Helen Fisher says that the Builder personality (think of the Myers-Briggs SJ) does not like it when you say “I guess that. . .” or “I suspect that…” because the Builder does not like people who are uncertain. I use those phrases proportionately more than any other blogger I read–or so I guess.
I have a running joke with my wife. I have solved global warming (that isn’t the joke. I could be wrong but I’m very serious about it) but I will only tell her if she asks me genuinely interested. It has been 2 years and counting. I fully expect that I will sell it to Peter Thiel before I tell my wife.
I guess this makes me ponder, I don’t think that “don’t like people who are uncertain” is quite right. They have anxiety over uncertainty I would suppose. So their mind squeezes it out if theit perception. But this could make them appreciate a division of labor with someone who can deal with uncertainty or add a sense of mystery and adventure. On the other hand there is a lot of mutual frustration.
I’m an NT married to an SJ. My wife is disturbed that I can’t answer “simple yes or no questions” – or answer other kinds of questions with certainty. At the same time she’s unhappy that I don’t talk more. She’s told me that I don’t have to wait until I’m certain about something to say something; I haven’t found that those instructions work very well, however.
They can spend hours talking about what they are absolutely going to be doing over the subsequent 10 minutes 😉
Does your SJ do the thing where she doesn’t believe something you say until she sees it in a magazine or news story?
She usually believes me; that’s not a problem.
Sure to not be helpful, but fun:
http://forums.intpcomplex.com/showthread.php?528-How-can-an-N-get-along-better-with-SJ
Okay, ya’ll are activating my MB OCD. The opposite of NT is SF. NP is the opposite of SJ.
Not necessarily. You can say is that N is the opposite of S. But once you try to bin 16 types into 4, the divisions don’t have to be ordinally precise.
Myers-Briggs type dynamics recognizes interactions between the dimensions based on what the dimensions’ values are. The breakdown Fisher uses (SP, SJ, NT, NF) makes sense because the N is largely driven by what they intuit inside, that is, their T/F preference, while the S is largely driven by interactions with the world, that is, their P/J preference.
The biggest challenge is that the academic institution for which I work is ruled (ever more and more) by SJs who seek to inflict their idea of order on everyone else.