ISFJs often mistype as INFJs
Almost every type has another type (or two) which it will gravitate toward mistaking for itself. This is particularly common when the auxiliary or dominant function is shared. (To learn about functions, read: The Eight Cognitive Functions.) In the case of ISFJs and INFJs, the auxiliary (Fe) is shared – giving both types a strong humanistic interest. Both types can make excellent counselors, advisors, human resource personnel, and social activists. And both types approach these pursuits with a reflective, introspective angle – not simply imbuing a career or project with energy, but with wisdom too.
As an INFJ myself, when I was new to typology, I mistook many ISFJs I encountered for being INFJs like myself because we got along so well and shared so much in common. When I sit down with an ISFJ one-on-one, I’m almost always guaranteed to have an enriching conversation full of fascinating gossip. Yes, gossip. This may sound like an odd, trivial tangent, but it isn’t – because gossip is one of the key mechanisms by which ISFJs and INFJs can be mistaken for one another.
Important side note: Gossip is a neutral word meaning “to discuss people.” It was intentionally given a negative slant in order to discredit women talking to one another about what they experience. This discrediting allowed women to be more easily taken advantage of by men. Gossip need not be “tearing someone down” or “slandering” them – but, when deserved, gossiping can be a way of spreading the story of someone’s abusive behavior so that others are warned. Gossip can also be a way of helping share stories that nurture our understanding of relationships, psychology, and our friends.
ISFJs and INFJs both love gossiping, and thus, they will naturally do this together. When young and single, these conversations are often centered around friendship, dating, and sexuality. When married, these conversations often center around domestic disputes and their resolutions. With children, gossip is largely about child development and their child’s friendships. With chronic illness or among elderly, these conversations often drift to health.
Another aspect of ISFJs and INFJs that is remarkably aligned is their tendencies toward order. Both types tend to feel a strong need to facilitate their inner wellbeing through creating a supportive external environment. In my experience, ISFJs tend toward more minimalistic surroundings to create more internal clarity, whilst INFJs tend toward more busy – yet highly organized – environments with a lot of color and quirky personality.
Both types have Se relatively toward the middle of the stack (mix-max function for INFJs, which is in the fourth position, and top of the shadow stack for ISFJs, which is the fifth position). This seems to be a sweet spot for Se usage where being artistic, embodied, and enjoying sensory experience is rich, often focal, and yet engaged in with great conscious awareness. Both types tend to have affinity for yoga, dance, collage-making, interior decorating, floral arrangement, and painting – to name a few things I’ve seen as trends among those I’ve met.
ISFJs mistaking themselves for INFJs is quite similar to the dynamic of INFPs mistaking themselves as INTPs. I*FJs share an extroverted auxiliary (Fe), just as IN*Ps do (Ne). And remember, your first extroverted function is what people witness in your behavior. It’s what you witness yourself doing! This is why I*FJs are often mistaken from the outside as extroverts – because Fe can be very social – although in I*FJs the Fe is still subservient to an introverted function and often manifests in the personality more as human interest rather than a strong desire to be around people all the time.
Another thing that is powerful about shared auxiliaries is that this means you will share blindspots! (Your auxiliary determines your tertiary. For I*FJs, that’s Fe determining Ti. These also determine positions six and seven on your “shadow stack” – which is positions five through eight. The seventh position – your blindspot – is the furthest function from your dominant function, which is demonstrated by my cognitive priority map. You can find your blindspot by taking your tertiary and inverting the facing – thus, Ti tertiary relates to Te blindspot.) Thus, ISFJs and INFJs both have a Te blindspot, which can manifest as a dread of taxes (or any paperwork), or a frustration with having to plug oneself into any large, complex, external system. Although my experience is that ISFJs seem to cope with this better, perhaps because Si “likes tradition” (so to speak).
Your first extroverted function (Fe in this case) is also what determines the last letter in your behavior code – J versus P. (To learn more about J and P behaviors, read: The Deeper Meanings of Judging and Perceiving and What does the difference between a J and P really look like in practice?) Thus, I*FJs are J types specifically because of their Fe auxiliary. (Just like IN*Ps are P types because of their Ne auxiliary.) Thus, as we know in typology, for introverts, your dominant function doesn’t match your external behavior. ISFJs lead with Si, and INFJs lead with Ni, and these are perceptual functions even though they are J types.
I*FJs are both perceiving types on the inside: ISFJs (Si) are referencing – at a deeply unconscious level – a pool of expectations and somatic memory, and INFJs (Ni) are referencing a pool of symbolism and constructs. These two unconsciously referenced pools are actually very similar. Si dominants (IS*Js) and Ni dominants (IN*Js) are both highly interested in narratives. They want to know where things have been and where they are going. Si tends to be a bit more “in the present” than Ni, but this is a general trend among all S types versus N types. Ni dominants are notoriously more concerned with the future than any other type – and I can testify to this very strongly as an INFJ with an INTJ mother (and many Ni-dominant close friends).
The future orientation of Ni-dominance, however, is not a great “tell” when trying to distinguish between ISFJs and INFJs. Both types will express much concern – if asked – about where their life is going. This concern will be particularly strong if they feel they are “looking for the one” or hoping to have children but worried about time running out. Both types may express concern about loved ones dying in the future, or developing illness as they age. I**Js, in general, give a great deal of thought to the unfolding of their life and of the lives of people close to them.
In short, ISFJs most often mistype as INFJs because they share relational interest (Fe auxiliary) and because they share introverted perception dominance (Si versus Ni) and because culture has recently decided that being N is more sexy than being S. Thus, a rash of people are now mistyping as N types, whereas the opposite was true in the mid-1900s.
Picking apart ISFJs from INFJs can be done through a series of clues.
The first clue I often look for is the relationship with writing. INFJs often are novelists or aspire to be, and even their texts tend to be long and detailed. ISFJs, in contrast, rarely seem to be driven to write. They seem to be perfectly apt at writing, and don’t report struggling with it, but they don’t seem to be “on fire with a burning need to write” the way so many INFJs are. The propensity for INFJs and writing is so great that I believe a very strongly disproportionate number of famous novelists are INFJs.
The second clue is in holidays and traditions. Both types tend to enjoy special occasions, decorating, special meals, and gatherings of loved ones. However, ISFJs almost always have a stronger affinity for long-held traditions and blood-ties. An ISFJ may feel genuinely panicked or despairing at a situation where a precious tradition is being cast aside, whereas an INFJ is much more likely to shrug or even embrace a new mode of celebration. INFJs often go so far as to be contemptuous of holiday traditions, favoring what feels meaningful to themselves in their own very personalized, individual way.
The third clue comes in the way these types communicate. INFJs tend to speak more quickly, with bursts of excitement about particular concepts, hobbies, or new interests. ISFJs, while perfectly capable of getting excited and speaking in a more enthusiastic way as well, generally tend toward a more calm, stable pace. INFJs are more prone to long monologues, moving from narrative to political rant back to personal narrative. ISFJs, while also happy to tell stories, tend to stick to narratives without side ventures into conceptual territory.
A fourth clue arrives in the level of rigidity about the future. Ni-dominance comes with an incredible flexibility about the future – yet, you may have to know an IN*J for a while to see just how dynamic their sense of future is. Why? Because Ni-dominants tend to speak very confidently about their visions, which makes it seem like their view of the future is very solid, complete, and certain – which it absolutely is . . . until it isn’t. IN*Js can be very abrupt about revising their entire future plan in light of new information. In contrast, Ni shows up in eighth position for ISFJs, making them often rigid – or uncertain – in their ideas for the future. ISFJs often have a mix of things they’re definitive about (such as desiring monogamy), and things which they feel entirely unsure about (such as whether they want children). (These two examples could easily be swapped on a given individual!) For the things where the ISFJ is definitive, we don’t see the same flexibility we see in an INFJ at all. The INFJ may go through phases of monogamy, then polyamory, then back to monogamy. Meanwhile, the ISFJ never wavered over the decades.
If these three clues are insufficient to tell apart an ISFJ from an INFJ, then one can go back to basics with telling the difference between S and N types. To do this, I’m going to expand into many frameworks that help elucidate typology at large, but we’ll start by examining language.
When working on distinguishing type, it can be very helpful to listen carefully to predicates they utilize. INFJs tend to use terms like “see” and “looks” as you will see in phrases like: “I see that,” or, “As far as I see…” or, “What I see is…” or, “It looks like it’s going to be a long day.” I believe this is because of the symbolic nature of N. In particular, Ni lends itself very highly toward visual-dominant thinking. Even if you’re not making “pictures” in your head, your visual cortex can organize information in a way that is both visual and spatial in nature. ISFJs (and most S types I’ve known), in contrast, tend to use more somatic predicates with higher frequency, such as: “I’m struggling to come to grips with it,” and, “It just felt wrong,” and, “I knew it in my gut,” and, “Just a touch of it.”
Using the predicate indicator should only be used very supplementarily, however. While S types tend to utilize more somatic predicates like “feel” and “touch,” I’ve also found that Fi dominants (I*FPs) also tend to use these more often. Furthermore, language – like all parts of a person’s behavior – is highly influenced by environment. (An S type child may speak much more like a classic N type if they had two N type parents, for example.) Thus, there will always be exceptions to anything ever outlined in typology. I explain some of these exceptions brought about by environment with my subtype model, which we’ll discuss later on.
Another classic way of telling S and N types apart through language comes from classifying the content which someone brings up. If they bring up the feel of the weather, that’s concrete and sensory (S). If they bring up the pattern of the weather, that’s abstract (N). If they mention that their parent has an illness and detail the caretaking and treatments involved, that’s concrete (S). If they mention what the illness means to them and what they believe it means about society, culture, or the future, that’s abstract (N). S types are more likely to engage in exercise because it feels good in the moment, or because they want to be more attractive or healthy. While N types may cite the same reasons for exercise, they will be more likely to attach something more abstract to it, such as wanting to maintain their mental capacities in old age.
An ISFJ may make a photobook and say, “I love looking back on these memories.” An INFJ may make a photobook and say, “It will be fun showing this to people I meet over the years.” An ISFJ may have an old hoodie and say, “I love how this old hoodie has stayed with me so long – it’s like it is a part of me.” An INFJ might say, “I love how this hoodie is so well constructed that it has lasted this long. One day when it does wear out I’m going to cut it apart and reuse this wonderful fabric.” Once again, remember that either type could say either of these things quite readily. It’s only in aggregate tendency that we can suss out type.
You might ask, if ISFJs and INFJs are so hard to tell apart, is there actually a real difference at all? Might typology all be a load of nonsense? Every now and then, over the years of studying typology, I have faced these doubts. But then I meet yet another ISFJ who is absolutely obsessed with holidays, and yet another INFJ who is writing a novel. The archetypal patterns which are organized through this system very undoubtedly exist – even if all our explanations for exactly why or how are merely hypotheses.
When people are genuinely very hard to place, we can always find where their type development was nudged by their childhood environment. For example, if an ISFJ wasn’t able to exercise their Fe-auxiliary due to a very lonely or hostile upbringing, then they may have developed their Ti or Ne “out of order.” The result is that their Ti or Ne acts more like their auxiliary than Fe. Now you have an ISFJ who isn’t as humanistic, gossip-oriented, or relationally driven. Instead, ISFJs who become Si-Ti or Si-Ne (instead of the typical Si-Fe) are more likely to be interested in martial arts, economics, history, or collecting antiques.
Carl Jung gave us the eight cognitive functions – offering eight types. Isabel and Katherine gave us the dominant and auxiliary pairings to describe sixteen types. Many later luminaries, such as Harry of Cognitive Personality Theory (CPT), have proposed that our tertiary function is actually our auxiliary function (with very good reasoning). Now, I bring you a more granular system, showing each of the sixteen types to have three subtypes. I believe many typologists have proposed the notion that the auxiliary and the tertiaries are swapped because theirs really is swapped – as it is for me. (I’ve also met another INFJ who is swapped the same way that I am, and we have a remarkable amount in common.) More on my subtype model is outlined in here: Cognitive Priorities: How Attention Shapes Who You Are.
After all of this, you might be thinking, “But I’ve tested as an INFJ, so clearly that is my type!” And, of course, you may be right. Maybe you are an INFJ. However, I’ve noticed that many people (not just ISFJs) are very drawn to the notion that INFJs are “the rarest type.” This isn’t strictly true – INTJs are arguably just as rare, and once you split across gender, then female INTJs are more rare than either male or female INFJs, although male INFJs are still significantly more rare than female ones. But rarity . . . does not equate to value. Only in a capitalistic society where we’ve put scarcity on a pedestal do we get the wrong idea about rarity. Things that are rare often are rare because we don’t need as many of them – or because having too many would lead to dysfunction. As an INFJ myself, I can attest to the fact that a world full of nothing but INFJs would be highly dysfunctional. I believe I have a lot of value to offer, but the type of value I have to offer is specifically something that society doesn’t need piles of. INFJs are more suited to advisory roles – often being proposed as a royal advisor, oracle, or consultant. ISFJs, in contrast, are arguably more essential: they tend to be the ones who take the time for the deep one-on-one nurturing that every human needs. While INFJs do become nurses sometimes, I would argue that ISFJs will be more likely to take on this role without as much burnout (especially if the medical system involved is a less oppressive and hostile one than the one I’ve experienced).
Maybe your test results – whatever they were – are correct, but I find it valuable to consider that these tests are done via self-assessment which are based on your perception of yourself. And that isn’t the only folly. To learn more, read: Six Reasons Why Tests Don’t Work Very Well.
As always, we must consider age. All types become harder to distinguish as we age because we tend to grow in ways that explicitly make up for some of our deficits. Most notably, people tend to grow toward their min-max function. For the ISFJ, that’s Ne. Thus, while young ISFJs may feel strongly inclined to follow the pattern laid out for them in their teens and twenties, somewhere along the way, ISFJs are likely to become much more curious, expansive, and interested in new things. Thus, an ISFJ in their forties or fifties might look nearly extroverted, or more heavily engaged with N and T pursuits than a younger ISFJ.
I’ve been blessed to have several close ISFJ and INFJ friends over the years. Both of these types are very dear to my heart and my life. I hope you’ve found this exploration of their similarities and differences insightful and helpful to your journey. If you’re still not sure – or you simply want to get to know yourself better than ever before – book a consultation with me.
— Raederle
AUTHOR, NEUROTYPOLOGIST,
LIFE COACH & NUTRITION CONSULTANT