Misplaced and/or Misdirected Cognitive Function Series | MBTI Listings

Introverted Thinking

The following are only a few of the ways in which the Introverted Thinking (Ti) function of a person is misplaced and/or misdirected:

– Crippling perfectionism; having high standards and aiming to be and do well with them can be great as long as it’s not paralyzing and keeping from making the necessary ‘mistakes’ to change and improve where it’s needed.
– Senseless fault-finding and nit-picking; focusing too much on what is wrong and losing sight of what is right (or highlighting what is wrong for no good reason and more often than necessary) can be both harmful and stagnating.
– Endless questioning; questioning is important and recommendable to find and create solid foundations and constructs, but if it keeps going incessantly, it can needlessly break or impair the solidity of things.
– Endless hypothesizing; hypothesizing is important and recommendable to come up with new ways to look at things and fill the gaps, but if it keeps going incessantly, it can leave no room for the facts and how things are truly like.
– Destructive and unproductive battle of wits; intellectual conflict may form doorways to exploration and clarifications, but if there’s too much emphasis on proving one’s intellectual superiority and another’s intellectual inferiority, many opportunities to learn will be lost.
– Insensitive and disrespectful prodding; it’s one thing to take interest in another person and participate in light teasing to get them to open up about matters, and it’s another to be pervasively insistent on getting someone to share about themselves (by pushing buttons and more) when they don’t want, need nor have to.
– Dismantling and reducing to bare minimum; in exaggerated efforts to be “detached” and “impartial,” stripping objects and subjects to the point where they lose their meaning and significance.
– Overvaluing intelligence and logic; believing intelligence and logic (in self and in others) are all that count and having little to no patience or appreciation for anything else not only lacks compassion – but also leads to a distorted and incomplete worldview.
– Severe distrust and negativity; not that being happy-go-lucky is always that much better, but many worthwhile people and experiences can be missed (or even tainted) if there’s a strong predisposition to think the worst of them.
– Projection; assuming they understand others when, in reality, they’re only attributing their own motives and intentions to others.