First of all, we can't deny that the study of personality types is definitely closely tied to the development of psychology. The study of psychology has come a long way since the influential works of famous psychologists such as Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung. Under the foundation of these researchers' work into the human mind, there has seen a rise in the development of personality theories. One well-known example is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), developed under the theory of Carl Jung, who proposed that humans experience the world using four basic cognitive elements — thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation. Each person can to manifest these four functions with different strengths and preferences, and this as a consequence produces the various personalities and behaviors among different people.

Source: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0e/b8/5b/0eb85b015acf98dc9e2b7214068a5507.jpg, accessed on July 30, 2020.

These ideas inevitably rely solely on observations of people and their behaviors, and therefore the 'study' of personality types has been coined as a 'pseudoscience' by many who don't believe in typology since people could easily draw to different conclusions based on the limited details they obtain from the observation of a certain person. Nevertheless, the intricacies of human behavior have prompted much interest in online discussions that it has become a source of entertainment. Nowadays, we are able to find an abundance of resources and forums on the internet.

There are, of course, other typing methods such as the Enneagram test and the Big Five personality test (OCEAN), all of which are developed to methodically pinpoint and sometimes quantify a person's personality and well-being on a spectrum. These personality tests may help people to better understand themselves and know their own strengths and weaknesses. However, these efforts may be diminished depending on the answers of the test-taker, who is hugely influenced by the mood or environmental circumstance of a person. For instance, your friend may be happy and confident one day and appear very excited, energetic, and 'extraverted', but feel upset and need some time alone being more 'introverted' the next day. Moreover, it does not help you to understand yourself that you are a 75%-extraverted ENFP today, and tested out to be only 45% extraverted the next day, and therefore becoming an INFP. Ahh, your personality changed in one day! How fun!!... But actually, scary if that is really true...

Because of these volatile test results, personality typing has unfortunately been seen as a fake art that only displays a temporary reference of one's mood, and sometimes even worse, as a mere joke — A shameful disgrace to those former psychologists and sociologists alike who tried to scientifically develop a reliable theory comparable to Freud's psychic apparatus — the id, ego, and superego. Apparently, the human mind is more complicated than just having these three elements, and there is no reason to discriminate against a complicated-to-justify yet premature system because its real-life application — typology — does not conclude with an absolute and correct answer. After all, literally anyone is capable of coming up with a justification of what personality type a certain person is, just as doctors and engineers could come up with different solutions (and more or less argue about them because of conflicting approaches) to conduct a surgery or solve a problem.

Another common reason that some disregard the legitimacy of personality types is because they are heavily utilized to be advisive. After a person takes a certain personality test, the results tend to suggest that they 'should' behave in a certain way for the betterment of their lives instead of understanding 'who they are'. These have led to huge medical — and sometimes marketing as well — incentives of abusing these technical terms to 'diagnose' a person and evaluate their well-being, a dangerous means that was spawned by a relatively good cause but may potentially and unwittingly confine the test-taker into a certain category of obligated behavior.

Source: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/58/4f/6b/584f6be01185ee5f6fdae2f1ebf78b18.gif, accessed on July 30, 2020.

Those are reasons for personality type enthusiasts, including myself, to retreat from the Myers-Briggs community, as well as the very vaguely generalized Keirsey Temperament Sorter, and focus more on 'socionics', a theory of cognitive processes of information that encompasses the strength, value, and consciousnesses of one's using of a function. As a side note, I am not here to argue how perfect socionics is and provoke a heated debate between other typers who reside with typing methods according to the descriptions provided by Jungian MBTI, 16 Personalities, C.S. Joseph's four sides of the mind model, Dave's Super Powers (now known as ObjectivePersonality.com), just to name a few. These are highly-relevant resources as well to understand the 'extrinsic' traits of a certain personality type and their behaviors and I agree to many — if not much — of their valuable viewpoints with regards to their way of reaching their conclusions as well. However, I seek to unveil this seemingly complex yet more convincingly-complete theoretical model — the 'intrinsic' working between the valued and undervalued, conscious and unconscious, as well as strong and weak functions is studied and proposed by socionics.

Socionics has borrowed some terms from Freud's psychic model and introduced the symmetric concepts of ego, super-ego, id, and super-id, each containing two slots for cognitive functions, which makes a total of eight function slots. A person will naturally attempt all eight cognitive functions throughout their lifetime, however strong, conscious, or valued the function is, which opposes the more widely-believed four function model. For example, ISTP – a.k.a. the mechanic – has their function stack as Ti-Se-Ni-Fe in order from top to bottom, and ENTJ – the executive – has Te-Ni-Se-Fi as theirs, and that's basically all the functions to their lives. Socionics, however, also brings the other four functions not in the stack to be part of the psyche, which is known as an 'archetype'. As you can see, the word archetype has the prefix 'arch', as in architecture, which denotes the primitive structure of a person's cognition that concerns more on what a type of personality 'is' on a fundamental level rather than how a type of personality 'should present themselves'. The ENTJ — according to 16 Personalities — are naturally confident and task-efficient leaders who see the expressing of emotions as a kind of weakness. This aligns with socionics' description of the corresponding LIE-ENTj, who has Te-Ni in their ego block. In reality however, LIEs can be crazily fun and loving outside of their duty that they usually finish effectively. This is described in the super-id block, the Fi and Se, which are the fuzzy and exciting functions valued by the LIE as well. As opposed to the ENTJ from MBTI who tramples over Fi all the time, LIEs can be one of the most caring and entertaining people to have around. (And don't worry about telling them your feelings too, because they will express their empathy with precise words and try to help you out, in ways not limited to a little convincing talk or thinking of efficient solutions to solve your problems!) :D

I have used some technical terminologies above, like the different cognitive functions, Ti, Te, Ni, Se, Fi, etc. to demonstrate the integrity of the socionics model, but will leave the details for another post. Hopefully this long rant isn't too bad to go through from your end. If you are interested, a good source to begin would be Sociotypes.com, where I gathered most of my information from. Until next time!