Are you familiar with the Myers_Briggs (or Jungian) way of separating thinking and feeling? "Thinking" and "feeling" are two decision making strategies. What it means is essentially that when faced with a questionnaire, about half indicate that they prefer taking decisions on objective criteria and half that they let relationships take precedence, even if it's "illogical". A person tends to answer these questionnaires consistently over long time periods too.

Thinkers generally, and this is from what I hear from my friends who are prevalently thinkers, tend to analyse others as "black boxes", and often lets off steam about how hard it is for them to understand certain people. They have a tendency to resort to mapping out what motives they can have.

I take part in a big BBS about non-perl topics. In these discussion fora - in extreme cases - the thinkers (not all) have a tendency to hurt people (inadvertently) and call others "idiots". Feelers on the other hand are more sensitive to these issues, but appear mushy and put wishful thinking before rational analysis sometimes. Most people are OK of course. I have tested some of these people with questionnaires so I know whether they are thinkers or not :-).

You write:

For instance, if Joe gets a new assignment at work and is upset, it might seem irrational to a thinker at first; however, if we consider that Joe is a Linux zealot and his assignment is to write a Winows 2000 website, then his unhappiness might not seem irrational after all. We can simply assign his attribute as a Linux zealot to another one of the "input channels" to analyze.

...and this is what a thinker would write. Problem is: Do you have the processing power to do it? Or rather, that is not the problem, you most likely do, but what happens sometimes is that you think you have mapped the person out, but you haven't. A feeler instead concentrates on the tone and body language of the person and does not rely on so much data. Both approaches have there place. When I and a friend discovered this thinking-feeling dichotomy we realise why we complemnet each other so well. He is a thinker and he knows a lot about motives, and I can warn him when he's going over the edge in a relationship (I'm a feeler).

Note that of course all people are both thinking and feeling, but in order to function normally and get anywhere in our lives we let one of them take precedence over the other, in order to avoid getting deadlocked in decision making conflicts. Anyways that is the general idea behind the theory, although in many ways it is best suited to self-knowledge.

/jeorgen

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