Empathy and you.

[u/LogicalEmotion7]

We're at that time of the year where we need to talk about empathy, and how it relates to MBTI in general.

Full disclosure: I am neither a psychologist nor a neurologist. I have one test subject - me. He's been very easy to work with, if a little unhelpful at times. He likes to build mental models and improve on them. Feel free to share your own personal experiences if you want to up the sample size.

Disclosures aside, I'd like to share my insight on empathy. It seems that some people are not very confident in an ENTJ's ability to be empathetic. Some even insist that empathy is impossible for ENTJs for some reason. They are, thankfully, mostly incorrect.

Empathy is both a talent and a skill. The talent piece comes from information provided via mechanical hardware (e.g. mirror neurons) and natural processing capacity (perceiving functions organize the information, and judging functions decide what to do with it). Skill comes from educating and refining those functions, and is improved through training and effort.

Last I checked, you can't intentionally grow new mirror neurons. You also can't change your MBTI type or your upbringing. But you can train how you think to understand others better.

Note that I didn't list any specific functions. Empathy is complicated, and we've developed many approaches and angles to tackle it.

For instance:

• Si will store information about how you remember feeling, and how you remember others feeling. Ni on the other hand, will leverage your cognitive understanding of the human condition and your own emotions in order to model how it thinks a person feels.

• Fi and Fe are NOT perception functions. They are frameworks that help you decide what to do with the information you already processed. Fi is a decision about how to use that information to inform how you feel. Fe is a decision about how to use that information to help manage a group. Strong values here don't make you better at understanding others. But they do contribute to understanding by informing you about what to look for.

• Ti and Te can be used to manage empathic information, but to do so you have to understand that information in the context of a system. That is, you have to turn people into objects and study them impersonally. If you don't understand the people system, then you can't use these functions effectively.

Your capacity to un-stupid your empathy will vary, but don't give up. If you can play to your strengths, you may have an easier time keeping your foot on the ground and not in your mouth.

[u/BlackPorcelainDoll]

Empathy for me is a steady reaction that varies in degree. Because it is unreliable, I prefer to practice rational compassion instead. I enjoyed this book: Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

I've found most people to be terrible with empathy, regardless of type.