Are you the deeply logical INTP personality type?

INTP is one of 16 personality types in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. INTP stands for introverted (in constant contact with the inner world), intuitive (abstract-thinking), thinking (technical/fact-focussed), and perceiving (more flexible lifestyle than controlled/organised).

Sign you may be INTP: You compulsively consolidate and tweak your understanding of the underlying nature of an objective reality that is outside human experience, but applicable to us all. You strive for total accuracy in overarching logical principles that explain everything.

Sign you may be INTP: You often question yourself and your own theories again and again. Your beliefs can be very niche, and you can be told you are too focussed on “defining things” or “nitpicking” – but truth is a matter of subtlety and you don't want to be misaligned.

Sign you may be INTP: You may experience analysis-paralysis and it is difficult to “get carried away in the moment” and lose sense of consequence – you may be hyper-aware of consequences. However, you can be quite spontaneous when an idea is interesting and innovative to you.

Sign you may be INTP: You feel disconnected from your body, environment and physical reality. If you explore, it is often mentally and playfully – falling down research rabbit holes, enjoying novel ideas, and creating and enjoying puns, impressions, irony, and parodies.

Sign you may be INTP: You are aware of the social obligations your environment requires of you, but the effort required to meet these can be a lot for you. You value mental autonomy and can often put in the faintest amount of social effort needed to get by.

Sign you may NOT be INTP: Your thoughts, frameworks, and decisions are attached to self-concept. If you find your theories consciously driven by or taking into account emotions or one’s sense of identity, you may not be INTP. INTPs try to remove themselves from their theories.

Sign you may NOT be INTP: You don’t constantly take logical quests for their own sake. For example, even when an INTP plays a game, they may experiment with the mechanics of the gameplay. If your love for logic extends to only philosophy, psychology, etc. you may not be INTP.

Sign you may NOT be INTP: You struggle to juggle multiple perspectives and consider them equally and simultaneously. If you intuitively find it most natural to want and be sure of one main probability of how things will pan out, you might be ISFP, ISTP, INFJ, INTJ, ISFJ or ISTJ.

Bottom line: It’s hard to type ourselves accurately, even after doing the MBTI test (we’re all biased). Patience is needed. An INTP can begin to accept their scattered nature but also their perfectionism when it comes to “finding the logical underlying principles of reality."