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Am I an INTP or a weird ENTP

18303 Views 31 Replies 19 Participants Last post by  CrispyBacon
Hi guys,

I am new to personality cafe and have been trying to figure out my personality type. When I first took the test, five years ago, I came out as an INTP. After that first test I figured out how it worked and cannot take it reliably because I can answer to get whatever letters I want. There are several reasons for my doubt as to whether I am an INTP or an ENTP. First, I enjoy socializing and get a charge from it when I talk about ideas. No matter the group size if it has that content then I have fun. However, if it turns to small talk and short conversations are encouraged then I get drained very quickly and need to get out. At home I can get energized by playing chess online, reading, listening to music etc. But, after a certain point, I soon begin to get drained in those activities as well. I enjoy debating with people, but I often take a less adversarial position in it. I have the view that it should be for the benefit for both and serve to arrive at truth. In fact, I love playing devils advocate because it lets me think about various possibilities and lead me to making a decision on ideas that I have been mulling over in my solitude. I think this could partly be due to the fact that the test questions are not effective enough. It could also be that having 16 types is too arbitrary and even if 50 types are made it would still be too arbitrary. Not to mention the unnecessary complexity of adding more types and identifying the differences. So in the interest of pegging someone into a certain sandbox, would I be a weird ENTP or INTP?

Thanks for reading and I look forward to some thoughts on this.
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For me key difference between INTPs and ENTPs is that T and F are judging, disjointing functions. These functions strive to make the ideal judgement. So somebody who is Ti dominant like INTP or Fi dominant like INFP would spend more of their thinking process basically taking a model of something and pulling it mentally apart into different pieces and coming up with the perfect label, perfect descriptor for each piece. As such INTPs tend to be sensitive to puns as form of humor and they can take things very literally in conversation. I once met a guy who was relatively outgoing and social and it was like he was on border of INTP/ENTP spectrum so I could not decide how to class him. It was not until we spoke some and he started clarifying and taking things I say too literally as in "this thing here can mean only this and nothing else" that I thought to myself "that's definitely an INTP". I later observed him pause and kind of drift off for a few seconds when somebody was playing with words in conversation, like he didn't quite understand it.

Intuition to the contrary is a unifying function. It takes a lot of random pieces and tries to pull them together into a single model. ENTPs may be somewhat sensitive to puns also, but not to the same extent as INTPs and they are by far less much sensitive to word play. In conversation you might also see intuition dominants rapidly jumping from one subject to seemingly unrelated other. It is because their dominant and well-developed intuitive function has already formed connections from whatever the subject was to a couple dozen other subjects. To an INTP conversation with an ENTP will probably feel somewhat confusing, muddy, a run-on of a lot of things together. While the clarity in conversation that INTP needs will seem frustrating and unnecessary to an ENTP.
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...I loved integrating these into the overall picture of how we as humans respond to legal, social, or personal rules (follow them, don't follow them, change them).
this desire to integrate data, build models out of the pieces you learned about, is a characteristic of an N-dominant type (ENxP or INxJ)
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