Last week I was too busy writing other stuff, and I actually wanted to tell you all about it today, but a different topic came to mind and it’s so important I’ve decided to write about that one instead: ENTP’s ideas of trust and lying.
My personal trust pattern goes a bit like this: I meet someone, based on my intuition I either trust them or I don’t. If I trust them, they can mess up a lot, and I’ll still trust them in that I’ll welcome them into my life and will forgive their mistakes. However, if I catch them lying to my face without a clear reason even once, even with something small, my trust is gone. And yes, extreme as that sounds, this includes practical jokes.
Nobody likes liars, of course, but ENTPs have a problem with them on a whole new level. If you’re hanging out with an ENTP, even a small lie might break the trust between the two of you, no matter how close you are. That’s not because we’re super sensitive (and remarkably it’s also not because we value honesty over everything, it’s not like we never lie ourselves, and yes that makes us hypocrites). Quite the opposite, it’s a logical, though often subconscious, thing.
The butterfly effect
As ENTPs we lead with our extraverted intuition, and our auxiliary function is introverted thinking. This means we strongly rely on mental models we create in our minds, also using hunches we can’t always explain. Analyzing everything that happens, we make it part of our mental models. These models? They’re amazing. And accurate. And they help us make sense of the world and make our decisions wisely. Not only that: we’re awesome at connecting dots. And more dots. And even more dots. You know what that means? This: we spot a butterfly in the USA, we might very well predict a hurricane in Japan and predict it correctly.
Now imagine you just predicted the hurricane and you spend an enormous amount of time, energy and resources (which could be physical as well as mental) on dealing with it, only to discover there is no hurricane. You re-evaluate your model step by step to see where you went wrong. And then you discover that while your reasoning has been correct all the time, your prediction turned out to be wrong because the information you got from someone was inaccurate. Turns out, it wasn’t a butterfly, it was a bird. And it wasn’t fluttering, it was just sitting there. And now you’ve just wasted all this time/energy/resources for NOTHING.
…
Auch.
Yeah.
Honesty really is the best policy
Any ENTP who’s experienced this kind of waste will instinctively try and avoid it. The easiest way to do that? Make sure their information is correct. If they catch you lying, they will always keep in mind you might do it again in a situation that will have big consequences, even if you won’t mean to. And the trust will be gone.
If an ENTP’s trust is important to you, remember even a very small lie can have very big consequences. This huge butterfly effect deduction capacity of our minds makes it extremely important for us to base our models on reliable information. And if you screw up our models once… we probably won’t give you a second chance.
So if you’re dealing with an ENTP, please try your best and be honest. If you don’t want to tell the truth, don’t. Instead, avoid the subject or question. Just don’t screw up our basis for decision making.
Pretty please.
Thanks.
P.S. if you’re an ENTP, here’s something I’ve learned over the years: there is a reason our dominant function is Ne, not Se or Si. If we have a hunch about something, even though evidence (or what others say) suggests otherwise, in most situations the hunch will be right. Don’t ignore the hunch.
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