Category: typing process

Hey ♥ I have a question (but feel free not to answer it): do your ideas about the types of people you know in real life shift around as much as for celebrities on your Tumblr?

Um… sort of.

I think in real life, I don’t really go around typing everyone I know – it makes it difficult to sit and talk to someone if I’m trying to analyze them at the same time.  I sometimes get Si telling me immediately what type they are – even just walking around in a mall, say, I occasionally bump into random strangers who remind me of someone I’ve already typed.

For people I’m not really sure about, they often just stay not typed (since I don’t actually have to organize them into tags) until I figure it out later – or not.  Having to keep tagging people helps figure them out faster, I think, but it also means that the decisions I’m pushing myself into making about them are wrong a lot more often.

So sometimes real life people will influence my typing and sometimes the celebrities inform my typing of people I meet, but generally I make more changes to the site since I just have more people and more variation within type on here to juggle.

Not sure if this has been asked before but would you try and type someone if the video interview is subtitled in English?

Try is not the right word here – I would try (I have tried and sometimes even succeeded), but it is much better for my sanity and time management (hah!) if I tell you not to ask me.

The problem with typing people in other languages isn’t necessarily the language itself, but the missing context.  If I’m watching, say, a K-drama, I’ll start typing characters because there’s story and interaction and I can get the jist of type from how people relate to each other.  Probably if I were watching a subbed reality show with a “story arc” (e.g. Bachelor or Survivor), I could pick up types, but I am extremely resistant to watching reality tv at all, so good luck with that.  If I’m watching a political interview where I don’t understand the cultural and political history and I’ve never watched the interviewer before, etc., it’s like watching aliens.  I spend a lot of time wondering if what that thing means to me also means the same thing to them.  Am I judging them by Fi – my personal bias (yes), or by Si – my objective understanding of MBTI (no, and this is basically impossible without a lot of trial and error to establish patterns because I don’t have enough understanding of what is MBTI and what is culture or person-specific).

To be honest, every new group I start typing is like this at first (actors, writers, scientists, rappers, athletes, people from other countries or ethnicities etc.), but at least we have language and some shared cultural cues in common.  It makes it easier to check into them a little, find their peers and also find out what other people think of them and so on.  It also makes it a little easier to guess at why life experience has shaped one particular group of people a little differently from others of their type.

Anyway, I could probably type people from subbed interviews (and in fact, if English isn’t the person’s first language, I do check out subbed interviews to see how they interact in their own language), but I don’t have the time and energy to pick out the social undercurrents of people whose language I don’t speak or read so no, please don’t ask.

I remember reading in one of your INFJ posts saying that you can usually tell someone is an INFJ because of a specific voice pattern that they have. Are there any other quirks that you find in other MBTI types that help you sort someone?

Yes – how about all voices, not just INFJ ones?  I might be more susceptible to voices (or to noticing them), but just about anything about a person can fall into a type pattern.

My brain kind of freezes in terror when I try to think about how to answer you, though; sensory patterns are kind of central to the way I type, but it’s a mass of pretty disorganized information to me (think poorly edited, semi-subconcious unreliable wikipedia – I am not a linear thinker by any means).  The patterns don’t really stick with me all that well (people, sometimes, but not patterns)- I just recognize them when I see them again.

I’ve recently tried to nudge at the edges of this by noting when people remind me of someone else – I hope that will be helpful.

Could you go over again/redirect me to your discussion about the different body languages and manners in which different types speak? or maybe post it on your livejournal? I am so fascinated by it. Nearly every time I meet someone new, I think “she/he reminds me of so-and-so.” I was reading your comment earlier about how we often are reminded of others of the same type because of these mannerisms, which I had never thought of before.

This is… not a post I have made, I don’t think, although I’ve talked about it a non-specific way often enough.  I’ve been trying to figure out how to organize that information into words for a while, but it’s actually a huge question – the vast majority of people I type are done this way.  Once I figure out one person I can usually find a bunch more who they remind me of

I mean there are a lot of ways people remind me of each other that aren’t MBTI related, but you can take pretty much any aspect of a person and run into a couple of patterns shared across type.

Discuss on LJ

Is there a particular function(s) that make it easier to type people by comparison/analysis? Or is it just practice? I can tell the difference between introvert/extrovert body language, but otherwise, many people of different types seem similar to me. Thank you! :-)

I was trying to figure out this morning… I think I took an MBTI test for the first time in 2005, but I didn’t start trying to type anyone until the next year.  That is 9 actual years of failing at this for the most part while I figured out what I was doing.  I’ve also spent a while typing by committee (dragged the INFJ, INTJ and ENFJ sisters into it, also for 9 years) because my area of people I knew and understood well was limited.

All that to say: if you can tell the difference between introverts and extraverts, that is pretty good.  I am still having problems with this in S-types, sometimes.

As for functions… I’ve always kind of thought Si doms would be excellent at typing people, if they were into doing so.  My ISFJ mom is obnoxiously accurate in her judgments of people such that I can practically type people by how she feels about them.  I see that in JK Rowling when I read Harry Potter as well.  It isn’t how I’d think of people, but it is consistent.

I don’t think that it’s really one function, though, to be honest.  I use all of mine while typing – Fi or Si are the instinctive ones, if I’ve already got a pattern in place to recognize.  If I don’t know, it’s Ne, considering possibilities and Te hashing out each letter.  The Ne is usually okay at spotting connections and at the “but why?” portion of understanding new things, but it’s terrible if I let it run amok.  That’s usually when I give up for the day.  Probably Te dom is better at typing than Te inf, but since I’m using it for letter vs. letter, I would miss when people are using functions strangely and appearing a different type.  I tend to run through my type tags later and let my Fi override anything I’ve come up with before, anyway (mostly accurately, often not).

I don’t know how the other four functions work for this, but I’m assuming well, since the other sisters are at least as good at this as I am.