Negativity | INFJ Forum

Negativity

Headstorm

Headstorm

On a mountain path.
Dec 3, 2018
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I am trying to type my collegues at the moment. Mainly because I want to learn more about MBTI. Three of them seem to be INTP; they are also the most negative people.

Raises the question: is there a correlation between negativity and certain types and/or functions?

Any thoughts, insights?
 
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I guess any type can be negative or positive.

I think imbalance may be the most likely to make someone prone to be negative. There is a reason we have specific function pairs, as they serve to balance out the preference of another. Stress is also a factor. You try to hold on to the saviour until you end up in the grip or in the shadow due to a trigger.

In the case of your INTPs they may be stressed for working among others, which overloads their inferior Fe if it's undeveloped and quickly depletes their energy resources.

All in all, it may be function related to a degree after all, but there are ways to work around these issues if you know what, why and how. We'd have to know more to make more accurate assessments.
 
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What might look like negativity of an INTP to an INFJ is actually a lot of the time just an INTP being shitty at self organizing their ideas
 
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Some introverts are very susceptible to work related stress primarily from being around people more than is healthy for them which can cascade into a lot of other problems if it is prolonged.
 
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Depends on what you mean by negative. For example, NTP's tend to be by highly theoretical and will often analyze something to a great degree and consider all the plausible possibilities of something, and this includes worse case scenarios. This can sound negative to someone hearing it.
 
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Hi, it’s very interesting that you experience INTP as negativ and I can understand why. I’m INFJ and my husband through 8 years is an INTP and also our friend is an INTP. They are highly theoretical and will often analyze everything. What I experienced from being an INFJ are that they are questionting everything and everything need to be theoretical or logical - from my INFJ perspectiv is that I can feel that they are challenging or crticzing my values!
 
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I pretty much agree with @Ginny that any types can have a degree of negativity depending on their situation and circumstances, or under a certain amount of stress. I don’t think it particularly attains to INTPs solely. I can say though that INTPs are highly analytical and combine that with introvertedness, negativity will happen as a result every now and then. Even myself as an INFJ, I have my moments of negativity and pessimism—which I have to quickly snap myself out of or I will be stuck in a negative hole for quite some time if I don’t.

But like I mentioned, any type can be extremely negative as some point.
 
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Headstorm said:
I am trying to type my collegues at the moment. Mainly because I want to learn more about MBTI. Three of them seem to be INTP; they are also the most negative people.

Raises the question: is there a correlation between negativity and certain types and/or functions?

Any thoughts, insights?
Click to expand...
There are three aspects to this that I'd like to develop: intrinsic negativity, environmental negativity, and 'practiced' negativity, but I'll keep each one short. So to answer your question, I would have to say, 'yes, definitely'.

Intrinsic Negativity
Certain cognitive functions by nature can express as critical questioning, e.g. Te. This means that types dominant or auxiliary in such functions can definitely appear to be more 'negative' than others.

Environmental Negativity
As has already been mentioned, the environmental preferences of certain types may not be routinely met by modern social and industrial arrangements, leading to these types being out of their environmental 'comfort zone' more often than others. E.g. Introverts being forced into extroverted workplaces.

Practiced Negativity
Critical thinking and empirical testing is a core element of many kinds of academic training (e.g. The scientific method), therefore individuals trained in such methods may routinely adopt 'critical' outlooks, which may appear to be 'negative' to others. Certain types gravitate towards such training, and therefore type may play a secondary or contingent role in adopting 'negative' outlooks. E.g. INTPs gravitating towards the sciences.
 
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hmh.. there is negativism.. for example in the frustration of ideals crashing with realism.. (INFJ)
and then there is pessimism that florishes nicely in a black and white set of mind.. for example when you crave for conistency but all your mind makes up is worst case scenario. (ISFJ)
I don't mean this as some form of anxiety.. but rather crashing looking back behavior, only seeing what was and drawing conclusions for the future from that in the most depressing way.
An INFJ might have pessimistic-ish moments too but I think the looking into the future focus with Ni is more like a bad prediction still giving time to adjust a plan..while for an ISFJ it's all already written so to say..

negativism isn't the same as pessimism... negativism works for each type a bit differently, I think.. another type might be more into the sceptical negativity and so on..
 
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Impact Character said:
hmh.. there is negativism.. for example in the frustration of ideals crashing with realism.. (INFJ)
and then there is pessimism that florishes nicely in a black and white set of mind.. for example when you crave for conistency but all your mind makes up is worst case scenario. (ISFJ)
I don't mean this as some form of anxiety.. but rather crashing looking back behavior, only seeing what was and drawing conclusions for the future from that in the most depressing way.
An INFJ might have pessimistic-ish moments too but I think the looking into the future focus with Ni is more like a bad prediction still giving time to adjust a plan..while for an ISFJ it's all already written so to say..

negativism isn't the same as pessimism... negativism works for each type a bit differently, I think.. another type might be more into the sceptical negativity and so on..
Click to expand...
I think what you mention with ISFJs is something we'd call Schwarzmalerei - at its worst, that is. I know a few ISTJs who are like that. They imagine the worst possible outcome based on their experiences so they couldn't possibly be disappointed and are prepared should this worst case come to pass. There is a relatively fine line between this pessimistically preparatory way of thinking and having it develop into depression, because the more habitual this thinking becomes the more likely it is to slip into believing it couldn't go any other way.
It may be similar to what @Deleted member 16771 mentioned with Practiced Negativity, only that their functional stack sort of automates this process.

I'm not sure if in this case it is so black-and-white (but I know what you meant to get at, I believe), I mean, Ne intuits a range of outcomes, but being in the inferior slot, you could imagine it like the function getting less brain power while Si is saturated with it, so the range of outcomes it can imagine is smaller. It then depends on the attitude of the person (which is most likely based on the experiences they have made) what this range looks like.

If they were fixated on one single outcome, it could indicate that they are ruled by the shadow Ni, which in turn might place them fairly low within an imaginary emotional health scale.

I can imagine that it would take another function to short circuit the spiral of pessimism by feeding new information, like attitude (Fi, or Ti), present situations as new experiences yet uncategorised (Se), or renegotiating preconceived notions with new information (Fe and Te). Theoretically, this could be applied to any type, with the right combination of factors.
 
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I think any type can be negative. In my experience, a combination of biology, childhood experience and the culture a person inhabits tunes their temperament. Outcomes aren't guaranteed, but there are trends from type to type. Both inferior Fe and Fi is easy to corrupt.
 
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Ginny said:
I think what you mention with ISFJs is something we'd call Schwarzmalerei - at its worst, that is. I know a few ISTJs who are like that. They imagine the worst possible outcome based on their experiences so they couldn't possibly be disappointed and are prepared should this worst case come to pass. There is a relatively fine line between this pessimistically preparatory way of thinking and having it develop into depression, because the more habitual this thinking becomes the more likely it is to slip into believing it couldn't go any other way.
It may be similar to what @Deleted member 16771 mentioned with Practiced Negativity, only that their functional stack sort of automates this process.

I'm not sure if in this case it is so black-and-white (but I know what you meant to get at, I believe), I mean, Ne intuits a range of outcomes, but being in the inferior slot, you could imagine it like the function getting less brain power while Si is saturated with it, so the range of outcomes it can imagine is smaller. It then depends on the attitude of the person (which is most likely based on the experiences they have made) what this range looks like.

If they were fixated on one single outcome, it could indicate that they are ruled by the shadow Ni, which in turn might place them fairly low within an imaginary emotional health scale.

I can imagine that it would take another function to short circuit the spiral of pessimism by feeding new information, like attitude (Fi, or Ti), present situations as new experiences yet uncategorised (Se), or renegotiating preconceived notions with new information (Fe and Te). Theoretically, this could be applied to any type, with the right combination of factors.
Click to expand...

yes exactly ^^
@Deleted member 16771 posted a bit before me. reading his words actually made me laugh (in a very good way!) because I thought so too about the practiced negativity..
It's really enjoyable to read all those different formulations on different levels/perspectives from everyone.. it really rounds of a topic and its meaning ^^

I think we all agree that the degree is up to individuality and their context and the form of it might be influenced by how they work internally..so to say :)

For INTP.. I believe ..negativity derives from their logic telling them they aren't having (good) choices (or no choices)..especially when emotionally drained and stressed already..
but then again all this about stress was already mentioned above ^^
 
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