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Re: On Debugging People

by jeorgen (Pilgrim)
on Aug 04, 2002 at 17:27 UTC ( [id://187505]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to On Debugging People

It could be argued (as much as you can argue anything in psychology) that people are black boxes to about half the population, those that are thinkers according to the Myers-Briggs test and derivatives. Those of my friends that fall into the thinker approach often treat others as black boxes, especially the ones that fall under the feeler approach; feelers seen as irrational by thinkers when trying to understand the inside. The feelers on the other hand know (that is, believe they know) what others want and think.

I know the above statemets are a bit sweeping and exaggerated, but the black box metaphor works better for some people than others.

/jeorgen

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Re: Re: On Debugging People
by SpritusMaximus (Sexton) on Aug 05, 2002 at 16:37 UTC
    feelers seen as irrational by thinkers when trying to understand the inside

    Hmmm. I disagree with this statement. If, as a thinker, you can understand how the person feels about a thing then you can guess about their reaction to the stimuli. This just requires more "internal debuuging", that's all. For instance, if Joe gets a new assignment at work and is upset, it might seem irrational to a thinker at first; however, if we consider that Joe is a Linux zealot and his assignment is to write a Winows 2000 website, then his unhappiness might not seem irrational after all. We can simply assign his attribute as a Linux zealot to another one of the "input channels" to analyze. -SM
      Are you familiar with the Myers_Briggs (or Jungian) way of separating thinking and feeling? "Thinking" and "feeling" are two decision making strategies. What it means is essentially that when faced with a questionnaire, about half indicate that they prefer taking decisions on objective criteria and half that they let relationships take precedence, even if it's "illogical". A person tends to answer these questionnaires consistently over long time periods too.

      Thinkers generally, and this is from what I hear from my friends who are prevalently thinkers, tend to analyse others as "black boxes", and often lets off steam about how hard it is for them to understand certain people. They have a tendency to resort to mapping out what motives they can have.

      I take part in a big BBS about non-perl topics. In these discussion fora - in extreme cases - the thinkers (not all) have a tendency to hurt people (inadvertently) and call others "idiots". Feelers on the other hand are more sensitive to these issues, but appear mushy and put wishful thinking before rational analysis sometimes. Most people are OK of course. I have tested some of these people with questionnaires so I know whether they are thinkers or not :-).

      You write:

      For instance, if Joe gets a new assignment at work and is upset, it might seem irrational to a thinker at first; however, if we consider that Joe is a Linux zealot and his assignment is to write a Winows 2000 website, then his unhappiness might not seem irrational after all. We can simply assign his attribute as a Linux zealot to another one of the "input channels" to analyze.

      ...and this is what a thinker would write. Problem is: Do you have the processing power to do it? Or rather, that is not the problem, you most likely do, but what happens sometimes is that you think you have mapped the person out, but you haven't. A feeler instead concentrates on the tone and body language of the person and does not rely on so much data. Both approaches have there place. When I and a friend discovered this thinking-feeling dichotomy we realise why we complemnet each other so well. He is a thinker and he knows a lot about motives, and I can warn him when he's going over the edge in a relationship (I'm a feeler).

      Note that of course all people are both thinking and feeling, but in order to function normally and get anywhere in our lives we let one of them take precedence over the other, in order to avoid getting deadlocked in decision making conflicts. Anyways that is the general idea behind the theory, although in many ways it is best suited to self-knowledge.

      /jeorgen

Re: Re: On Debugging People
by frag (Hermit) on Aug 06, 2002 at 01:29 UTC
    I think the main point, and it may be getting lost in the discussions over different psychological schools of thought, is simply to question your assumptions. What's going on inside someone's head is not measurable or provable in the sense that the atomic weight of Uranium is, and there are inevitably parts to the whole that you have no idea exist. (Just to throw gestalt psych into the hopper.)

    It's a good idea in experimentation (including experimental psych) - don't just have a null hypothesis, but have a secondary competing hypothesis that isn't simply a straw man, when putting your own theories to the test. When you're debugging and you get stuck, its when you start actively coming up with these alternative explanations that you begin to hit the real problem.

    Update: Re-reading the thread, I think I misunderstood something in the discussion and I'm just non-sequitizing here, and repeating dws. (And making up words like 'non-sequitizing'.) By way of salvaging the post, let me add that whether someone is a thinker or feeler seems to me to be independent of whether or not they really question their assumptions or first judgements.

    -- Frag.
    "Oh. Never mind." -- Miss Emily Latella.

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