#not gonna lie the main reason i chose this guy over all the other intp candidates is that he reminds me one hell of a lot of my dad

[notanotherinfjblog]

How to spot an INTP

A few years ago, I made a post about how the cognitive functions manifest in our behaviour and now I’m going to expand on that and give a more detailed, visually accompanied overview for each type, now for the INTP.

For the purpose of this guide, I took a look at this interview with Harald Lesch, a German astrophysicist, natural philosopher and science journalist. You can find the links to other type spotting guides below which I will update over time when new guides are being added.

The dominant and the auxiliary cognitive functions that people use are those that are the ones that are really noticeable in the quality of their gaze, in their speech style, in their facial expressions, and their whole general demeanour, and so these are the ones that I will be focussing on here. In case of an INTP, these are Ti and Ne. Due to this combination, INTPs spend a lot of time inside their own mind and that’s visible in their faces. If you compare the gaze of an INTP to that of an ISTP that shares their dominant Ti, the difference between them is blatantly staring you in the face because the INTP’s gaze completely lacks any intensity whatsoever that the ISTP (and any other person with Ni/Se) does possess. INTPs can look at something directly and yet it never seems like they are really taking in all the visual information. It’s like their mind is screaming so loudly that it’s drowning out any external information that might enter their brain.

When they laugh, they laugh for themselves, not to accommodate other people. Many times, INTPs laugh about what they are about to say, but when they are saying the funny thing afterwards, they usually do so calmly without laughter in their voice. INTPs are in general not designed to accommodate other people, they are not designed to go out of their way to be polite and friendly. They can absolutely be so, but that’s a conscious choice, not something that happens naturally as it does for the other types with higher Fe. If you watch the interview, you will find that Harald Lesch spends the entire almost 20 minutes just sitting there on his chair with his arms crossed for the entire time, with occasional disruptions of gesticulations with no regard to how that might come across. INTPs are not socially inept though and they usually do know what is appropriate in a situation and what isn’t, but first and foremost, they are existing for themselves, unrelated to those around them. They are their own entity. 

When it comes to talking, INTPs have two modes: 1) their gaze is directed at some point in the air, but their eyes are slightly shifting from left to right, from right to left, like the external gearwheels of their mind, and you can bet there will be a perpendicular line on their forehead between their eyes as they are frowning at their own thoughts, or 2) they are looking at their conversation partner directly, often with big eyes under raised eyebrows as to highlight the point they are making. And they will switch between these two modes constantly, though the first one appears to be the default. INTPs may lack the grand and open body language of other types and like to keep it minimalistic, so they mainly use their head for this purpose, and I mean that in the most literal sense possible: their head moves around a lot, may it be for emphasis, for (un)certainty on a matter, anything.

Regarding their speech style, INTPs share the same tendency that all intuitives are prone to, which is really long sentences. They squeeze in a lot of subordinate clauses all over the place, and when they finally finish a sentence while monologuing, the next sentence is following so quickly after with not a single millisecond wasted for irrelevant things like breathing, it seems like they are actually producing one single sentence that is going on and on and on forever. But I would like to highlight that what they are saying is (with a few exceptions of aborted subordinate clauses they first wanted to squeeze in) all grammatically correct. This becomes noteworthy when you compare them to the NJs who are many times incapable of that. A little excerpt from the interview on climate change and policies with Harald Lesch (translated from German) demonstrating these everlasting sentences:

“It must be done. It’s a bit like, you are told, the tooth back there, we actually should do something about it, and then you don’t go to the dentist and you still don’t go to the dentist and at some point it starts to hurt and then you may try some highly spiritual drinks such as a cognac, fiddle there, rinse it a bit back there and at some point in the end you need to go and then it needs to be pulled and currently I have the feeling, we’ve had the diagnosis for a long time concerning the wisdom tooth, but wisdom’s last resort, eventually, is climate protection and gradually, uh, the number of people who understand that keeps growing, but it could be that nature won’t play along, which means that our conception of time, how we deal with decisions - we are poring over and over and so on - these conceptions are wrong because we cannot bargain with nature and nature has its own time scales according to which it reacts and the more strongly we change nature, the more strongly and the faster these changes will fall back on us. [...] And at this point you just really need to say this, you need to, uh, that children go on the streets here on Fridays [Friday’s for future], uh, that is actually a scandal, namely that one that we are not joining them, that not all of us are on the streets.”

Occasionally, INTPs can fall into a speech style that the Ne-doms ENFP and ENTP are notorious for, which is almost stutter-like as they repeat either the same word or the beginning of a word several times over and over very quickly before moving on with the sentence. Something that INTPs also like to do is start talking about something, omit the main part and jump right to the conclusion, so that they get confused when nobody can follow because they know the middle part, they just forgot to say it out loud. 

Other How to spot type XY guides so far: INFJ, ENFJ, ESFJ, ISFP

#not gonna lie the main reason i chose this guy over all the other intp candidates is that he reminds me one hell of a lot of my dad #also this is a very good interview on climate policies so if you speak german please watch it #mbti #mbti typing #intp #how to spot #how to spot an intp #cognitive functions #ti #ne #high ti #high ne #introverted thinking #extroverted intuition #intp appearance #while writing down the speech paragraph i realised that that one mandatory book we had to read in german class must've been by an ntp #because that guy wrote a novel - a classic! - that consisted of like 10 sentences #i'm exaggerating but his sentences could span almost two pages and there were exactly three people in that class that didn't hate it #and that was me that entp girl and our infj teacher while the rest of the class was full of rage because of this writing style #man that was almost a decade ago i'm getting old and i'm sorry for the ramble that's what happens when you write a post at 4am #typing post #visual typing