Choosing the F option

[Cone]

Excuse my ignorance for a second.

Here's what I don't understand: why do people choose Feeling over Thinking on Socionics tests? Psychological texts tell us that people are decision-making machines that also have emotions thrown in there somewhere. Everyone thinks they are rational (or at least make semi-logical decisions). We either view a situation from a logical standpoint or an emotional standpoint (modern tests won't differentiate these in terms of T/F, so that's not the answer to my question.)

Take the two T/F questions from Hugo's Socionics Type Indicator:

Te: I am more attentive to the expenditure of resources and to the usefulness/appropriateness of something.

Fe: I am more attentive to people’s moods/emotions and emotional arousability.

Ti: I am more attentive to logical relationships between things. I create a system of rules, a system of ranking and organizing things. I make comparisons between things.

Fi: I am more attentive to emotional relationships between people. I am attentive to who likes who and who dislikes who. I am attentive to people’s needs. I am attentive to proper behavior.

Fe implies that there are actually people out there who submit themselves to reading emotional signals from other people. They throw themselves into situations where they can visibly see and manage these emotions. Their lives are nothing but people, people, and more people, as if nothing else existed. (This is what Fe descriptions sound like to me.)

Fi implies that there are people who sit around and think about people constantly. What others think about, how Joan and Bobby's relationship is progressing, what others like/dislike, what they need/want, what they think is right/wrong. They analyze people.

This is directed at all the self-proclaimed Feeling types out there. Do you really identify with one of those modes? Or is the Thinking option so not you that you choose the Feeling option just because it is less unlike you? Or do you interpret these questions differently than how I do?

[Slacker]

I really identify with Fi. Honestly. I promise.



I don't organize anything, anyone, anyhow. And I certainly don't create any systems of ranking and whatnot. ACK. *shudder*

I wish I were more attentive to expenditures of resources and usefulness/appropriateness of things but, uh, no I'm afraid not. At all.

[XoX]

What is wrong with people? They are extremely complex and dynamical biological machines that contain endless and endless new mysteries to be solved. Just might be the most complex system in the universe. Add to this the fact that your life and survival is pretty totally dependent on other people and your interactions with them and well...it makes a lot of sense to dedicate your time to study and interact with them. I mean...really...how is it that mystical if someone chooses to concentrate on people instead of say astronomy or mathematical formulas?

[Slacker]

And why do you think we think about other people and relationships *constantly*. That isn't possible. I have tons of things that I have to do, like it or not, that involve T every single day. I don't even mind all of it.

But I do think about relationships and people.

[snegledmaca]

I identify with Fe (When having to chose between Fe and that other thing).

Fe implies that there are actually people out there who submit themselves to reading emotional signals from other people.

I do not *submit* myself, I just do it. I naturally notice emotional arousability. It's like eyesight. And I naturally know how to handle those situations.

They throw themselves into situations where they can visibly see and manage these emotions. Their lives are nothing but people, people, and more people, as if nothing else existed. (This is what Fe descriptions sound like to me.)

Wrong assumption. Do you throw yourself into situations where you are required to use your hands just because you have them?

[Creepy-Diana]

.

[Cone]

I mean...really...how is it that mystical if someone chooses to concentrate on people instead of say astronomy or mathematical formulas?

Concentrating on people by your definition is a Thinking process. I do not think that Feeling types analyze people mainly for impersonal reasons.

And why do you think we think about other people and relationships *constantly*. That isn't possible. I have tons of things that I have to do, like it or not, that involve T every single day. I don't even mind all of it.

I didn't think it was possible. That's why I asked the question. But you can't expect me to just throw something out because I don't feel that it makes sense.

But I do think about relationships and people.

Well, I do too, and probably for the same reasons you do. In its isolated form, this sentence doesn't seem to define Fi at all.

They throw themselves into situations where they can visibly see and manage these emotions. Their lives are nothing but people, people, and more people, as if nothing else existed. (This is what Fe descriptions sound like to me.)

Wrong assumption. Do you throw yourself into situations where you are required to use your hands just because you have them?

Now you are defining Fe as a skill. I want to know how Fe is a lifestyle. Sure there are skills involved, but that is not the whole picture.

There are skills involved with every function, but they are not created within a vacuum. Skills are methods of adaptation to a specific environment. If it is not your skills which defines why you do things (as you have noted), then what does define what you do?

I initially thought that Feeling types deal within the world of people much more than Thinking types, because why else would someone possess good interpersonal skills? Thinking types have natural skills for organization and making cost-benefit calculations, because they often immerse themselves in scientific endeavours and often do something else which I have a difficult time describing. So logically, people-oriented skills are attached to people-oriented lifestyles. The only problem is, how people-oriented is a Feeling type? The answers that you people are giving me show that you're all almost equals to Thinking types in terms of focus on people.

So I am still confused as ever.

[Creepy-pokeball]

Title: Choosing the F option.

I guess we could lie, Cone. Next time I'll choose T for shits n giggles.

[XoX]

I mean...really...how is it that mystical if someone chooses to concentrate on people instead of say astronomy or mathematical formulas?

Concentrating on people by your definition is a Thinking process. I do not think that Feeling types analyze people mainly for impersonal reasons.

I'm not a feeler? I already thought I was But anyways my wife thinks the description is very much like her. Then again she also thinks is like her. Just that is something she has to do where is something she likes to do. I think is like a food she loves. She wants to eat it. is like a food that doesn't taste so good but sometimes you have to eat it when you are hungry and it is not THAT bad just worse than . Eating food too long without getting any food makes her frustrated and she doesn't enjoy life as much. She would want to eat only food on every meal but accepts that it is not possible. Something like that.

[snegledmaca]

They throw themselves into situations where they can visibly see and manage these emotions. Their lives are nothing but people, people, and more people, as if nothing else existed. (This is what Fe descriptions sound like to me.)

Wrong assumption. Do you throw yourself into situations where you are required to use your hands just because you have them?

Now you are defining Fe as a skill. I want to know how Fe is a lifestyle. Sure there are skills involved, but that is not the whole picture.

I see Fe more as a part of me (Hands analogy). I am skilful *with* Fe.

Also doesn't socionics describe Fe as "internal dynamics of objects". How is this limited to people?

There are skills involved with every function, but they are not created within a vacuum.

Well my Fe is similar to my bone structure. Without any outside influence I would've grown to such and such height but with outside influence I could've changed that but not by much.

Skills are methods of adaptation to a specific environment. If it is not your skills which defines why you do things (as you have noted), then what does define what you do?

Because I have hands I will be able to do things that birds for instance can't. Like shape stuff, throw stuff and so on. But why I do things is determined by who and what I am. I consciously decide to do things. It's not my hands that decide.

I initially thought that Feeling types deal within the world of people much more than Thinking types, because why else would someone possess good interpersonal skills?

Born that way???

Thinking types have natural skills for organization and making cost-benefit calculations, because they often immerse themselves in scientific endeavours and often do something else which I have a difficult time describing. So logically, people-oriented skills are attached to people-oriented lifestyles. The only problem is, how people-oriented is a Feeling type? The answers that you people are giving me show that you're all almost equals to Thinking types in terms of focus on people.

Well let me give you a glimpse of myself. I'm around 183 cm in height, black curly hair and am kinda skinny. Physically I'm nothing special, just your typical teenager.
With people I'm popular exactly because of my exceptional people skills and usually when I enter a room people give me ovations.
Now you might think that I myself as an F type, or more specifically a Fe type, would absolutely love that, that I would consciously try to get more and more of it, would be oriented towards that kind of life style.
But that is not who I am, that is not my personality.
I spend most of my time at home researching. I am fascinated with science or more specifically mathematics and physics.
Currently I will be attending college in a couple of weeks and it is an electro engineering and computer science college. I had a tough time picking between that and the mathematical college mathematics and mathematical college physics.
In my free time I play with mathematics and physics. I made my own numbers in mathematics (I can calculate a matrix raised to the power of another matrix. I'm pretty sure one day I will make a book on it. It's still young now) and have numerous theories in physics.
And also I sometimes play with philosophy. Even there I have come to some conclusions.

What I'm trying to say is that your personality is largely independent of your socionics preference. Just because you have Fe doesn't mean you will want to use it (If it is consciously under your control).

[meatburger]

Yeah i agree with every response. Ashton explained it perfectly in my view.

I also agree with XoX. We choose them because we know they are our strenghts. You naturally want to use your strength more in life. Whilst people with strong thinking functions are better at analysis etc people with strong feeling functions are indeed better at understanding and dealing with people.

When it comes to the amount of interaction with people the ESTp at work talks and interacts all day whilst im often quiet only contributing here and there.

So while you use your superior thinking functions to benefit society i use my charm and comedy.

Im not sure if this is correct but say that is your superior function. That is the window where the information goes through first. So some one says "what is 6+8?" and firstly i would go nope not going to help, hmm im taking a long time they are probablly thinking im dumb, ahh here it is the answer is 15(joking 14)

Now that example doesn't neccessarily mean that a Thinker would beat me in speed at working out the equation. They do have an advantage though. I would have to train my to ignore it and not get scared and train my to focus more. Where it can get interesting is if the question is more complicated 2*5(243). Maybe i might use my in unison with my and come up with a really cool way to answer it. Your likely to still kick my arse though

The other way round in my advantage would be, someone walks into the room who is depressed. Information hits my functions i almost instantly know what is going on while you take a little longer getting to the gist of the problem.

[schrödinger's cat]

Isn't the issue made worse by our societies' bias towards T stuff? No wonder all of us F people say things like "...but I use Te a lot too, of course". We have to, if we want to stay outside the loonybin. It would be interesting to hear what a person would say from a culture where F and not T is the approved basic skill.

How do we define "people stuff"? Even reading non-fiction can be "people stuff", in that I do it for people reasons - because I want to know stuff in order to understand people, or because a friend recommended this book and I want to know what she liked about it. Or simply because it's fascinating to discover all those cause-and-effect relationships in the real world. I want to learn about them as much as I can until I can feel my way into the underlying principles that govern things. That way I might be able to unleash the potential of every possible situation. Or something.

Or, if I read a thread on this forum where INTps and ENTjs and ENTps etc discuss some strictly non-people thing, I get the following information:

• (a) the logical bits - arguments pro and contra, logical reasoning, all that.
  (b) what the people are like, and what they probably felt when they wrote their posts, and sometimes even what they really wanted to say but didn't.

In some cases, I get (b) even when I can't see any (a).

Fi is like a filter that colours everything you see, not just the "people stuff". It's probably true the other way round. Perhaps a Ti dominant could think about people and relationships and feelings all the time without using a whit of Fi - perhaps he'd see it a relationship as an abstract system of checks and balances, or he'd analyze feelings according to the chemical substances that play a part in... well, that kind of stuff.

[discourse]

Fe implies that there are actually people out there who submit themselves to reading emotional signals from other people. They throw themselves into situations where they can visibly see and manage these emotions. Their lives are nothing but people, people, and more people, as if nothing else existed. (This is what Fe descriptions sound like to me.)

Stuff written in Estonian tells the same. By stuff I mean conspects of materials in socionics, which were made from diferent books in Russian. Functions read information and everything is information. Emotions too. And that's what types recive from the world the most strongly. Facial exprecions, hidden moods, intonation of speach. They can also create emotions: laughter, sadness, insult. So in one word is procedures related to emotions: to read them, to feel them, to show them.

By types I mean types who have this function as the 1st one. People who have as the secondary function are creative and their type is either type or type. So I am speaking of types who are either ESFj or ENFj. is their lifestile, for INFp and ISFp this function is the area for their creativity.

[Ave]

Excuse my ignorance for a second.

Here's what I don't understand: why do people choose Feeling over Thinking on Socionics tests? Psychological texts tell us that people are decision-making machines that also have emotions thrown in there somewhere. Everyone thinks they are rational (or at least make semi-logical decisions). We either view a situation from a logical standpoint or an emotional standpoint (modern tests won't differentiate these in terms of T/F, so that's not the answer to my question.)

Take the two T/F questions from Hugo's Socionics Type Indicator:

Te: I am more attentive to the expenditure of resources and to the usefulness/appropriateness of something.

Fe: I am more attentive to people’s moods/emotions and emotional arousability.

Ti: I am more attentive to logical relationships between things. I create a system of rules, a system of ranking and organizing things. I make comparisons between things.

Fi: I am more attentive to emotional relationships between people. I am attentive to who likes who and who dislikes who. I am attentive to people’s needs. I am attentive to proper behavior.

Fe implies that there are actually people out there who submit themselves to reading emotional signals from other people. They throw themselves into situations where they can visibly see and manage these emotions. Their lives are nothing but people, people, and more people, as if nothing else existed. (This is what Fe descriptions sound like to me.)

Fi implies that there are people who sit around and think about people constantly. What others think about, how Joan and Bobby's relationship is progressing, what others like/dislike, what they need/want, what they think is right/wrong. They analyze people.

This is directed at all the self-proclaimed Feeling types out there. Do you really identify with one of those modes? Or is the Thinking option so not you that you choose the Feeling option just because it is less unlike you? Or do you interpret these questions differently than how I do?

Let me tell you what its like for me. I think that question on Hugo's test really does describe me. When I discovered I was probably Fe and Not Te, I realized I had not done much research into the actual definitions behind these terms. You also added:

"Fe implies that there are actually people out there who submit themselves to reading emotional signals from other people. They throw themselves into situations where they can visibly see and manage these emotions. Their lives are nothing but people, people, and more people, as if nothing else existed. (This is what Fe descriptions sound like to me.)"

I think thats a bit a bit redcutionistic. Its not like I never use Te, for example. And I think people have to be careful when trying frame their perpespectives regarding people who use these functions. Notice I said "people who use these functions", not the functions themselves.

But I think that when I'm with people, I am constantly focused on reading emotional signals, even subtle ones. Its like I always know, exactly how people react to me. This doesnt mean that I spend all my time with people, or that I like people in general, or that I cant use Fe to read these same signals in art or music. But that does apply to me personally, if thats what you're asking, so if I had to choose between those definitions, Ill let you guess which one.

That doesnt sum me up as a person, though. Most funtion descriptions are reductionistic, so its always about choosing the one most like you, not the one that "is" you.

Mr. Cone, I could be wrong here, but do you think that maybe you are expecting too much from socionics to help you understand people?

[UDP]

I want to know how Fe is a lifestyle. Sure there are skills involved, but that is not the whole picture.

Ugh, man. Ugh.

I cannot imagine how ESFjs really do it. It seems so crazy. ....however, from a logical standpoint, I can 'understand' how they use , and why. Ethics and Emotion seem like a dichotomy of the same thing (I say this, as that is a secular conclusion, and not just because I saw it on Rick's Socionics site, so to say). I guess it is just 'decision making', or perhaps even interpretational decision making.

Maybe your curiosity is similar to my own, the one I sometimes feel about from ESFps ---- how could you live like that as a lifestyle. Maybe not.


PS: I kinda would also second Cherrio's question at the end of that post...

[Cone]

I want to know how Fe is a lifestyle. Sure there are skills involved, but that is not the whole picture.

Ugh, man. Ugh.

I cannot imagine how ESFjs really do it. It seems so crazy. ....however, from a logical standpoint, I can 'understand' how they use , and why. Ethics and Emotion seem like a dichotomy of the same thing (I say this, as that is a secular conclusion, and not just because I saw it on Rick's Socionics site, so to say). I guess it is just 'decision making', or perhaps even interpretational decision making.

Maybe your curiosity is similar to my own, the one I sometimes feel about from ESFps ---- how could you live like that as a lifestyle. Maybe not.

Yeah, that's sort of what I had in mind. Like, there really are people who adhere to lifestyles as extreme as what I had described in my first post, and to me, that's almost incomprehensible to my INTp-centered mind. So I was wondering if most Feeling types actually act that way. It seems the answer to that question is...varied and ambiguous. Whatever.

[implied]

Stuff written in Estonian tells the same. By stuff I mean conspects of materials in socionics, which were made from diferent books in Russian. Functions read information and everything is information. Emotions too. And that's what types recive from the world the most strongly. Facial exprecions, hidden moods, intonation of speach. They can also create emotions: laughter, sadness, insult. So in one word is procedures related to emotions: to read them, to feel them, to show them.

this seems like such a crock of shit because aren't ENTjs and ISTps very attuned to this sort of thing, too? lots of T types use body language as indicators of how far they should step or what they should do. i thought ISTps particularly were very attuned to body language which is why they can seem unfriendly/closed off, and why they don't necessarily need in your face emotions.

[science as magic]

Maybe your curiosity is similar to my own, the one I sometimes feel about from ESFps ---- how could you live like that as a lifestyle.

this is exactly the sort of thing that led me to replace my mindset with those of the stereotypical manifestations of other "types" (not necessarily socionics, a good example would be "outgoing" people). i highly recommend this if your goal is an understanding and appreciation for why another person does what they do.

[UDP]

Maybe your curiosity is similar to my own, the one I sometimes feel about from ESFps ---- how could you live like that as a lifestyle.

this is exactly the sort of thing that led me to replace my mindset with those of the stereotypical manifestations of other "types" (not necessarily socionics, a good example would be "outgoing" people). i highly recommend this if your goal is an understanding and appreciation for why another person does what they do.

I'm on it, Pedro. I sort of started it about 6 months ago, but not intentinally at all. Only very recently has it been more intentional, and it is definitely an experience that broadens horizons.

[meatburger]

(edited)

I mean, what about as a lifestyle? Ne is one of the strangest of the lot. I think its just a filter for the information to pass through.

[Rocky]

Maybe your curiosity is similar to my own, the one I sometimes feel about from ESFps ---- how could you live like that as a lifestyle.

this is exactly the sort of thing that led me to replace my mindset with those of the stereotypical manifestations of other "types" (not necessarily socionics, a good example would be "outgoing" people). i highly recommend this if your goal is an understanding and appreciation for why another person does what they do.

I'm on it, Pedro. I sort of started it about 6 months ago, but not intentinally at all. Only very recently has it been more intentional, and it is definitely an experience that broadens horizons.

UDP, it's called the















world. Recognize it, embrace it, love it, cherish it.

[UDP]

and what are you implying?

[Rocky]

Re-read what you wrote about not understanding Se, and then note what kind of symbols I used, and then read what the symbols spell. LOL.