What Type is BBC's Sherlock?

[Love_Conquers_All]

After watching through season four. I believe he is ISTP don’t ask me why, it is just my instinctual intuition.

 

[Reverist]

I say ISTP

Because...

Ti - his powerful use of deductive reasoning to form a conclusion based solely on the evidence

Se - he observes and examines the physical environment, even performing experiments to validate assumptions and gather verifiable physical results

Ni - he can imagine the next logical step and create a single story to logically fit a scenario and its results

Fe - he clearly lacks skill around social interactions and struggles to connect with people, but the fact that he seems aware of this awkwardness (even to a small degree) points to him being able to read people on some level, which can also provide real world feedback in addition to Se

No Te - he is uncomfortable forming a conclusion until all the evidence has been examined and verified

No Si - he is bored by mundane, routine cases; his interest is ignited by the most challenging cases, and its quite unpredictable in how he will go about solving a case

No Ne - he focuses far less on various possibilies than on a single solution

No Fi - he seems driven to find what is empirically true and not what he feels true to him

I love BBC's Sherlock Holmes. And I don't know many people irl who understand or enjoy talking about mbti or the cognitive functions, so this is fun

 

[Lurk]

If your answer is INTJ, you understand INTJs as superficially as the stereotype they'd like you to believe. Te doesn't work like that.

My straightforward method:

I or E?: I
N or S?: N
T or F?: T
J or P?: J

Te vs. Ti, Ni vs.Ne etc.is hard to tease out well enough to type someone. Our behavior is influenced by our environment, and no one can confidently call any introverted function. We all use both.

 

[bonfire]

It's difficult to tell. BBC's Sherlock differs a bit from the original Sherlock (who is, without a doubt, an ISTP). BBC's version seems to focus more on the intellectual side, and he seems a bit more broody than original Sherlock who's more of a cool cat. So I voted INTP. But idk, he still seems like a mixture of INTP and INTJ with unusual deftness of Se to me.

 

[Gaze]

Agree with @bonfire. Seems a mix of INTP & INTJ.

 

[bonfire]

Agree with @bonfire. Seems a mix of INTP & INTJ.

From Season 3 onward I started to see him as Benedict Cumberbatch, the INFJ, for some unknown reasons.

 

[Ren]

In hindsight, I do think BBC Sherlock is IxTP.

I think I have a better understanding of Ni and Ti at this point and I don't think BBC Sherlock is Ni-dom.

 

[bonfire]

Sherlock Holmes (from the books, I mean) is certainly an Se/Ni user. This quote proves it.

 

[Ren]

Sherlock Holmes (from the books, I mean) is certainly an Se/Ni user. This quote proves it.

Haha, relatable af

 

[Happy Phantom]

Still INTJ... If he were an INTP I would know.

 

[Misadventure]

I see absolutely zero J in him. ISTP is a good bet. Watson is a J.

basically this

If your answer is INTJ, you understand INTJs as superficially as the stereotype they'd like you to believe. Te doesn't work like that.

I also chose ISTP for reasons already stated. It's easy to mistype a fictional character almost as easily as it is to misunderstand the J and P functions.


- https://www.psychologyjunkie.com/20...standing-what-the-jp-preference-really-means/

 

[charlatan]

Intuitive-dom types generally don't build this intricate web of interrelations among data points from obscure sense impressions they collect

I'm happier thinking of someone like Greg House from the show to be an intuitive dom --- he usually reasons with lots of leaps that he rarely has close to full evidence to support....and rarely goes over the facts meticulously.

 

[Wyote]

I'm happier thinking of someone like Greg House from the show to be an intuitive dom --- he usually reasons with lots of leaps that he rarely has close to full evidence to support....and rarely goes over the facts meticulously.

It's a good compare and contrast to make the case for Sherlock being ISTP. I like this argument. It boils down to how you want to personally interpret the way they illustrate Sherlock's mind. In a straight forward sense, you as the audience see a lot of combing through details, but this could also be interpreted as simply an attempt at illustrating Ni and not really doing it justice. Super TiSe would make more sense for Sherlock if you interpret the information being presented as sort of happening in real time. Whereas with House you don't necessarily see how he even gets from point A to point B because it's so intuitive and sometimes he doesn't even know himself, often claiming something is "just a hunch." Sherlock does similar things, but his "just a hunch" sort of commentary is more to be cheeky because he knows exactly for certain, whereas for House it's more like he is being intuitive so he's pretty sure, but not positive.

I really think the main difficulty here is Benedict being an NF trying to play an ST. You can see the T come through, but he's just got too much of an N presence to overcome that as an actor and be a convincing S. If you just read a script without seeing him, it'd probably be obvious they were going for ISTP.

 

[Asa]

It is difficult to type fictional characters. There are always elements of the writers' types, stereotypes of types of people (whether MBTI, or not), and the actor's type woven into the final character. (As @Wyote said, BC bring an NF, pretending to be ST.)
Characters are usually ideals (even ideals of people who are not ideals) with "human aspects" added for texture. Human aspects can be grabbed from anywhere: personal experience, observation of other people, lifted from other literary/film works, etc.
When writers try to type their characters, they usually rely on stereotyping, not on real people who are that type.
Sherlock is meant to be the perfect sleuth – an idealization, not a type.
So, it may be better to argue what plural "types" Sherlock is, rather than singular type.

 

[charlatan]

It's a good compare and contrast to make the case for Sherlock being ISTP. I like this argument. It boils down to how you want to personally interpret the way they illustrate Sherlock's mind. In a straight forward sense, you as the audience see a lot of combing through details, but this could also be interpreted as simply an attempt at illustrating Ni and not really doing it justice.

I think Sherlock probably has strong tertiary Ni, at least, based on the vibe I get of how he works

Of course it's always possible in any case that Sherlock's explanations are more after-the-fact than how he really reasons

There are clues, though, that lean me to TiSe with good tertiary Ni .. for one thing, a theme you get from both Poirot and House, who are what I'd call intuitive doms, is that neither likes the idea of (as Poirot says in Suchet's production once) 'ferreting' about for clues... that is, the way Poirot seems to work is to sit back and imagine how the crime could've occurred.
In the Davenheim case, Poirot expressly defends his preference (and it also shows up in The Clocks, where Colin constantly expresses irritation with Poirot for de-emphasizing being out there looking around).

That has a distinct vibe from Sherlock who seems to love the thrill of involvement in the thick of the action, looking for clues. e.g. wanting to feel every quiver of the beating heart.... when he's coming back from faking his death. Though, I should note, I don't think Sherlock's a S-dom -- he does seem more mentally driven than that.

It's also worth noting that there's also the T vs N (not just S vs N) to consider. T hates when the logic is not explicit. It's akin to when someone writes down an argument, kind of like Ramanujan the mathematician did, and skips a lot of the steps because they intuitively know it is right...but they don't really know how to fill in a more formal proof that passes muster in the realm of logic. Usually Ts are hard-asses about ensuring the logic, not just the intuition, is totally there -- logic is the part we all can see, vs intuition is clearest to the person apprehending.

Based on this, it's worth asking -- even if Sherlock were a N>S type, would he be a T-dom, or a N-dom?

I usually go for fictional characters with what they give evidence for, even if it's not 100% conclusive -- that is, if I see a case for TiSe, but I don't see much contradicting it, the fact that it could still be other types doesn't play a role in my typing of Sherlock, so much as I'd say if Sherlock were a real life character, I'd want to more thoroughly investigate him first before concluding

 

[charlatan]

Another minor note is any super-brilliant character will be presented as having insights that seem, to the untrained eye, to be out of nowhere. However, the question is how they experience their process of thought.

A good way to go about this is to ask something like what would a super-brilliant TS type look like --- that is, if we type Sherlock as a N-dom, it's worth asking how he could have been so as to be closer to a TS type than to people like Poirot or House.

 

[Gaze]

I really want to change my vote to INFP, just to see what people would say

 

[Happy Phantom]

ESFJ.

 

[bonfire]

I really want to change my vote to INFP, just to see what people would say

ESFJ.

Negativists!