Post by tobyspringfield on Apr 25, 2017 1:29:57 GMT -5
I'm not sure I get the question right but lemme try. I remember when I was first getting into MBTI types and first got typed INFJ, I got to know that apparently there are more INFJ females than males and that apparently INFJ male is the rarest type (which is obviously not true from CT findings) but anyway my point was, most people seemed to believe that INFJ males were actually quite feminine because females supposedly dominated the type while on the side of the ENTJ, since males dominated, the general consensus was that ENTJ females acted quite masculine etc. Not sure what bearing this has on the question but hope it does.
But I suppose I'm inclined to think of the question in terms of investigation/research. For example, from the angle of biological differences and excluding the cultural as much as possible. Testosterone levels alone account for some differences in personality elements. Apparently testosterone levels are positively linked to:
- Aggression - Increased risk taking - Competitiveness - Being "thing oriented" (vs "people oriented") - Higher sexual desire
This is regardless of sex. So certain women who have higher testosterone levels than other women, will show more of these tendencies. And vice versa for males. But of course, males have a lot more testosterone on average, by a factor of 10+.
And by the Big Five males are: - Higher in Extroversion (facet: Assertiveness) - Lower in Agreeableness - Higher in openness to ideas
Whereas women:
- Score higher in empathy - Higher in Warmth (an Extroverted facet) - Higher in Aggreeableness - Higher in Neuroticism - Higher in rates of depression and anxiety - More language oriented (as opposed to visually, like men)
Nonetheless, crossover does exist and while these statistics are true (even cross-culturally) they're not definitively predictive of any single male or female's psychology. It's a bell curve distribution:
So a fair amount of males and females will cross-over into each other's personality traits above. But in general, the most aggressive and assertive individuals will be men and the most emotional/agreeable individuals will be women.
As part of the decline of traditional values, the nuclear family, gender roles, and the like --- liberal ideology has further tried to push the narrative that males and females are inherently no different. And that gender is a cultural construct, and is a type of fluid entity.
My evaluation of this phenomenon is that they're conflating an ethical question with an objective question. The facts show differences in human male/female anatomy as well as psychology, and this should be separated from any sort of political opinion.
I think the pushback we've received over the last century from liberal ideology has been great in allowing women to partake more equally in society. But what began as a positive movement toward equality has gone too far into a type of relativism toward sex/gender that is simply false from a scientific perspective.
I think the sexes are definitely different in fundamental ways, but that doesn't mean they're not equal. They're equal but different. And I think people feel like they have to be identical to be equal. So "equality" gets confused with being homogeneous.
It's the wrong answer to try to imagine or pretend these differences don't exist. Or to pretend the biological differences don't produce psychic differences by extension. The right answer would be to acknowledge the profundity of these differences, while finding a way to equalize the value and placement of each of these facets within society.
But I realize this is a controversial topic, hence why I bring it up... What do you guys think about personality differences and sex?
...if we accept the base proposition that sex comes with inherent biological differences which are also personality differences, then we can start investigating a whole new area: the intersection of sex and type.
Intersection of Sex and Type
Masculinity & Femininity: Lets suppose we define masculinity and femininity as those traits which deviate from the baseline by the presence of hormones, or otherwise measurable by male/female differences in brain matter constitution, anatomy, etc.
"Male brains utilize nearly seven times more gray matter for activity while female brains utilize nearly ten times more white matter. What does this mean?
Gray matter areas of the brain are localized. They are information- and action-processing centers in specific splotches in a specific area of the brain. This can translate to a kind of tunnel vision when they are doing something. Once they are deeply engaged in a task or game, they may not demonstrate much sensitivity to other people or their surroundings.
White matter is the networking grid that connects the brainβs gray matter and other processing centers with one another. This profound brain-processing difference is probably one reason you may have noticed that girls tend to more quickly transition between tasks than boys do. The gray-white matter difference may explain why, in adulthood, females are great multi-taskers, while men excel in highly task-focused projects."
That means that masculinity (M) and femininity (F) can be defined as the qualities of being on average more: - 'thing oriented' (M) versus 'people oriented' (F) - visual (M) rather than linguistic (F) - more mechanical/process-based (M) rather than associative (F) - aggressive (M) rather than agreeable (F) - more risk-taking (M) or more neurotic (F)
But as we know, some of these qualities also emerge due to type. Being a logic-lead type will give parallel qualities to those given to males due to their biology. Likewise ethical-leads will have qualities comparable to those given to females due to their innate biology. So there's a strong overlap of traits, even though they're two different things.
I think this itself may be responsible for some people's confusions with their type. For example a male NiFe may be prone to mistype as INTJ or INTP in other systems because of this layering of personality characteristics. This may be an important factor to keep track of when doing typings.
Alignment of Traits?
Roughly speaking, I would say the EST attitude has the largest parallel to the biological effects of being male. Again, not making them out to be the same thing, but just saying that they overlap the strongest with each other. And the INF attitude has the largest parallel to the biological effects of being female. So an EST male or an INF female will experience the least internal dissonance, because there's alignment between the traits of their type and their sex.
...while on the side of the ENTJ, since males dominated, the general consensus was that ENTJ females acted quite masculine etc.
Right. Somebody like a TeSi or TeNi women may experience quite a dissonance between their sex and type. Some tentative patterns have started to stand out to me within our samples, where people may experience a type of mild gender dysphoria because their type is not in alignment with sex.
A TeSi woman may feel like "more of a man" than say an FiNe male, which suggests that the qualities birthed upon the individual due to their type alone may be significant enough to overshadow the qualities given to them by their sex, in terms of where they feel they fall in the masculine/feminine divide.
Post by tobyspringfield on Apr 26, 2017 4:12:19 GMT -5
I think I follow the line of thought much clearer now. Well, I'm not sure if it's possible but it would really really help if we could get a collection of types and their matching genders so we could identify a pattern. Maybe gender just as much, if not more, than upbringing and genetics could also play a role in determining type since that is the basic primal divide between humans.
And the INF attitude has the largest parallel to the biological effects of being female. So an EST male or an INF female will experience the least internal dissonance, because there's alignment between the traits of their type and their sex.
If we're including more patriarchal cultures I would say the ISFJ female has an even easier time.
I think this itself may be responsible for some people's confusions with their type. For example a male NiFe may be prone to mistype as INTJ or INTP in other systems because of this layering of personality characteristics. This may be an important factor to keep track of when doing typings.
And this is why I love CT... we get to find these guys who don't show up as we would typically expect them to.
I was doing research on the amygdala, and came across this description that seems relevant to this thread:
The amygdala is one of the best-understood brain regions with regard to differences between the sexes. The amygdala is larger in males than females in children ages 7β11,[14] in adult humans,[15] and in adult rats.[16]
In addition to size, other differences between men and women exist with regards to the amygdala. Subjects' amygdala activation was observed when watching a horror film and subliminal stimuli. The results of the study showed a different lateralization of the amygdala in men and women. Enhanced memory for the film was related to enhanced activity of the left, but not the right, amygdala in women, whereas it was related to enhanced activity of the right, but not the left, amygdala in men.[17] One study found evidence that on average, women tend to retain stronger memories for emotional events than men.[18]
The right amygdala is also linked with taking action as well as being linked to negative emotions,[19] which may help explain why males tend to respond to emotionally stressful stimuli physically. The left amygdala allows for the recall of details, but it also results in more thought rather than action in response to emotionally stressful stimuli, which may explain the absence of physical response in women.
So this means that men and women intrinsically process emotion and motivation differently. The last paragraph is especially fascinating, as I've noticed this action-oriented response in men. Perhaps that's the objective origin of the 'yang' principle as associated with the masculine archetype? ^^