The hidden gap in the way we see things.
MBTI Personality Map, Part II: A critique and visual exploration of the different ways we perceive the world.
How does this quote come across to you?
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." — Eleanor Roosevelt
Agree or disagree? I won't share my opinion yet, but we'll come back to it.
In this essay, we'll explore, map, and critique the second pair of personality traits in the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality model: "sensing" and "intuition."
No matter how you perceive the MBTI, I hope that mapping the underlying concepts visually helps you navigate the space between how you and others see the world a little more easily.
A tip for footnote readers: to condense this chapter-sized essay, I’ve moved a lot of context to the footnotes that are easier to navigate on substack than in the email.
Let's set the stage with a brief recap of what we’ve mapped so far:
One experience — two worlds of interpretation.
In the last essay, we mapped what MBTI refers to as "thinking" and "feeling." Carl Jung, whose ideas the MBTI builds on, defined these as distinct "judgment" functions: mental tools for interpreting the near-infinite amount of information endlessly playing out in the theater of our minds:
Feeling sorts and prioritizes what we see by the subjective relationship to our personal values and social group.
Thinking ranks and orders things using impersonal and abstract conceptual patterns — mental models, information, systems, etc.
We employ both functions to make sense of things, but the resulting patterns might as well be from different worlds:
Depending on our nature and nurture, Jung observes that we develop a personal preference for using feeling or thinking — a "feeling type" or "thinking type."1
The differences between these types make near-universal common sense, echo across history, and have parallels in modern science. But, the categorical and individualistic format MBTI packages Jung's theories within comes with a chance of adverse side effects. For instance, we might interpret the words “feeling” or “thinking” in our type quite differently than what’s meant by them.2
In our last essay, we explored an alternative, sketching thinking and feeling as two ways to map the world of our experience — not as personality types.
Here’s where we left our map:
Our relational map helps us trace the subtle social and interpersonal factors in play.
Our conceptual map helps us navigate the underlying concepts in play — the systems, equations, beliefs, and other abstractions.
Now, onto our topic for today:
A hidden difference in our perception.
Before we interpret what we find in our minds, we must perceive something. That's obvious enough.
But when was the last time you thought about how you perceive things?
The origin of our perception isn't something we tend to think about — perhaps we've never thought about it. And fair enough: we're busy enough spending our mental energy working out what to do with what we find in our minds to question how they got there.
But here's the rub: we seem to perceive our experiences as differently as we interpret them.
Assuming a shared frame of reference with our partner, professor, or coworker results in dizzying confusion about where they’re coming from leaving us to decipher:
Are they missing the forest for the trees? Or is their head stuck up in the clouds?
What game are they up to? Are we just too dumb to get it?
Developing the skill to spot differences in our perception adds a second dimension to our ability to navigate ourselves and others.
The MBTI's answer to differences in perception.
The MBTI's model of personality includes the two functions Carl Jung used to describe how we perceive things:
Sensing takes in our experience directly through our senses.
Intuition perceives what might be in play but isn't apparent.
We employ both perception functions, but not at the same time, and have little control over which we’re using— they appear in our minds as a given.
Sensing tunes us into what's observable.
If sensing is our primary lens for the world (a "sensing type"), we naturally see things more practically and realistically:
"When people prefer sensing, they are so interested in the actuality around them that they have little attention to spare for ideas coming faintly out of nowhere." — Gifts Differing.3
At work, we gravitate towards observable, measurable tasks, enjoy the practical reality of things, and prefer more concrete feedback. "What works" is our main concern, and we're motivated to keep it working, whether it's maintaining relationships, our health, code, or reputation.
A sure sign that we're using our sensing perception is when we're more comfortable forming an opinion when things are predictable — we've seen examples, there are tried and true techniques, trustworthy sources — ambiguity is low.
Intuition tunes us to what we can’t observe.
Intuition4 is the opposite function and perceives things that our conscious sensation overlooks.
When intuition becomes our primary lens for perceiving the world (an "intuitive type"), we'll be inclined to take imaginative leaps and speculate between the lines instead of seeing things at face value.
"Those people who prefer intuition are so engrossed in pursuing the possibilities it presents that they seldom look very intently at the actualities.” - Gifts Differing.
At work, intuitive types enjoy speculating about what might be more than giving attention to what already is. Intuition focuses us on new ideas, potential outcomes, and underlying motivations.
Rather than relying on facts or induction, our intuition forms an "impressionistic" snapshot of the whole of things all at once: we might get an instant perception of a movie, person, or situation; but the details remain fuzzy if they’re present at all.
A sure tell that we're using intuitive perception is that it's difficult to explain how we arrived at a view, yet it's as apparent as if we'd seen it with our own eyes.
A problem with MBTI's framing of sensing & intuition
Let's revisit the opening quote:
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." — Eleanor Roosevelt.
I can't make up my mind if this quote is more ridiculous or unkind. But, it's an excellent example of the modern tendency to equate an affinity for theoretical ideas with intelligence — even greatness — while labeling people who care more for the practical reality of people and events as "average" or "small" minded.
Our culture idolizes inventors, prophetic voices, and galaxy-brained gurus of all kinds — we're as fascinated by what’s new as we're bored with what's already worked out.
Which would you rather be? A "sensor" which sounds like a part of a machine or "intuitive" which sounds creative and mysterious?
Of course, Myers, Briggs, and Jung didn't intend for being an "intuitive" or any other function to become status signals. But here again the limitations of using the forms of science — psychometric tests resulting in prescriptive categorical results — lead to mass misuse. As a result, millions of people slap on any personality label that enhances their status like bumper stickers on cars or hashtags on their Instagram profiles.
A Visual Map of Sensing & Intuition.
If we view personality a bit less as a science and more as an art, we can avoid the pitfalls of over-identifying with types or traits. So, let's upgrade our Map of the MBTI by adding a second horizontal dimension: Order and Chaos.
Sensing is how we detect the order of things.
Order contains all the possibilities we’ve discovered and connected into reliable patterns that "just work.” Whether we’re mapping a relationship, our physical health, or our business we don’t tend to notice the order in our lives until it breaks.
Relational Order: We use what the MBTI describes as sensing and feeling to mentally map the relational order we feel around and within us.
Relational patterns can be hard to spot because they’re implicit and felt rather than articulated. They’re subtle when followed — embarrassingly obvious when violated.
We detect relational patterns more through mimicry than logic. From infancy, we absorb our ingroup’s shared values, traditions, jargon, norms, status signals, and other patterns that bind us together. And we define ourselves primarily in relation to others. Every established group performs and relies on these social patterns whether we articulate them or not. No one is immune, only more or less aware.
But, the better our mental map of the relational order around us, the better our chances of fitting in, finding (just enough) individual uniqueness, and socially performing in an admirable — or at least appropriate — manner.
Conceptual Order: We use MBTI’s sensing and thinking functions to map the underlying concepts that govern our lived experience in the modern world.
Our map’s conceptual order is like an invisible operating system forged from intricate patterns of information, rules, and technologies that stabilize and empower everything we experience above.
Conceptual patterns are abstractions from our lived experience, making them impersonal by definition. So if we’re navigating our conceptual map of a situation while our partner is navigating their relational map of it, we’ll come across as coldly unempathetic no matter how technically correct our assessment.
Intuition is how we find new patterns in chaos.
Because sensing tunes into the current order of things, it's easy to recognize in ourselves and others. Order isn't mysterious; it's useful.
But our second perceiving function — "intuition" — has a mysterious, even mystical feel. Where do the premonitions, eureka moments, and imaginative leaps come from? A muse? Meditative techniques? 5 Accordingly, it's more difficult to map, but here's an analogy I find helpful: intuition is when our perception "zooms out."
Let’s flip the Chaos Map on its side to illustrate the analogy:
The further our perception zooms out, the more connections we see across what seem to be entirely separate things from a lower vantage point. We see new kinds of possibilities at different levels:
Tree level: Zooming out a little may surface a new hypothesis or prompt us to try a new experience;
Forrest level: A bit more and we may uncover a new paradigm or potential spark of a social movement;
Galaxy level: Zooming out further still, we may encounter a new philosophical insight or prophetic vision.
We can map the space between chaos and order for anything: a project, team, culture, or ourselves. For example, here's a practical application for rescuing conversations when people are talking past each other: Mark the level of conversation you'd like to have.
Awareness of less-local and more universal patterns helps us navigate around disaster and towards opportunity in the long run. But soaring in the clouds of chaos comes at a cost: we risk ignoring critical details and losing touch with reality.6
Accordingly, we have different levels of risk tolerance for how high we trust our intuitive perception to climb — not unlike how one of us may feel dizzy and afraid on a 12-foot ladder while another enjoys leaping out of airplanes for sport.7 And of course our comfort level for taking leaps varies greatly depending on the situation and mental state we’re in.
Up Next: Map your optimal place within any group.
With the two dimensions we’ve mapped so far, it’s easy to locate the MBTI’s personality types on a map.8
But seeing Sensing, Intuition, Feeling, & Thinking as mental tools for mapping the patterns that already exist around us is a more accurate and useful view than attributing them to ourselves.
A map puts our context first, our position within it second, and helps us avoid taking our personality type too personally.
That said, now that we’ve plotted both dimensions of the map we have all the tools we need to locate where we play most naturally in any group: our Gravity Point.
In the next essay, I’ll share a step-by-step guide to locating your Gravity Point on your team, in a specific project, or within any group you’d like to navigate.
By "type," Jung means what's typical of us across all situations. He isn't suggesting we don’t use both functions more or less in various circumstances nor that “thinking” or “feeling” be used to fulfill our "useless desire to stick-on labels." Here’s one of several passages in Psychological Types where Jung disclaims labeling:
"My typology is far rather a critical apparatus serving to sort out and organize the welter of empirical material, but not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system… I would therefore recommend the reader who really wants to understand my book to immerse himself first of all in chapters II and V. He will gain more from them than from any typological terminology superficially picked up since this serves no other purpose than a totally useless desire to stick-on labels." — Carl Jung in the preface to Psychological Types.
Myers and Briggs also disclaim overly-prescriptive, reductive applications in their writings. Unfortunately, the format of MBTI encourages the opposite — and the medium is the message.
Preference != Aptitude. Thinking in maps can help clear up another misperception that comes with labels like "thinking" or "feeling" — that a feeling type is more emotional and a thinking type more logical or serious. That may sometimes be the case but overlooks that our preference for one tool over another doesn't indicate our skill in using or expressing them any more than being left or right-footed makes us a better or worse striker. Some people who prefer thinking can out-feel another who prefers feeling. And many people who prefer feeling can out-reason a "thinker" in a debate. Exceptional people are often more adept than most of us in multiple functions regardless of their preference.
Something to look out for: a well-develop feeling function is better able to moderate and channel emotions appropriately. Whereas for many thinking types, the emotional landscape is relatively foreign territory — it’s a space we prefer to avoid. When we’re less adept at navigating feelings we’ll have less of a handle on our emotions and express them more strongly and overtly than a situation warrants. So overexpressing emotion can be as sure an indicator that we’re a thinking type as under expressing them.
Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type by Isabel Briggs Myers and Peter B. Myers. If you’re curious or critical of the MBTI I highly recommend this easy, short read. As the origin of the models, it’s a better place to appreciate and critique the model from than the versions you'll find across the internet.
“Intuition” is often used synonymously with making a judgment based purely on feelings without dispassionate, logical deliberation. But it’s more useful to recognize intuition and feeling as distinct functions. We may have intuitions about relationships and abstract concepts alike.
Making judgments from feeling is a different thing and a rational process insofar as it’s reasonable. For instance, using our feelings to interpret a romantic gesture or determine the time and manner to breach bad news to our boss is as rational and appropriate as modeling how much weight a bridge can hold with mathematics or making a budget using a spreadsheet.
In Jung’s view, our subconscious mind constantly soaks in patterns without classifying, interpreting, or contextualizing them — a dreamlike stream of raw unassociated input flowing underneath whatever we’re actively paying attention to. He explains intuition partly as our subconscious resurfacing patterns found within this raw data that’s outside of our conscious thoughts which is why they seemingly appear out of nowhere.
So contrary to popular notions, developing stronger intuition isn't a matter of stabbing in the dark by free association, brainstorming, using “design thinking” techniques, following our heart, or channeling a muse. It's a perception function — an image that appears as a given before we have a chance to interpret what may explain everything or nothing.
Intuition exists in our psyche because existential threats and game-changing innovations alike can't be seen down in the weeds of how things are now or were before. Seeing what's coming around the corner requires leaving the safety of what we know and taking a broader, speculative, and riskier view. But if our ancestors didn’t have an intuition function we wouldn’t be here.
The cost of chaos. The higher our perception climbs, the harder it is to see the actuality of things. Too much chaos exploration leads to disconnection from the here and now. Eventually, we'll have difficulty discerning patterns that map to reality from ones that only exist in our imagination. There’s a fine line between a potentially world-changing idea and a conspiracy theory; the first iPhone and Theranos.
Further, the greater the height of our perspective, the greater the risk of a fall. For instance, we may waste our and others' time and energy chasing visions that don't amount to anything. Worse still, if we force our vague, chaotic notions into the order of things we may damage what’s already functioning well enough with nothing gained.
My (intuitive) hunch is that the degree to which we use intuition has at least as much to do with the comfort level we have for the risks that come along with it as it does with our genetics.
Here’s a sketch of where a few of MBTI’s personality types are generally located:
