ENTPs are confident, bold, intense, and love a good debate.
Reading time: 5 minutes
This series of short articles touches on several aspects of the ENTP personality type.
You can jump straight to any section by clicking the links below, or keep reading to learn about the definition of the ENTP personality type.
ENTP stands for Extraverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Perceiving.
In the popular Myers-Briggs or 16-personalities tradition, all personalities belong to one of 16 types. Each type is defined by preferences across these four dimensions:
Here’s how to understand the ENTP’s place on all four dimensions:
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ENTPs have an extraverted attitude or orientation.
ENTPs tend to focus more on the objective world of people and their external environment, while an introverted attitude leads to a greater focus on the inner, subjective world of concepts and ideas.
ENTPs prefer to use the cognitive function of intuition over sensing when taking in information about the world.
This dimension, intuition vs. sensing, is known as the perceiving function in MBTI theory.
Intuition refers to perception from sources other than the sensory system. ENTPs prefer to use their perception of abstract patterns, connections, “gut feeling” about a situation, rather than relying more heavily on perception directly through the sensory system (sensing).
ENTPs prefer using their thinking function when judging information and assessing values and needs among people.
This dimension, thinking vs. feeling, is known as the judging function in MBTI theory.
By prefering thinking over feeling as their judging function, ENTPs lean heavily on logic, consistency, and correctness when making decisions, rather than focusing on others’ emotions, desires, and perceptions.
As a perceiving type, ENFPs tend to present their perceiving function of intuition to the external world.
Because they present their perceiving function externally, other people see ENTPs as highy intuitive, curious, and interested in abstract concepts and ideas.
The four-letter types from MBTI theory encode each type’s attitudes and preferred cognitive functions.
For the ENTP,
From this, we can determine how the ENTP prefers the four cognitive functions of intuition, sensing, thinking, and feeling:
Why? ENTPs have an extraverted attitude (E) and a perceiving attitude (P), so they present their perceiving function (N) to the external world.
Like all extraverted types, ENTPs prefer an orientation to the outer world, so they present their strongest cognitive function (N) to the outer world and other people.
ENTPs’ secondary function, thinking, is the one they rely on more heavily in their inner, subjective world. This counterbalances their extraverted primary function.
In MBTI theory, the tertiary function is the opposite of the secondary function, which for ENTPs is feeling.
Lastly, the inferior function is the opposite of the primary function, which for ENTPs is sensing. The inferior function in all personality types is the least developed function.
According to the MBTI, somewhere between 3% and 7% of all people will be classified as an ENTP.
For comparisons between ENTPs and other types from the 16 Personality typology, visit any of the type pairings below:
