JamsPlace - Fighting Fantasy and other walks of life

The Logician personality type is fairly rare, making up only three percent of the population, which is definitely a good thing for them, as there’s nothing they’d be more unhappy about than being “common”. Logicians pride themselves on their inventiveness and creativity, their unique perspective and vigorous intellect. Usually known as the philosopher, the architect, or the dreamy professor, Logicians have been responsible for many scientific discoveries throughout history.

Logicians are known for their brilliant theories and unrelenting logic – in fact, they are considered the most logically precise of all the personality types.
They love patterns, and spotting discrepancies between statements could almost be described as a hobby, making it a bad idea to lie to a Logician. This makes it ironic that Logicians’ word should always be taken with a grain of salt – it’s not that they are dishonest, but people with the Logician personality type tend to share thoughts that are not fully developed, using others as a sounding board for ideas and theories in a debate against themselves rather than as actual conversation partners.

This may make them appear unreliable, but in reality no one is more enthusiastic and capable of spotting a problem, drilling through the endless factors and details that encompass the issue and developing a unique and viable solution than Logicians – just don’t expect punctual progress reports. People who share the Logician personality type aren’t interested in practical, day-to-day activities and maintenance, but when they find an environment where their creative genius and potential can be expressed, there is no limit to the time and energy Logicians will expend in developing an insightful and unbiased solution.

Logician (INTP) personality
They may appear to drift about in an unending daydream, but Logicians’ thought process is unceasing, and their minds buzz with ideas from the moment they wake up. This constant thinking can have the effect of making them look pensive and detached, as they are often conducting full-fledged debates in their own heads, but really Logicians are quite relaxed and friendly when they are with people they know, or who share their interests. However, this can be replaced by overwhelming shyness when Logician personalities are among unfamiliar faces, and friendly banter can quickly become combative if they believe their logical conclusions or theories are being criticized.

When Logicians are particularly excited, the conversation can border on incoherence as they try to explain the daisy-chain of logical conclusions that led to the formation of their latest idea. Oftentimes, Logicians will opt to simply move on from a topic before it’s ever understood what they were trying to say, rather than try to lay things out in plain terms.

The reverse can also be true when people explain their thought processes to Logicians in terms of subjectivity and feeling. Imagine an immensely complicated clockwork, taking in every fact and idea possible, processing them with a heavy dose of creative reasoning and returning the most logically sound results available – this is how the Logician mind works, and this type has little tolerance for an emotional monkey-wrench jamming their machines.

Further, Logicians are unlikely to understand emotional complaints at all, and their friends won’t find a bedrock of emotional support in them. People with the Logician personality type would much rather make a series of logical suggestions for how to resolve the underlying issue, a perspective that is not always welcomed by their more sensitive companions. This will likely extend to most social conventions and goals as well, like planning dinners and getting married, as Logicians are far more concerned with originality and efficient results.

The one thing that really holds Logicians back is their restless and pervasive fear of failure. Logician personalities are so prone to reassessing their own thoughts and theories, worrying that they’ve missed some critical piece of the puzzle, that they can stagnate, lost in an intangible world where their thoughts are never truly applied. Overcoming this self-doubt stands as the greatest challenge Logicians are likely to face, but the intellectual gifts – big and small – bestowed on the world when they do makes it worth the fight.

Friendships
Many of the usual motivations for making friends – emotional support, social validation, shared routine – simply don’t apply to Logicians. More likely, these concepts are met with disdain, as people with the Logician personality type prize intellectual depth above all else. It is not easy to become good friends with Logicians, but if there is a common interest and a common train of thought, the connection is likely to spark instantly, surprising everyone else who thought they had this distant personality type pegged.

Logician friendships are knowledge-based, defined by the exchange of ideas, theories, and concepts, and those who aren’t able to keep up with this, or who have sharply differing tastes (don’t talk to Logicians about celebrities) will find stony faces that border on rude. To Logicians, communication is often more of a nuisance than a pleasure, and conversation is reserved for topics that they find meaningful, or for people they already like enough to stick it out.

Unless there’s a natural affinity for this intellectual style, few have the patience to try to penetrate their shields, and Logicians are left with a naturally small circle of good friends.
Other Analyst personalities are a natural fit for Logicians, who share their passion for new ideas, riddles and solutions. People with the Logician personality type are knowledgeable and intelligent, and have a great deal of respect for those who can keep them on their toes in this regard. They will gladly help to tackle any dilemma thrown their way, offering up sound advice and rational solutions. As valuable as these qualities are though, they are not always the best approach – when it comes to emotional support or advice in dealing with matters of the heart, Logicians are at a loss.

It’s not that Logician personalities don’t feel – quite the contrary, they actually have very strong sentiments. But this is not their strongest suit, making Logicians’ emotional reactions strong, untrustworthy and naturally in need of being tempered by their well-trained logic and rationalism.

While they may not be able to help directly with these sorts of problems, Logicians help indirectly with unambiguous and reliable friendships. Logicians’ friends need never worry about power games or emotional baggage – they are liked for their minds and abilities, not their status or possessions. While it may not be easy to establish true friendships with Logician personalities, once the link is made, they will provide years of understanding and thought-stimulating ideas, making them well worth the effort.

Logician Strengths
Logician (INTP) strengths
Great Analysts and Abstract Thinkers – People with the Logician personality type view the world as a big, complex machine, and recognize that as with any machine, all parts are interrelated. Logicians excel in analyzing these connections, seeing how seemingly unrelated factors tie in with each other in ways that bewilder most other personality types.
Imaginative and Original – These connections are the product of an unrelenting imagination – Logicians’ ideas may seem counter-intuitive at a glance, and may never even see the light of day, but they will always prove remarkable innovations.
Open-Minded – Logicians couldn’t make these connections if they thought they knew it all – they are highly receptive to alternate theories, so long as they’re supported by logic and facts. In more subjective matters like social norms and traditions, Logicians are usually fairly liberal, with a “none of my business” sort of attitude – peoples’ ideas are what matter.
Enthusiastic – When a new idea piques their interest, Logicians can be very enthusiastic – they are a reserved personality type, but if another person shares an interest, they can be downright excited about discussing it. More likely though, the only outward evidence of this enthusiasm will be Logicians’ silent pacing or their staring into the distance.
Objective – Logicians’ analysis, creativity and open-mindedness aren’t the tools of some quest for ideology or emotional validation. Rather, it’s as though people with the Logician personality type are a conduit for the truths around them, so far as they can be expressed, and they are proud of this role as theoretical mediator.
Honest and Straightforward – To know one thing and say another would be terribly disingenuous – Logicians don’t often go around intentionally hurting feelings, but they believe that the truth is the most important factor, and they expect that to be appreciated and reciprocated.

Logician Weaknesses
Logician (INTP) weaknesses
Very Private and Withdrawn – While Logicians’ intellectualism yields many insights into their surroundings, their surroundings are ironically considered an intrusion on their thoughts. This is especially true with people – Logicians are quite shy in social settings. More complicated situations such as parties exacerbate this, but even close friends struggle to get into Logicians’ hearts and minds.
Insensitive – Oftentimes Logician personalities get so caught up in their logic that they forget any kind of emotional consideration – they dismiss subjectivity as irrational and tradition as an attempt to bar much-needed progress. Purely emotional situations are often utterly puzzling to Logicians, and their lack of timely sympathy can easily offend.
Absent-minded – When Logicians’ interest is captured, their absence goes beyond social matters to include the rest of the physical world. Logicians become forgetful, missing even the obvious if it’s unrelated to their current infatuation, and they can even forget their own health, skipping meals and sleep as they muse.
Condescending – Attempts at connecting with others are often worse than Logicians’ withdrawal. People with the Logician personality type take pride in their knowledge and rationale, and enjoy sharing their ideas, but in trying to explain how they got from A to B to Z, they can get frustrated, sometimes simplifying things to the point of insult as they struggle to gauge their conversation partners’ perspective. The ultimate insult comes as Logicians give up with a dismissive “never mind”.
Loathe Rules and Guidelines – These social struggles are partly a product of Logicians’ desire to bypass the rules, of social conduct and otherwise. While this attitude helps Logicians’ strength of unconventional creativity, it also causes them to reinvent the wheel constantly and to shun security in favor of autonomy in ways that can compromise both.
Second-Guess Themselves – Logicians remain so open to new information that they often never commit to a decision at all. This applies to their own skills as well – Logician personalities know that as they practice, they improve, and any work they do is second-best to what they could do. Unable to settle for this, Logicians sometimes delay their output indefinitely with constant revisions, sometimes even quitting before they ever begin.

Career Paths
Logicians are solitary, eccentric, and independent – none of which is listed as desirable for corporate positions, which are usually designed for very different personality types. Logicians duly struggle in finding careers that meet their needs, but what they do bring, qualities in much higher demand, are creativity, a passion for theoretical methods and ideas, and an entrepreneurial, innovative spirit. If they are able to put this better foot forward to secure a position in a suitable line of work, people with the Logician personality type will find that, whatever the job listing says, these “less desirable” qualities will prove an asset after all.

Logician (INTP) personality
A Poem of Numbers
Chief among Logicians’ interests is exploring and building models for underlying principles and ideas, even going so far as to find these concepts, in their own way, beautiful – this makes them natural mathematicians, systems analysts, and career scientists, especially in more abstract fields such as physics. There are many other careers that allow Logicians to explore these interests, but many of them are far too rooted in uninteresting practical applications. As useful as it is to develop a better vacuum cleaner, it is no Large Hadron Collider.

Logician personalities are self-driven and have very high personal standards – “good enough” is never good enough – but have few environmental needs. Despite this relative simplicity, they are often hard for more people-centric types to understand. Logicians live primarily in their own heads, and have little interest in social distractions like chitchat and motivational speeches.

All Logicians really want is to immerse themselves in an interesting project, and anything that interrupts that, be it overactive managers, the need to manage others, or office parties or meetings, are simply unwelcome burdens.
For this reason, the flatter the workplace hierarchy, the better, making small, technical workplaces and fields such as law, forensics, and laboratory research very desirable for Logicians. Insightful and open-minded managers who can accommodate these needs will find their Logician subordinates to be a tireless generator of brilliant and unique ideas. However, many people with the Logician personality type may do away with the immediate hierarchy altogether, opting instead to provide their services on a freelance basis as consultants.

Emotional Values: A Mere Illusion
Where Logicians do not thrive is in workplaces that require them to provide a high degree of emotional satisfaction – cruise ship masseuses they are not. Logician personalities struggle to understand emotional exchanges, and service-oriented positions will prove baffling and exhausting for them. Though Logicians are talented analysts who are perfectly capable of understanding the theoretical importance of customer service, the day-to-day application of such a scheme is simply better left to more people-oriented personality types.

Business is growing more complex every day, and this complexity is managed with technical systems, economic theories, and data. The need for novel approaches is stronger than ever for people and organizations to distinguish themselves. Though general people skills are often phrased as a must, it is the technical work that creates something to talk about, and it is in this pursuit that Logicians thrive.

Work as business analysts and corporate strategists is well suited to Logicians, but they can also move things forward as data analysts, mechanical, electrical and software engineers, and even as technical writers and journalists, provided the field is interesting enough. If they can smile and shake hands just long enough to establish themselves as the brilliant innovators that they are, people with the Logician personality type will find that whatever the expectations for social conduct, it is the qualities unique to them that are truly in demand.

Conclusion
Armed with a powerful intellect and vivid imagination, Logicians can overcome or outmaneuver obstacles that seem unbeatable to most. At the same time, their many quirks, such as often unconstrained rationalism, lead to many misunderstandings. Those misunderstandings end here. What you have read so far is just an introduction – we have a great deal more to tell you about the Logician personality type.

At some point in reading through your results, you probably hit a tipping point. You went from trademark Logician skepticism to “huh…” to “wait, what?” You may even be a little uncomfortable because you are really not used to being understood, even by the people you’re closest to.

Chances are, you’ve accepted that as part of who you are, and maybe even grown proud of it. But embracing that disconnection isn’t a requirement for Logicians. It’s a misused defense mechanism, leading you down a lonely, inefficient path – gaining insight into yourself and others is so much more rewarding.

Logician (INTP) personality
This is no date-of-birth gimmick, and no, we did not spy on you – rather, we’ve spent years studying Logicians’ life stories, experiences, and patterns in hundreds of our surveys. Step by step, insight by insight, we discovered how those who share your qualities and outlook have overcome the challenges they’ve faced. You are a unique individual, but you are not alone in this.

It’s true. Sadly. Even if this meme went international it wouldn’t compare to the efforts of our health workers. I’m sharing it with pride having worked in that sector myself among these truly amazing people.