You're probably on to something. I frequently get impressions like, good Lord, can't you tell this person is schmoozing? Or that they're trying to hide their agitation? Same with people prone to black and white thinking. And it comes after just a minute or two. And it's often right. (Though I constantly doubt myself and possible confirmation bias.) I wouldn't say it's preternatural but better than most people, apparently. I almost never vocalize these impressions. Because the reasons why are inexplicable, and few have any reason to trust my gut instinct over any other person's.
100% right. My wife is an INFP and in 16 years of being together, she has not been wrong about someone once, even when I vehemently disagreed with her at the time. But she would never say she's good at reading people to a stranger lol.
Re:Jessica Livingston
by lotsofpulp on Friday June 23, 2023 @04:30PM
(#36451840)
Why is Myers Briggs being referenced when it has zero substance to back it up? I thought it was common knowledge that pop psychology stuff was garbage, at least amongst this website’s readers.
That "common knowledge" is wrong. Myers briggs is not great for scientific studies since it splits people into 16 buckets instead of sliding scales (like the Big 5, which is used in research). But MB is an incredible mental toolkit to have.
Re:Jessica Livingston
by lotsofpulp on Friday June 23, 2023 @05:36PM
(#36452469)
Why would something with no evidence behind it be an incredible mental toolkit?
See the whole criticism section.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
MB is astrology for nerds.
Astrology has a one in twelve chance of accuracy since the only variable is birthday.
With the four discrete variables in MBTI, I can type people with 90% accuracy after a conversation.
The buckets themselves are also false, so no.
Re:Jessica Livingston
by mattnewton on Friday June 23, 2023 @06:57PM
(#36453355)
Isn’t this often just the Barnum effect, especially when ground truth is established by asking people if you are right? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect
Not quite zero substance, the four dimensions are reasonable close to some of the five leading components of personality.
The problem is that each letter comes from splitting a normal distribution in half right at the middle where maximum likelihood is. So most people won't be very strongly attached to most of their letters.
That's why people who claim to have this ability almost never do. Its not in the nature of someone who can to really talk about it this way.
I'd also argue that courts are definitely not the place to have this. There's good reasons why this is likely to fail in a stressful setting (convicting someone of a crime or reviewing evidence) vs a situation of neutrality. Once you start mixing in other factors I imagine this gets blurry real fast. Its all very context dependent.
To tack on further, courts by structure also have a burden of proof aspect to limit / remove the human element as much as possible (in theory anyway) and that is very important.
[0]: https://www.simplypsychology.org/infp-personality.html