TYPING YOURSELF (3): FORGET THE FUNCTIONS

In case you don’t know yet, the famous e-i-e-i/i-e-i-e “function stacks” that everybody takes for granted (Socionics’ included) are wrong: they go against what Jung actually discovered and, whenever people try to prove them, the numbers just don’t fit.

In reality there’s no such thing as “the Myers-Briggs functions”. A lot of people seem to think that the function stack is synonymous with the “MBTI system” or the “official MBTI”. Well, it’s not. The official MBTI is the letters (or dichotomies), not the functions. The typology indicator has always been about identifying where someone stands in the four psychological dichotomies: extraversion/introversion (E/I), sensation/intuition (S/N), thinking/feeling (T/F), and judging/perceiving (J/P). The official tools and tests work with that, and the statistics match with that, too. If the stack seems “logical” or “useful”, and people seem to “relate” to it, that’s mostly because the letter combinations that go with each presumed “function” (NP for “Ne”, SP for “Se”, etc) are actually good at capturing certain traits, not because the functions have been figured out (they haven’t).

The idea of which functions are behind which letters is essentially ornamental. It started that way with Isabel Briggs Myers: her indicator didn’t measure the functions, it measured the dichotomies. The functions were only supposed to be there, somewhere. So, yes, a “function stack” was already in Myers’ work, and it was already wrong: she said that IP types had judging dominants, and IJ types had perceiving dominants. That doesn’t make sense, but it stayed that way. My guess is that Myers knew she was an introverted feeler (Fi1), but considered herself “a perceiver” because she wasn’t orderly enough around the house or whatever, so she designed the test to reflect that. During the first years of the MBTI [some] IPs were typed as IJs, and vice versa. Then, somewhere along the road, the test was fixed, but the stack remained the same. Other “serious typologists” made several variations of it, but the ones that got popular were equally mistaken.

These are some of the reasons why the eiei/ieie “function stacks” are wrong, and why using those “functions” is absolutely unreliable for typing:

✸ 1) If you read what Jung wrote about psychological types, and then compare that with modern type descriptions and correctly typed people, you find that IFJs are the true introverted feelers (= Fi1), ITJs are the true introverted thinkers (= Ti1), ISPs are the true introverted sensors (= Si1), and INPs are the true introverted intuitives (= Ni1). All the famous “stacks” distorted that, so the original concepts of the functions got distorted, too.

✸ 2) As Jung said, our auxiliary function is always in the same attitude (E/I) as our dominant. It needs to be that way, that’s why he always talks about the attitude of consciousness (and the compensatory attitude of the unconscious), not the “attitudeS”. The stacks don’t reflect this, but instead make a mess with the directions, so they don’t reflect how our mind works, either, and assume we all have some kind of crazy consciousness that’s both introverted and extraverted. (See also the link in point 8) (page 17).

✸ 3) All those things make the stacks’ concept of “dominant” entirely inconsistent: it marks the dominant for the extraverts, yes, but for the introverts that “dominant” is actually their auxiliary. Using those function stacks is like working with chemical formulas where the letter “C” stands for “Carbon” 50% of the time, and for “Helium” the other 50%.

✸ 4) What the stacks call “auxiliary” is actually a shadow function for the extraverts, and a different shadow function for the introverts. So, in the end, the stacks only indicate one thing “correctly”: the extraverted dominants. If we multiply and count the errors, the stacks get only 8 out of 32 conscious functions right (or 16 out of 64 total functions), that is: 25% of them.

✸ 5) The official MBTI statistics never put the types with the same stack-functions together at one end of a given trait, and the opposite ones at the other end. For example: they never put ISFJs and ENTPs together (which supposedly share all their “functions”) at one end, and ISFPs and ENTJs (which supposedly share all their “functions”, too) at the other. They do put ISFJs and ISFPs together all the time, and they put ENTJs and ENTPs together all the time. This happens with all the J/P pairs.

✸ 6) The “function tests” don’t work, either. Even if their descriptions of the functions are based on traits that correlate with combinations of letters, people tend to get strange results that don’t fit with any known “stack”. For example: they usually get high percentages of both the introverted and the extraverted attitude of the same general “function” (high Ne and high Ni, high Te and high Ti, etc).

✸ 7) Back in 1989 McCrae & Costa said it was better to separate the MBTI from Jung’s functions, because the statistics are reliable only when it comes to the letters (dichotomies). They essentially said what has been explained in the previous points: the “function stacks” that everybody keeps repeating don’t match with Jung’s work.

✸ 8) The official MBTI folks themselves have written against the use of the functions, for example in The Case Against Type Dynamics (“type dynamics” is an expression that refers to the “function stack”). They call them a “category mistake”, stating that the use of the functions “provides an incomplete account of type phenomena” and “does not account for the empirical facts”, among other reasons.

So, if you really want to type yourself correctly, you need to forget about the famous “functions”. There’s no use in something so arbitrary, confusing and inconsistent when you already have the tried and true. Whenever I talk about the real functions in detail the context is totally different: the content is not to be taken as anything more than attempts at describing some very difficult subjects, and not to be used for typing anyone, of course. Perhaps some day it might be helpful, somehow, but in the meantime, if you ask me about typing, I send you to this series. (Edit: now it’s 2 years later and I’ve been posting for a while about using the real cognitive functions for typing, too).



Out there the eiei/ieie “functions” are always being promoted as something “advanced” and “cool”, but in reality they are just a magnifying source of misinformation and mistypes. In fact, some people take them as a tool to make typing unnecessarily complicated and “obscure”, twisting everything that could be understood as a simple concept and turning it into differential quantum mechanics. These people end up being among the most unhelpful and harmful to those they are supposedly trying to assist. Now you may ask: if the known functions are so wrong, how come there are so many blogs and things about them? Well, just think about it this way: how many books and blogs and channels and “professionals” and business are there about astrology, cartomancy and other forms of “prediction”? How many spam accounts, how many [online] scams, how many shining lotteries and casinos? Yes, that’s right. Are they going to dissappear any time soon? No way. Does that mean they are useful? Hahaha. Good point. But no, not for the “clients”.