it would be (Ne) Extraverted Intuition. This means that when we gather information we consider the things around us like people, things, possibilities, theories (something that is out of our mind, which is the external or outer world).

1.
2.(Ne) Extraverted Intuition
3.
4

The cognitive function order in a specific personality type always is Introverted first followed by Extroverted and so on or this could be vice versa depending on your result's first letter indicator. That's how things worked and not the other way around.

In case you are wondering, why is it not indicated as the first function? Because the first cognitive function is always the dominant one. And in our case, I indicates the dominant one. Since we have eliminated the Intuition as our way of Perceiving, the only one function left is the Feeling under the Judging category. So our Dominant function is (Fi) Intorverted Feeling.

1.(Fi) Introverted Feeling
2.(Ne) Extraverted Intuition
3.
4.

(Fi) or Introverted Feeling is all about judging things based on our self values. Does it defy our moral values or does it support it?

So since we already distinguish our first 2 cognitive functions, what would be the third and fourth?

1.(Fi) Introverted Feeling
2.(Ne) Extraverted Intuition
3. (Si) Introverted Sensing
4. (Te) Extraverted Thinking

Since our dominant function is number 1, therefore our inferior function is at the 4th number and the exact opposite of our dominant function which is the (Te) Extraverted Thinking. This means for us INFPs the function that we cannot control or something that makes us miserable is being objective/logical when it comes to decision making because it literally contradicts our dominant function. This together with Ne somehow makes everything hard for us to be decisive. But in my case I'm trying to improve this inferior function just so I can be more peaceful with myself.

The third function on the other hand can also be distinguished easily as it is the opposite of our 2nd function. And that is (Si) Introverted Sensing which means when we make decisions we consider the information we have gathered through what we have experienced (touched/felt, seen, smelled, heard, tasted).

So basically that's it for us INFPs.

But to be fair to my readers, here's a brief general information about the functions. I'll leave this here for you to contemplate individually and probably you'll recognize more of yourself.

There are 2 paths were we categorize our cognitive functions: Perceiving and Judging
Perceiving is basically what I have told above and Judging is how you make decisions.

Perceiving	Judging
Intuition	Feeling
Sensing	Thinking

Based on Carl Jung, these perceiving and judging functions can be done in an extraverted or introverted preference. Which is why we have:

Perceiving		Judging
Introverted	Intuition	Introverted	Feeling
Extraverted		Extraverted
Introverted	Sensing	Introverted	Thinking
Extraverted		Extraverted

In short by code:

Perceiving	Judging
Ni	Fi
Ne	Fe
Si	Ti
Se	Te

That's it for now. I'll probably create a post wherein I'll explain more about these functions. Don't worry I won't be biased there anymore.