INTP and socio-economical status of

[WALKYRIA]

There appear to be three sorts of childhoods and three sorts of adult social adaptations made by the gifted. The first of these may be called the committed strategy. These individuals were born into upper middle class families, with gifted and well educated parents, and often with gifted siblings. They sometimes even had famous relatives. They attended prestigious colleges, became doctors, lawyers, professors, or joined some other prestigious occupation, and have friends with similar histories. They are the optimally adjusted. They are also the ones most likely to disbelieve that the exceptionally gifted can have serious adjustment problems.

The second kind of social adaptation may be called the marginal strategy. These individuals were typically born into a lower socio-economic class, without gifted parents, gifted siblings, or gifted friends. Often they did not go to college at all, but instead went right to work immediately after high school, or even before. And although they may superficially appear to have made a good adjustment to their work and friends, neither work nor friends can completely engage their attention. They hunger for more intellectual challenge and more real companionship than their social environment can supply. So they resort to leading a double life. They compartmentalize their life into a public sphere and a private sphere. In public they go through the motions of fulfilling their social roles, whatever they are, but in private they pursue goals of their own. They are often omnivorous readers, and sometimes unusually expert amateurs in specialized subjects. The double life strategy might even be called the genius ploy, as many geniuses in history have worked at menial tasks in order to free themselves for more important work. Socrates, you will remember was a stone mason, Spinoza was a lens grinder, and even Jesus was a carpenter. The exceptionally gifted adult who works as a parking lot attendant while creating new mathematics has adopted an honored way of life and deserves respect for his courage, not criticism for failing to live up to his abilities. Those conformists who adopt the committed strategy may be pillars of their community and make the world go around, but historically, those with truly original minds have more often adopted the double life tactic. They are ones among the gifted who are most likely to make the world go forward

Not wanna make it sound like INTP's are directly genius, but I think there's something going on in here...

This site suggests that there are mainly two types of intelligent, the hardworkers commited but boring ones who are expected to make money in society and the creative ones. I see this all the time btw... Jay people would be the former and *NTPs would to be the latter.
The site also suggests that these differences might stem from socio-economical disparities and thus insinuates that personnality is the product of the money of your milieu in childhood. I also believe this, many of my friends who are coming from highly educated milieus(sons of professors..etc) are oftentimes conformist and high achievers although boring people with no lateral thinking and unable to take risks... It's striking.
And then on the other side, I hear INTP's complaining about how plain lazy asses they are, procrastinators, unmotivated and underachievers, but yet intelligent and creatively, artistically and humoristically gifted... does that mean that INTP's were necessarily born in socio-economical poor families ?

Personnaly- before I encouterd MBTI- I always thought that me being rised in a very poor(culturaly aswell as economically) and unbalanced environnement was the genitor of my personnality. What Do you think about this equation ?

intellect x (SOCIO-ECONOMICAL STATUS + childhood wellbeing)= personnality

c ya

 

[Pyropyro]

I have a very lazy "J" roommate so them being hardworkers isn't the norm.

True, hardworkers trumps talented every time. However, hardworking talented people take themselves and others to a different kind of excellence.

Socio-economic status have a great impact on one's development but this is not confined to INTP's. Aside from denying a child with potential learning and networking opportunities, poverty also warps the child's mindset to consider poverty as the norm. Without parents or other supporting people, this might cause the child to lose ambition.

Yes, the environment can affect your personality BUT you can change yourself for the better.

The formula is pretty nice though we might need someone with more social science background to refine it further.

 

[Ex-User (5841)]

Can you add what the third type is and/or link the site? I'm curious now...

Otherwise, I see a lot of twos here...

 

[WALKYRIA]

Yes, the environment can affect your personality BUT you can change yourself for the better.

You talkin bout psychological resilience ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_resilience

Resilience describes people who adapt successfully even though they experience risk factors that ‘stack the odds’ against them showing good developmental outcomes. Risk factors are related to poor or negative outcomes. For example, poverty, low socioeconomic status, and mothers with schizophrenia are correlated with lower academic achievement and more emotional or behavioral problems. Risk factors may be cumulative, carrying additive and exponential risks when they co-occur.[33] Even when these risk factors occur in the lives of children, resilient individuals are those who show developmental competence nonetheless. They avoid the negative outcomes that are usually associated with those risk factors. These positive outcomes are attributed to some protective factors, such as good parenting or positive school experiences.[38]

The better ?
I used to think like that too, but I'm definitely not that sure.... U can forget the pain of having suffered while young kid or having lacked/lost something, but then it strikes you back years later in unexpected ways.(problems that weren't problems become problems, like not wanting to adapt or socialize, not wanting to seek help if necessary, somatization, bad attachement styles, lost of framework and thus lost of motivation to do somthing, depression,isolation, blur future ..etc)

And if change is possible, I don't believe it is the problem... Change might happen, u might not suffer as much, but in fine you would find yourself completely different from the norm and thus live outside society.


The third type is irrelevant to our discussion: it's the dropout, more likely to be NP's too I guess.

 

[Pyropyro]

You talkin bout psychological resilience ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_resilience

I prefer to call it grit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H14bBuluwB8

The better ?
I used to think like that too, but I'm definitely not that sure.... U can forget the pain of having suffered while young kid or having lacked/lost something, but then it strikes you back years later in unexpected ways.(problems that weren't problems become problems, like not wanting to adapt or socialize, not wanting to seek help if necessary, somatization, bad attachement styles, lost of framework and thus lost of motivation to do somthing, depression,isolation, blur future ..etc)

And if change is possible, I don't believe it is the problem... Change might happen, u might not suffer as much, but in fine you would find yourself completely different from the norm and thus live outside society.


The third type is irrelevant to our discussion: it's the dropout, more likely to be NP's too I guess.

Let's just call what you discussed here as "inner demons" if you don't mind. Yes, you have to live with them until death but they can be addressed and their influence minimized.

Either way, fame or poverty, you WILL be different from the norm but I must disagree on the living outside society part.

We're INTP but we're still humans. We are a step away from reality but is still bound by its rules. We need others to sustain ourselves and to grow by being influenced and then influencing others. We just have to balance that "getting away to recharge" and the "need to bond with others".

As for the "dropout", uh let's just say that their biographies were a bit romanticized.

 

[Ex-User (5841)]

Link (far, far down. There's plenty of other interesting stuff to read as well): http://prometheussociety.org/cms/articles/the-outsiders

The third type is irrelevant to our discussion: it's the dropout, more likely to be NP's too I guess.

If we're examining the outcomes of growing up in three different environmental conditions, it would be a good idea to actually include the third, no? It's not like we're pretending unsavory conditions don't exist, right?

And finally there are the dropouts. These sometimes bizarre individuals were often born into families in which one or more of the parents were not only exceptionally gifted, but exceptionally maladjusted themselves. This is the worst possible social environment that a gifted child can be thrust into. His parents, often driven by egocentric ambitions of their own, may use him to gratify their own needs for accomplishment. He is, to all intents and purposes, not a living human being to them, but a performing animal, or even an experiment. That is what happened to Sidis, and may be the explanation for all those gifted who "burn out" as he did. (Readers familiar with the Terman study will recognize the committed strategy and the marginal strategy as roughly similar to the adjustment patterns of Terman's A and C groups.)

Aldous Huxley once wrote:

Perhaps men of genius are the only true men. In all the history of the race there have been only a few thousand real men. And the rest of us--what are we? Teachable animals. Without the help of the real man, we should have found out almost nothing at all. Almost all the ideas with which we are familiar could never have occurred to minds like ours. Plant the seeds there and they will grow; but our minds could never spontaneously have generated them [4, p. 2242].

And so we see that the explanation for the Sidis tragedy is simple. Sidis was a feral child; a true man born into a world filled with animals--a world filled with us.

Needless to say, I identify with 3.

 

[Ex-User (5841)]

This site suggests that there are mainly two types of intelligent, the hardworkers commited but boring ones who are expected to make money in society and the creative ones. I see this all the time btw... Jay people would be the former and *NTPs would to be the latter.

Now then...

I agree with this "intellect x (SOCIO-ECONOMICAL STATUS + childhood wellbeing)= personnality" but I don't see this as definitive enough to categorize specific MBTI types. I don't think anything in bold is well-founded. The more unstable and threatening the childhood is, the more neurotic the adult is expected to be. If anything this hints at an epigenetic mechanism for neuroticism.