I don't understand, no sorry, I refuse to read about this because I think the concept of being an ExTP or xNTJ or xSxJ WAT. Come on, try a little harder to figure yourself out! I personally think that if you put an x anywhere in your type an are satisfied with your level of self-understanding then you are lazy xD
Well, first of all, it can be important to distinguish between
theoretical assertions and
factual assertions. Somebody might say they subscribe to a personality typology that
theorizes that people have opposing preferences on four scales and there's no middle while acknowledging, at the same time, that there's no respectable body of studies that purports to establish, as a
factual matter, that a person can't be in the middle. And somebody else might assert — as you seem to be doing — that, as a
factual matter, it's impossible to be in the middle with respect to one or more dimensions of personality.
Starting at the theoretical end, I never tire of pointing out that Jung himself said that more people were essentially in the middle on E/I than were significantly extraverted or introverted, and he also stressed that people of the same type varied considerably in terms of the strength (or, as he often characterized it, "one-sidedness") of their preferences. Myers likewise distinguished between people with mild and strong preferences, and allowed for the possibility of middleness on all four MBTI dimensions. So the "X" possibility goes all the way back to the MBTI's theoretical roots.
The official MBTI test is designed on the
operational assumption that people have four preferences, and assigns people a (tentative) type on each dimension. But that's a very different thing from saying that the MBTI theory says that it
isn't possible for someone to be in the middle on any dimension — and, in fact, the MBTI Manual specifically notes that someone with a score near the middle is someone who has essentially "split the vote" rather than offered much evidence of a preference. And the more recent "Step II" version of the MBTI has five subscales for each dimension, and it's possible to come out on the E side (for example) of some of them and the I side of the rest.
Myers believed that one or more of the dichotomies
might turn out to be bimodal — with, in effect, a more or less empty (if narrow) zone in the exact middle. But she never asserted that that theoretical possibility had been factually established by any respectable body of evidence, and the 1985 Manual (which she co-authored) acknowledged that the evidence for bimodality was sketchy at best.
And today, as I understand it, there's quite a lot of accumulated data that suggests that most or all of the MBTI dichotomies (and the Big Five dimensions they correlate with), rather than exhibiting a bimodal distribution, exhibit something along the lines of a normal distribution, with the majority of people in or not that far from the middle.
So... two questions for you:
- Are you under the impression that it's somehow been established, as a factual matter, that any of the MBTI dimensions is bimodal, and that it's impossible for someone to be in the middle? If so, can you point us to any sources?
- If, on the other hand, you don't think the impossibility of middleness has been factually established — and if you agree (as I hope you would) that the point of theories, generally speaking, is to account for the facts as well as possible — why would you want to theoretically exclude the X possibility, and why would you be inclined to tell anybody who types themselves as X on one of the MBTI dimensions that they're either being "lazy" (as you said) or just don't understand themselves?
I wouldn't necessarily assert that one is lazy, but I think there is a difference between typing yourself using the dichotomies and typing yourself using cognitive functions. Now I can completely see how one could fall in the middle on one or more of the dichotomies, but my misunderstanding comes the question, "why not use other methods of figuring out your type from there?" I think cognitive functions are more concrete, which leads me to believe that being in-between should be looked at first as a confusion and then speculated. There are many factors that could lead to an x:
