@PhoenixRising
Interesting, it seems phrenology is something quite different from what we're doing here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology
Phrenology is usually about deciphering the personality from the features of the head, like the eye spacing. You're tying to decipher the personality from the eye movements, and more dynamic features. But it's basically the same principle, in that you also seem to believe these behaviours are static enough to deduce a static type for the person.
Cognitive Type does not aim (or claim) to be a method to decipher people's thoughts. It is a way to decipher the thought processes, the specific functions that define a person's psychology. This is a distinction that should be evident in the explanation of the theory itself.
It is. But if you know someone's thought processes, then you can decipher their thoughts, simply by asking oneself what thing someone would say/do/emote if they would think X, if they only used those thought processes? It's really no different to what programmers do in tech support. If you have the source code, and the precise results, you can work out what they probably did, and 90% of the time, you're right.
One way to test it is by observing function pairs. If you observe a person who seems to have Fe warmth in their speech and an intentional smile, and then you look for the signs of Ti (meticulous hands and cooling down of the face alternately), and they are present as well, then this is one objective piece of evidence to support the theory. Up to this point, I have not seen anyone with the signs of one function without signs of its counterpart.
It's ironic, because in the UK, and in every American I met, which was thousands, meticulous hands in heterosexual men was always considered the sign of an extremely cold personality, because the two almost never occur together, and when they do, there are always exceptional reasons for it. In girls, it's usually the sign of a very feminine desire to look pretty. In homosexual men, it has a similar connotation.
Some girls and gay guys have rough hands. They usually have a tendency to work with their hands, and have a rather brusque no-nonsense personality when it comes to strangers. But the instant that the stranger has demonstrated some politeness and/or some characteristic that the person finds even slightly endearing, the person starts to treat the stranger as if they were best friends. Woe betide anyone who even tries to upset the stranger, because such women have been known to beat such people to a bloody pulp for being nasty to her friend.
As far as proving that the outward signs described do in fact relate to certain functions, this takes reference to Jung's work.
Jung's work references functions in terms of cognition, and gives his own objective descriptions of how they behave.
What we aim to do is provide objective evidence to validate Jung's original theory.
As I said, his theory doesn't need or benefit from such attempts, because he was already very careful to give detailed descriptions of how each type behaved.
That is my personal problem with psychology, there are no surefire ways to identify and confirm a person's psychological functions.
For one, psychology is preferred by INFJs, and one of the pet peeves of INFJs is people who "put people in boxes", which is how they refer to categorising people by such things as which psychological functions they do and do not have.
For another, the way the mind acts, is very unlike a machine. I doubt that Stephen Pinker would argue that humans were born with the ability to drive, because there was absolutely no evolutionary need to drive until about 100 years ago. Still, humans develop that skill.
For another, you seem to be hoping for as precise a science of psychology, as exists currently in physics. Physics was developed over the last 2,000 years. Modern psychology is only about 100 years old. Moreover, the synthesis of the various observations of physics, into the modern precise science that exists today, was achieved almost exclusively by the application of extremely complicated mathematics. Mathematics is almost ignored in modern psychology, except in the application of basic statistics to generate a basic correlation. So it is unrealistic to expect such a synthesis in psychology yet.
For another, there are something like 50 different schools of psychology, which all use entirely different methods of classification to identify factors in cognition, and again, have not yet been synthesised.
So for several reasons, your disappointment is unrealistic.
The Cognitive Type approach is the most objective I've seen so far, since it uses physical evidence rather than pure subjective analysis. In truth, we are operating from a theory in the first place (Jung), but that is indeed how science works. First you formulate a hypothesis, then you construct repeatable experiments to test your hypothesis against, and if you (and many others) get the same results, your hypothesis becomes a theory (most probably reality).
It's true that that is the ideal in science. But as G.K.Brown pointed out, that's the way physics is presented in scientific papers, but is actually conducted in the opposite manner. Usually a scientist first comes up with a pet hypothesis, and then sets out to produce experiments that confirm his hypothesis, and it's only when something is tested in a situation that his hypothesis should also apply to, but he didn't consider in his experiments, that the hypothesis is actually put to the test.
Your theory also doesn't give me any way to test your hypothesis independently. In order to test your theory, we need a way to determine the cognitive type of a person, independently of your hypothesis, and in a way that we all agree to, and only AFTER we have those results, then we can try to apply your theory, and see if it matches with the agreed cognitive types. Currently, you have NOT proposed any way to determine the cognitive type of a person, that is entirely independent of your theory, and that you and all who espouse this theory, would agree to its results. So it's untestable.
This entire premise (and the one that follows it in point #5) uses a gross amount of stereotype and theoretical leaps. The key talent of a well-developed INTP is to meticulously pick up details about whatever subject is being focused on, and create complete, well thought out theories. Just because the human mind is seen by most as a completely unique thing, it truly is just the same type of complex system that we see throughout the universe at a more complex level. It is a real phenomenon, and can be understood objectively just like anything else. Argument about the stereotypical social skills of an INTP is irrelevant here.
As Jung pointed out, and as you probably already have observed, meticulously picking up details and synthesising them to develop complex, well-thought-out theories, takes a lot of effort, and a lot of time, and a lot of meticulous triple-checking with the details. An INTP can do this with any subject. But the criteria are there to be observed in the way the theory is described and applied:
1) Meticulous observation of every detail, however slight.
2) A theory that covers every relevant detail that might occur, however rare, and every possible combination of those details.
3) An intense analysis of each case, that discusses EVERY detail, and explains how every such detail fits into the theory as it already was stated prior to any case studies, in such a way that one could give the theory to a small Se-dom child with a meticulous skill of observation and almost no ability to think, and still comes out with the exact same answers as were expected.
In your examples, we would then expect that your theory covers every type of eye movement, every type of lip twitch, every type of hand movement, every type of leg movement, etc., and how each possible combination would combine. Then we would expect that in each video, you give a blow-by-blow account of ALL details, however slight, resulting in at least 20 details mentioned in each short 10-minute video; Then we would expect that others would ask about other videos of people you'd never even heard of, and a similar analysis occurring of more than 20 details, and with ALL of them, and their precise combination all already having been described, before you had any ability to observe such a video or such a person. We would expect that level of detailed precise predictive ability of at least 20 videos of people that you'd never seen before, and probably a lot more, before your theory would be solid.
In physics, to get a solid result, you need predictability with an error of less than 1 in a million cases. I'm only talking about producing such detailed analyses of 100 people that you've never seen before, and that are unlike anyone you've ever met.
I've been reading the analyses here. They barely come to more than half a page, and with only 5 details mentioned at most, and with only a few videos, and no independent prior decision of their type.
All I've been seeing is people saying "What type is so-and-so? I don't know what type they are. You tell me." and then someone applying your theory to decide the type. Again, it all seems to assume your theory has already been proved.
This theory is a presentation of tediously gathered objective data from repeated experiment/analysis. If something exists in reality, anyone should be able to see it, it doesn't matter what functions they themselves have.
INTPs are known to be extremely boring, because IF we explain our theories, then we do so with tedious long-winded explanations that cover every detail, and that bore the pants off almost everyone, resulting in almost no-one reading their theories. Your videos had MUSIC in it! Your written documentation was incredibly short, and covered very few details.
I doubt that you wrote your notes entirely on paper. I suspect that you wrote them on computer. Thus, you should be able to provide access to them. So why did you provide a PowerPoint presentation and a few YouTube videos? Those are for laypeople, who have no real interest in understanding your theories. Where are the copious notes? Where are the detailed diaries of your observations? Where are the lists of every possible detail of your subjects, that you used to develop the theory from?
I usually overlook that level of detail, simply because I can check a theory against reason, and against my mental recall of people, and if it seems to hold even partially, to then check it against people in the street that I've never seen before. Then I can put it into motion, to give it a much more stringent test. But in your case, that seemed to disagree with your theory substantially. So I would require to see that you've put in that level of detail, to conclude that my initial estimations were not correct.
This is a subjective claim.
I did write "It reads like". You did not notice that? INTPs are supposed to be very precise with their words. Why did you not consider that my words were precise?
Perhaps this is the impression the theory gives you, however it is not intended to be as such. We openly invite others to test the theory in whatever ways they can, in fact I won't fully accept the validity of the theory myself until analysis has been performed by many others and confirmed it objectively.
I'm a mite suspicious of your claim, mainly because IMHO, the way you came across was as if you were already convinced.
However, when I have more time and motivation, I'll write it down on paper, condense it, analyse it, synthesise it, and then pick at random videos that are of people I suspect you would never consider looking at, and then see if it holds. But only AFTER you've given me a method of typing people, that YOU accept, and that is INDEPENDENT of your method. I don't see a point in posting counter-examples, only for you to claim that I've typed them incorrectly in the first place.
Having said all that, I think that you have a point, that there is a connection between facial expressions and typology. But I doubt that it is that simple. I think that it's going to be subjective to each person's experiences, and that means that it will probably involve a LOT of subtlety, and far more than you've currently expressed.
