# Extraverted Thinking



## Elaminopy (Jun 29, 2011)

*Extraverted Thinking: ESTJ and ENTJ Types*

Unlike the Perceiving functions, which encourage us to process sensory impressions as they occur, the Judgment functions are rational in operation. They prompt us to _organize_ our sense impressions--by focusing on the ones that happen regularly enough to recognize and predict.

Although rational thought is usually discussed as a left-brain phenomenon, Judgment operates in both hemispheres, just as Perception does. Left-brain reasoning is more apparent because it depends on language--concepts and signs that tell us what things are and how they relate to each other. Right-brain reasoning is experiential and immediate, inherent in the situations in which it's operating.

Te, the subject of this article, is a left-brain Judgment function. Like all left-brain functions, it gives us a conceptual, one-thing-at-a-time approach to life. It prompts us to notice sense impressions that are stable or occur regularly, so we can define them and focus on them as distinct objects and events.

Even the left-brain Perceiving functions, Si and Ni, work this way. They encourage an awareness of sense impressions as they happen, but we acquire them as facts and ideas, one at a time, in light of what matters to us. The difference between these latter functions and Extraverted Judgment is that Si and Ni are not rational.

In the inner Perceptual world, we need not organize acquired facts or determine their relationship to each other. It's in the outer world that the left brain requires predictability. Confronted with multiple objects in a sensory context, the left brain has to decide where to place its focus. To that end, it deploys Te or Fe.

These functions enable us to make our knowledge systematic, so we have a basis for concentrating our attention. Te is one way of creating this basis--an impersonal way. It prompts us to notice the qualities that objects have in common, and to use those shared aspects as a standard of sequential order. Whenever we Think, we're relying on such standards--to organize multiple objects and to establish logical relationships between them.

The process is as familiar as finding a name in a telephone directory. If we couldn't assume the logical relationship of each letter to others in the alphabet, we'd spend half our lives looking up a phone number. It's the same with celebrating a birthday. We're recognizing the logical position of a date in a calendar sequence of days and months.

Like all Extraverted functions, Te harmonizes us with general ideas about reality, so most of the standards of order we employ are collectively determined. Indeed, when collective Te standards are operating successfully, we take them pretty much for granted. We "know," for example, that letters run from A to Z, that numbers progress by tens, that a year has 365.24 days, that a day has twenty-four hours, that presidents have more power than vice presidents, that a high grade point average is better than a low one, and so forth.

It's natural to associate the capacity for reason with the conceptual systems we've learned to rely on. But this association can get in our way. Te is a universal skill, and it need not lead to the systems of order we define as rational.

*Of Logic and Letterman*

Given the requisite neurological equipment, all humans are inclined to organize sensory experience by impersonal standards of order. The ability develops early, long before acquired concepts hammer it into a specific social shape. As soon as a child is coordinated enough to be the direct cause of a maddening effect--say, the clang of a spoon dropped from a high chair a few thousand times in a row--Te is beginning to develop. The relationship between act and result is so utterly predictable that it suggests a fixed sequence of events--the idea that the same thing will occur with other kinds of objects.

This, properly speaking, is an exercise in logic--this discernment of a standard, or principle, that can be pried apart from its context and applied to a new set of objects. Long before we credit children with any capacity for scientific thought, they're determining the validity of the "dropped spoon" principle by setting up experiments--with a new vase in the parlor, for example, or an exceedingly tolerant cat. A great deal of our formative experience is devoted to cognitive exercises of this sort, by which we learn to distinguish logical predictability from so-called magical thinking.

The delight that accompanies successful experiments is not unlike the audience reaction to classic stunts on the David Letterman show, such as running over beer cans with a steamroller or pushing watermelons off the top of high buildings just to see what happens. Silly as they are, these routines are a nice illustration of the Te process.

When we Think in an Extraverted way, we're recognizing that certain principles of order are "always true." Letterman's routines are funny because they're gleefully subversive, but also because their outcome is never in doubt. The only thing in question is how satisfying a mess an object is going to make when tossed out a window.

This tells us something else about Te. Ultimately, the objects that illustrate our general principles are less important than the principles themselves. Even for a child, the spoon and the floor eventually lose their power to entertain. What's important is their _relationship_--the expectation we retain.

The entire house can blow away--utensils, high chair, kitchen, and all--but the relationship between the spoon and the floor endures, like a ghost in the mind. As we move from one context to another, a throng of such ghosts come with us, and we assess their possibilities for tangible embodiment.

One envisions the harried Letterman staff, week in and week out, locating ever novel material hosts for the same invisible idea--a bucket of chowder, a rotten pumpkin, a can of green paint. And one can see from the audience reaction how Te ultimately portends a community. The people who watch the show regularly enough are united by the common vocabulary of the routine. They laugh because they know what to expect, and their expectations are confirmed definitively and viscerally.

Our societal Te vocabulary is more subtle, of course, but it works a lot like this. The principles "we hold to be self-evident" aren't really. They're ghosts, too. They're self-evident only so long as we translate them into material form and recognize their effects. Te, in this respect, is not just a matter of acquiring a system and following the rules. It's an act of imagination. Left-brain imagination.

Right-brain imagination soars beyond the world as we know it. It issues in patterns untried by the fires of linear application. But left-brain imagination is always a compound of mind and matter. It has a kissing-cousin relationship to magic. It begins with an invisible intention and ends with material results.

When we Think, we're either extracting a logical relationship from its material context, turning it into a portable ghost, or we're translating our familiar ghosts into form in some new context. Either way, the process directly influences the structures we build, the aspects of reality that claim our attention, and the standards we count on for meaning and community.

*The Collective Aspect of Thinking*

Given the natural human ability to derive principles from predictable outward relationships, it should be clear that _every_ culture uses Te to establish structural expectations in its members. It doesn't matter whether a culture is literate, subscribes to the medical model, or keeps track of its finances. All humans make sense of their sensory experiences by relating them to principles they can count on.

Perhaps the quintessential illustration of the process is a prisoner, deprived of all other forms of identity and rational control, who scratches a crude calendar into the wall and charts the alternation of light and dark. Like the God of Genesis, he splits the inexorable tide of natural events into a sequence of predictable units, creating time and linear direction. Such things give us a way to manage what happens to us, to make plans, to establish routines, to know who we are with respect to our circumstances.

Even if a culture's ideas about the predictable are limited to the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, seasonal change, and distinctions of gender, the principles derived from these regularities ultimately shape a philosophy and portends an organized community. As far back as archaeology can reach, sexual icons, representing regular biological experience, have been used as an ideogrammatic vocabulary to celebrate the foundation of order in the cosmos.

The "truth" of Te, in this respect, is not its scientific accuracy but its rational utility. It doesn't matter that other cultures have conceptualized time, space, and seasonal progression differently than we do. Te can underlie theocratic stability as easily as it does technocratic change. The bottom line is that our Te principles are reliable enough to use as consensual benchmarks, thereby freeing us from the dictates of immediate experience.

*Freedom's Just Another Word...*

It may seem peculiar to describe principles as freeing one from immediate experience. From an Extraverted Perceiver's standpoint, freedom means the unfettered ability to _respond_ to immediate experience--the _absence_ of structure and expectation. For Judging types, however, it's the absence of rational structure that traps us, forcing us to respond to things as they happen, to forfeit plans and goals, to depend on the bounty of fate.

This view is well illustrated by the comment of an INTJ seminary student, who was irritated by a classroom discussion about the Pharisees. An ancient religious sect concerned with observing the law, the Pharisees are presented in the New Testament as foils for the Christian message--as self-righteous generalists, more interested in people's surface behaviors than their interior life. Most of the students were expanding on the classic interpretation, but the INTJ saw things differently.

The Pharisees, he said, were forerunners of today's micromanagers. They were interested in structural integrity. They were trying to shape a discipline certain enough to protect them from the clamor of the "ten thousand things." Without that kind of discipline, it's not even possible to develop an interior life.

Although the student's point reflects an Introverted Perceiver's understanding of Te, it says a great deal about the kind of approach the function promotes. For TJs, freedom isn't the opposite of management. Freedom is management so adept that external reality all but takes care of itself.

*Shifting Cultural Perspectives*

The ability to adhere to a general principle of order, particularly when immediate experience inclines us to do otherwise, has traditionally been understood as evidence of character and self-discipline. In fact, Te types consider most forms of principled behavior as signs of integrity and respect for others--arriving on time, keeping one's promises, following through, playing by the rules, fitting into one's roles, representing the chain of command. Thus, when an ETJ's dominant identity reflects the structural expectations a society takes for granted, we regard these types as arbiters of moral obligation. We seek their advice, their counsel, their mentorship, their guidance.

As I've pointed out in other articles, however, society has become increasingly oriented toward Perception, so that our ideas about Extraverted Judgment have changed over the last few generations. For one thing, we've become more aware of the biases enshrined in our impersonal principles.

Although standards of order are derived from observed qualities and behaviors, and hence are objective, they're also relative. For example, we can organize a rock collection in any number of ways--by size, by color, by age, by type, by name. Any of these qualities will determine an objectively logical system. But each will result in a different sequence of order, which may be said to "favor" a different kind of rock. Choosing one over another will always involve subjective considerations--our sense of what matters.

ETJs can lose sight of this. As Extraverts, they accept the principles of order that exists, and their concern is to apply them. An Se society, however, will be acutely aware of limited options. The idea arises that the principles in force must coincide with the subjective self-interest of the people who rely on them.

For this reason, the marriage of a Te type's dominant identity and traditional roles and institutions has come to look less like character and more like an attempt to maintain an accustomed power base. In one fell swoop, the ETJ can reduce an infinity of perceptual options to two: the way I do it or the wrong way.

One envisions media paradigms, two generations past, who reflect the strong association Te once had with benign, institutionalized (male) authority: the Walter Cronkite-type news anchor; the straight-arrow cops who wanted just "the facts, ma'am"; all those Eisenhower-era patriarchs who knew best, whether they presided over a suburban family or a cattle drive on the old frontier. Within a generation, they've evolved into the comically reasonable Dad on _The Brady Bunch_, lost without his watch and his shoe trees.

The movie remake of _Mission: Impossible_ has no qualms about turning Jim Phelps, the highly principled task force leader from the late sixties' TV series, into nothing more than a self-serving double agent. Even Dana Scully, the responsible ENTJ pathologist on _The X-Files_, is cast as an overly rational skeptic, clinging to her FBI handbook and the scientific paradigms that tell her what should and shouldn't be done.The word _Scully_ has passed directly into the pop lexicon as a verb that means to offer a conventionally logical explanation for an event that requires an open mind.

*How Te Really Works*

In point of fact, dominant Te types are so accustomed to _putting aside_ their immediate interests for the sake of their principles that they lose sight of their own needs and priorities. They screen out so much direct information that their logic becomes theoretical. They lose touch with real life.

A real estate agent, for example, told me about an ESTJ sales representative who had accepted a two-year assignment at the local branch of his parent company. He was buying a house for the two-year period, and he had two mortgage options. One was variable, guaranteed at 7 percent for three years; the other fixed, guaranteed at 9 percent for thirty.

The agent naturally encouraged his client to take the variable mortgage. The 7-percent rate was guaranteed for three years, and the man was staying for only two. But the ESTJ insisted on taking the fixed rate--because it was the more responsible choice! He didn't want to take any chances. Rather than respond to a clear immediate advantage to himself, he held to his principles.

The ETJ's behavior can _look_ self-oriented because these types will ignore _others'_ immediate interests as well as their own. They don't trust exceptions to the general rule. Mitigating circumstances strike them as excuses, and they try not to take them into account.

The _Star Trek_ franchise offers many episodes that deal with this aspect of Extraverted Judgment, because its Starfleet officers are, at bottom, military personnel, committed to a specific code of directives. Captain Kathryn Janeway, for example, in _Star Trek: Voyager_, is an unusually sympathetic portrait of an ETJ in conflict. The fact that this _Star Trek_ series is the least popular of any is no surprise.

Janeway is in command of a lost ship, light-years away from home, helmed by a combination of Starfleet officers and renegade freedom fighters. Her task, in many of the episodes, is to recognize the value of the rebels' experience, as opposed to their credentials and training, which is not easy for her. She is also trying to enforce Federation rules among crew members who don't share Starfleet's assumptions about protocol.

As this series has unfolded, two things are worth noting. First, the Federation rules have, in fact, given the officers and the freedom fighters a common standard of order, despite their very different experiences and loyalties. Second, Janeway has come to recognize that her situation has no precedents. Federation directives could never have anticipated some of the crises she'd had to resolve.

Thus, she's learned, very gradually, to take immediate events into account and to deal with them as they present themselves. Her first inclination remains, however, to maintain her principles--not because they support her position or keep people under control, but because they tell the crew what to expect from one another when nothing else is certain.

An even better illustration, because of its reverse morality, is Quark, the avaricious Ferengi barkeep in _Star Trek: Deep Space Nine_. The Ferengi are a business-oriented society whose transactions are guided by _The Rules of Acquisition_, a compendium of principles that require a good citizen to put profit about all else.

In one episode, believing he's about to die, Quark offers his body parts to the highest bidder. As it turns out, his health is fine. But now he has a problem. To break a contract ensures the loss of all his assets, tantamount to loss of identity.

Quark is confounded by the quandary. To fulfill the contract, he has to die. But to break the rules strikes him as thoroughly immoral. His integrity is at stake. Although _The Rules of Acquisition_ support all manner of bribery, cheating, and dishonesty for the sake of self-interested profit, the idea of violating the rules themselves, even in the interest of self-preservation, gives Quark real pause.

And this is precisely the point. It doesn't matter how a culture or an organization conceptualizes its principles of order. Keeping faith with them always strikes a Te type as a matter of responsibility, honor, and knowledge of the "right" values. This is why ETJs need their secondary function, Si or Ni--to recognize when immediate experience takes precedence over authorized procedures.

*The ETJ Types*

ETJs represent about 18 percent of Americans. Toss in the Introverted TJs, who use Te as a secondary function, and the number rises to one-quarter of the population. All but 6 percent of these TJs and STJs, which is one reason we tend to associate Te with an investment in what already exists.

All ETJs have a strong sense of responsibility. They are not fuzzy about the principles they hold. They can articulate them, and they regard them as a basis for the kind of life they actually live. Knowledge, they might say, with Isaac Bashevis Singer, is a small island in a sea of nonknowledge. The integrity of that island strikes such types as a matter of personal obligation.

One might recall the "living books" in _Farenheit 451_--people who "became" the classics the government had burned by memorizing them and reciting them to others. As their memory failed, they trained others to take their place. ETJs are something like these "living books." They try to live up to the roles they play in society. They are faithful to the categories of knowledge they've received, and they're proud of their ability to fit themselves into a larger system and succeed on the terms specified. Such types have a great deal of momentum and direction in this respect.

ESTJs, prompted by Si, enjoy contributing to an existing organization, particularly when their ability to meet specified goals is recognized as superior. Such types depend on reason and analysis to deal with life, and they are careful about getting the facts they need in their area of expertise. In general, they support a "measure twice, cut once" philosophy of life.

ENTJs, by virtual of Ni, are more likely to see around the corners of an existing structure. They are usually motivated to streamline goals or tactics, and they may be gifted in their ability to solve problems that require imagination. They are something like INTJs in this respect, but their sense of possibility doesn't take them as far afield of structural priorities. ENTJs want to create a better mousetrap; they don't question whether mice should, in fact, be caught.

Both ESTJs and ENTJs require the confirmation of hard evidence before they'll deal with a situation. To paraphrase Aristotle (perhaps the quintessential Te type), if you can't measure something, you can't predict it's behavior, and hence it isn't real. This, admittedly, is a very loose paraphrase, but it's close enough. Aristotle's belief is echoed in the words of every ETJ physician who finds no measurable basis for a patient's chronic pain.

The bottom line is that reason can't be used to analyze the unknown. Unless one can determine the sequence in which one thing follows another or the functional contribution of a part to a whole, a situation is not a logical one and, to the Te type's mind, probably doesn't exist.

ETJs reason quite literally in a step-by-step manner. Asked to explain one aspect of a problem, they will begin at the beginning and explain the entire linear process. Such types tend to plan and set goals even when they're doing something "for fun." And they are just as interested in "retrodiction" as they are in prediction. That is, they will analyze their actions after the fact, attempting to prepare for similar situations in the future.


----------



## Herp (Nov 25, 2010)

Fine. I guessing I'm a Te type now.

I mean, I pretty much identify with both Si (checking up the world against my subjective ideal of perceptions,_what should be_) and Te (Evaluating objects for their traits, _creating sense out of raw information_). But I feel like I have a very strong tendency to cling to the latter than the first. Things are not always going to be like I expect them to be, but they better make goddamn sense.



> To paraphrase Aristotle (perhaps the quintessential Te type), if you can't measure something, you can't predict it's behavior, and hence it isn't real. This, admittedly, is a very loose paraphrase, but it's close enough.


I admit telling my therapist once something very close to these lines. I think he asked me 'Why do you think you have to predict everything? Can't you allow things to just happen?' and I replied 'I can't allow that to happen. If I don't analyze and predict, everything won't make sense and I will not know what to do. I can't not know what to do!'

I'm just having a hard time deciding whether I'm a Te-dom or Si-dom, as they both make sense for who I am.

What can anyone say about experiencing inferior Fi? What happens when Te can't solve a situation? What happens when a Te user is obliged to deal with the unknown?


----------



## Elaminopy (Jun 29, 2011)

Herp said:


> I'm just having a hard time deciding whether I'm a Te-dom or Si-dom, as they both make sense for who I am.


Here is an ESTJ description: http://personalitycafe.com/estj-articles/122823-extraverted-thinking-introverted-sensation.html

and an ISTJ one: http://personalitycafe.com/istj-articles/108012-lenore-thomsons-istj.html

They are from the same source. The ISTJ one wasn't posted by me.



> What can anyone say about experiencing inferior Fi? What happens when Te can't solve a situation? What happens when a Te user is obliged to deal with the unknown?


I'll post that part in a reply here since you asked. I was just trying to post only about Te and not Te-doms exclusively.


----------



## Elaminopy (Jun 29, 2011)

Herp said:


> What can anyone say about experiencing inferior Fi? What happens when Te can't solve a situation? What happens when a Te user is obliged to deal with the unknown?


This:

ETJs who resist their inner experience of life ultimately reach a state of imbalance. They're screening out too much information. Their least-developed function, Fi, gets out of their control and begins flooding them with impulses that undermine their accustomed point of view. Because these impulses are unconscious, ETJs don't recognize them as part of themselves. They believe that other people aren't being logical or responsible enough, obliging them to take control and be the grown-up.

Fi is a right-brain form of Judgment, immediate and subjective. Well developed, it fosters an inner moral compass--a recognition that everything we do affects a situation for good or ill. This wholistic perspective calls into question the ETJ's pricipled approach to life, which is guided by general rules, notwithstanding people's subjective value judgments.

Pressured by impulses in conflict with their accustomed strengths, ETJs feel threatened, as though someone were depriving them of their logical expectations. Like all types, the don't see this unconscious drama as part of themselves. They see it as part of their outward situation. For example, they may be frustrated by people who don't play by the rules, or people who want personal benefits without taking social responsibility. The needs of loved ones may strike them as disruptive, particularly if addressing them means modifying their priorities or changing their routines.

Such types can seem egocentric or insensitive, but their focus is squarely on their logical self-image. The problems they're noticing can't be solved with Te, and as long as they're resisting other approaches, their only option is to defend the one they've got. They do this by eliminating, ignoring, or complaining about the things that can't be explained by or fit into their Te framework.


----------



## Dastan (Sep 28, 2011)

Where is this definite attribution of functions (function attitudes) and brain hemispheres coming from?


----------



## Elaminopy (Jun 29, 2011)

Dastan said:


> Where is this definite attribution of functions (function attitudes) and brain hemispheres coming from?


If you would like, I'll post about that. In short, research was done using PET scanning on the brain and were able to show significantly increased activity in certain parts of the brain when the subject was asked to perform different tasks that required different cognitive functions. The results were:


*Front of Left Brain**Front of Right Brain*
TeNeFeSe


Si
FiNiTi*Back of Left Brain*
*​Back of Right Brain*


----------



## Monkey King (Nov 16, 2010)

Pretty good on the first skim. Thanks.


----------



## Dastan (Sep 28, 2011)

Elaminopy said:


> If you would like, I'll post about that. In short, research was done using PET scanning on the brain and were able to show significantly increased activity in certain parts of the brain when the subject was asked to perform different tasks that required different cognitive functions. The results were:
> 
> 
> *Front of Left Brain**Front of Right Brain*TeNeFeSe
> ...


Ah, there is a thread about that:
http://personalitycafe.com/myers-briggs-forum/9648-types-brain-pseudo-science-behind-mbti.html

But thank you anyway!


----------



## JungyesMBTIno (Jul 22, 2011)

I think this is good, aside from the goofy left/right brain stuff and MBTI stereotypes (like it really means anything). She captures the essence of Te perfectly with David Letterman, I think. I still wouldn't really compare the IXTJs with the EXTJs as much as she does, which falls in line with the MBTI paradigm. It would be perception+perception that would *influence* these types on the personality level, not perception+judgment (which would probably be these types who get extremely stuck in some kind of operational persona). Through judgment, they just take care of obligations to themselves and others, not their ego ideals.


----------



## JungyesMBTIno (Jul 22, 2011)

In fact, it is the Ni doms, no matter what the MBTI type, who are said by Von Franz to be some of the most functionally random people on Earth (as in, they pretty much have an intuitive sense of everything to the point that, since they live this mentality, they probably don't even realize it). They don't orient themselves to the world with any kind of structural integrity, Te style - this would probably be their superego concerns (I have a theory that dom/inferior represent the ego, aux/tert represent the superego, and the alternate aux/terts represent the id - no idea if I'm right, but after reading Freud, it seems to align with some of what he talks about about personal obligations and impulses).


----------



## JungyesMBTIno (Jul 22, 2011)

> I mean, I pretty much identify with both Si (checking up the world against my subjective ideal of perceptions,_what should be) and Te (Evaluating objects for their traits, creating sense out of raw information)._


"What should be" probably reflects some Fi. What you conspicuously eliminate here and seem to struggle with might be Ne (not being able to tolerate possibilities), perhaps?


----------



## Herp (Nov 25, 2010)

JungyesMBTIno said:


> "What should be" probably reflects some Fi. What you conspicuously eliminate here and seem to struggle with might be Ne (not being able to tolerate possibilities), perhaps?


Sorry for the delay, I've just seen this.

I mean, it is not a mystery to me that I have a complicated relationship with Ne. It's an incredibly vulnerable part of myself. Needing to know what to do is a commodity that I can't afford to lose. It's threatening for me to be left to the flavor of the unknown, unable to adapt from whatever comes.

But its being hard to discern the priorities set by Te and my (now faulty) grasp of Si. I can sense the influences of Si, Ne, Te and Fi. I'm aware of my dependence on Te and Si, but acknowledging a dominance isn't being as easy.


----------

