Personality Type: An Owner’s Manual (by Lenore Thomson) and Personality Hacker (by Joel Mark Witt and Antonia Dodge) are two books that use the concept of “cognitive functions” to explain differences between personalities and the varying challenges people may face depending on their personality type.
Cognitive functions
The cognitive functions are derived from the work of Carl Jung, who identified four psychological processes for making decisions and gaining new information and ideas:
- Feeling (for decision-making based on people’s values, needs and feelings)
- Thinking (for decision-making based on objective facts and logic)
- Sensation (information about what can be directly experienced)
- Intuition (information about what can’t be directly experienced, including meaning, theories and possibilities)
These four functions were later divided into two versions of each, one extraverted (focused on the external world in the present moment) and one introverted (focused on a person’s inner world, past experiences and expectations for the future). These eight cognitive functions are often abbreviated with an initial letter (F for feeling, T for thinking, S for Sensing and N for Intuition) followed by another letter indicating whether the function is extraverted or introverted (e for extraverted or i for introverted). So, for example, “Fe” refers to Extraverted Feeling and “Ni” refers to Introverted Intuition.
Everyone uses all of these functions. But people who follow Jung’s ideas about personality type believe that different people will have a different subset of functions which they prefer to use and are more confident with. That is, your cognitive functions can be sorted by how much you prefer to use them.
The relationship between cognitive functions and personality type
In this framework, everyone has one cognitive function they prefer most (the first or “dominant” function). For each possible dominant function, there are two possible cognitive functions that will complement it as the second or “auxiliary” function. Out of the dominant and auxiliary functions, one needs to be extraverted and one needs to be introverted. Also, one needs to be for decision-making and one needs to be for gaining new information and ideas.
Once the first two functions have been determined, the ordering of all the rest of the eight functions by preference and confidence is fixed. So with eight possible dominant functions, each with a choice of two possible auxiliary functions, there are sixteen possible personality types based on the cognitive functions. These sixteen types correspond directly to the sixteen four-letter codes given by the Myers-Briggs framework, such as ‘ESTP’ or ‘INFJ’. If you know the four-letter code, you can determine the order of the underlying cognitive functions, but the interpretation isn’t immediately obvious. This reference guide (on the Personality Hacker website) gives the order of the first four cognitive functions corresponding to each of the Myers-Briggs personality types.
Key advice from the two books
For personal growth, both books recommend working on our auxiliary function, to increase our skill and confidence with it, and to allow it to give better support to our dominant function. If we don’t do this, we can become unbalanced, either by focusing too much on the external world without taking time for reflection (if extraverted cognitive functions are used together without a complementary introverted function) or by focusing too much on our inner world and not being able to take action or relate to others effectively (if introverted functions are used together without a complementary extraverted function.
Also, both books describe the third and fourth cognitive functions in someone’s personality type as the weakest, and as a possible source of apparently out-of-character behaviour during times of stress. We need to use these two functions carefully (rather than suppress them) but avoid relying on them for decision-making or letting them take over.
Personality Hacker only discusses the influence of the first four cognitive functions on our personality, while Personality Type also talks about the role of the remaining four, including situations when they are helpful and situation when they can cause trouble for us.
Reflections
Many people are sceptical of the Myers-Briggs framework, describing it as unscientific or too binary and simplistic. I’m uncertain, but I tend to think that there isn’t currently enough evidence to think of the four-letter personality types as real categories. And the system of how cognitive functions are supposed to be ordered seems too neat to me: shouldn’t there be more possibilities than just the sixteen types?
Also, discussion of personality types and cognitive functions often contain a lot of jargon, and terms like ‘sensation’, ‘perceivers’ and ‘attitudes’ can be misleading, since these are words with general meanings that are, in some cases, quite different from the intended usage in the context of personality type. I think the terminology has had a real (and usually detrimental) impact on how many people interpret the ideas. And I’m wondering if my summary of the concepts in the previous sections is dry and dull.
However, despite my scepticism and doubts, I’ve found that thinking about cognitive functions has given me useful insights into many questions about personality, personal development and interpersonal relations, including:
- why is rational thinking so often ineffective at addressing procrastination and lack of motivation?
- why do some people seem highly empathetic most of the time but occasionally demonstrate a surprising lack of understanding of other people’s perspectives?
- why is it easier for some people to understand other people’s emotions than their own?
- how can people who find themselves naturally rebelling against rigid systems improve their productivity?
(I’m planning to discuss these and other questions in a separate post, or possibly several posts.)
There’s a saying, attributed to George Box and often discussed by statisticians, that “All models are wrong, but some are useful“. For me, cognitive functions (and personality types to some extent) form a useful model for thinking about differences in personality, decision-making, learning and idea generation, whether or not the model is actually true. (Although sometimes I worry whether I’m relying on this model a bit too much. Perhaps I should spend more time learning about mainstream psychological thinking on these topics and ideas from other cultures to give some alternative perspectives.)