…building civilizations with my space elves in space.

Post navigation

The MBTI Lens

It occurred to me that I hadn’t posted on this specifically before, and it might be interesting to those of you who might be interested in the construction equipment behind the curtain.

Are you familiar with the Myers-Briggspersonality types? Well, if not, you might want to become familiar with them before you continue with this post, ’cause otherwise it will make no sense.

Take a look at this table which shows the frequencies with which the various personality types appear in the (human, Earthling, American) population:

Now, consider that we live in a world built by the standards of and for, to a large extent, the majorities of Sensing types (73%) and Feeling types (60%). And specifically that the rarest group, the iNtuitive Thinking (“Rationals”) make up no more than 10% of the population.

Now invert it, and consider what a world would be like in which it’s the NT Rationals whose corner dominates the chart, and where the Intuitives and Thinkers are the more common functions seen in the other types, too1.

If it seems familiar to you after spending time reading here, that’s because this exercise was part of my original worldbuilding process.

(Disclaimer: the author is an INT[J|p].)

1. The world also caters more to Is than our very much built-for-Es in many ways, *there*, although that’s a subtler effect and one less reflected in the raw numbers.

One thing that would be as interesting to study as it is impossible, I have long thought, is whether most of the worldbuilding I particularly enjoy is done by people with a strong N – i.e., people who are used to/skilled at systematizing large patterns in their heads, and who are therefore better at putting together a big and internally coherent world lacking the inconsistencies that lead me to throw t’book at t’wall.