Dynamic Types
Dynamic Types: ESE, SEI, EIE, IEI, LIE, ILI, LSE, SLI.
A person perceives the world primarily through what they direct their attention toward — and attention is mainly held on the mental functions.
When dynamic aspects are in the mental ring, reality is experienced as a continuous flow of change. Changes feel smooth and interconnected, with blurred boundaries between “scenes.” The observer feels immersed inside this flow, moving along with it. In speech, this manifests as descriptions of processes, tendencies, transitions, and trajectories, often linked by cause-and-effect chains.
In this configuration, static aspects shift to the vital ring. Structures, fixed relationships, and stable qualities are not tracked constantly, but accessed on demand.
A dynamic type therefore perceives the world not as discrete states or fixed positions (“who stands where” or “what is now”), but as direction and movement — where everything is heading. Upon entering a group, they intuitively sense developing trends: where irritation is building, where tension is cooling, or where conflict is brewing. Current states are recognized but remain secondary — merely momentary snapshots within the ongoing flow.
This has nothing to do with fussiness, talkativeness, or extraversion. A dynamic type can be calm and even stubborn, yet their inner perception remains dominated by movement, development, and trajectories rather than static states.
Markers of Dynamics in Speech
Below are markers that have undergone critical validation. Each of them is based on observable properties of speech and behavior, rather than the observer’s subjective impression.
Marker 1: Vocabulary of becoming
The use of words that describe gradients and gradual change: “increases,” “thickens,” “accumulates,” “slows down,” “grows.”
Test: does the phrase “more and more” fit naturally?
“The volume of information increases, while the percentage retained decreases.”
Note: this test works better with descriptive and analytical speech than with recounting objective facts. Even a static type can say “it kept getting worse” when describing an objectively worsening situation. The marker is reliable when a person describes their perception of a situation, not external events.
Marker 2: Describing the static through actions
A dynamic type tends to describe objectively static situations through the absence of actions.
“And a cartridge just sits in the barrel.”
“I already have a lot of useful information, but since I don’t read it, it’s not really in my head yet.”
This marker is one of the most reliable because it captures a mode of perception, not a formal textual feature. It cannot be faked stylistically.
Marker 3: Verb aspect
A preference for imperfective verbs even when describing the past (“was arguing,” “was saying,” “was looking,” “was figuring out”), rather than perfective ones (“argued,” “said”).
“I was arguing and saying that everything they call ‘Introverted logic’...”
Note: verb aspect depends on genre—descriptions of habitual actions use imperfective for everyone (“I usually go to the store”), while recounting a specific event uses perfective for everyone (“I went to the store”). The marker works when the speaker has a choice—and consistently prefers one form.
Marker 4: Boundaries between scenes
Scenes flow smoothly into one another through causal links (“because,” “and then,” “at the same time,” “nevertheless”). Text fragments are highly interdependent—removing one disrupts the meaning of the others.
“At first they typed me as LII, I was like okay, I’m a LII. I understand the description is nonsense and you shouldn’t really rely on it, but still I needed something to start from. Back then I read the description and thought—well, it fits…”
Important clarification: the marker is not “whether there is a chronological sequence” (everyone has that when recounting events), but how the connections within that sequence are structured: flowing vs. discrete.
Marker 5: Dominance of semantic verbs (in descriptive speech)
When describing people or situations, a dynamic type avoids purely verbless constructions, preferring meaningful verbs: “visits people,” “doesn’t rush anywhere,” “takes care of loved ones by working and earning.”
Marker 6: Gradual increase in detail (auxiliary)
A gradual shift from general to more detailed descriptions over the course of narration.
This marker is weaker than the others because it depends on the observer’s interpretation. It should be used only as supporting evidence, not as a standalone indicator.
Non-Working and Incorrect Markers
Dynamics in Real Life (Case Study)
Let’s consider the manifestation of Dynamics in speech using Diana as an example.
TASK 1. Narrative mode: “Recall a conflict situation and describe how it unfolded.” This naturally activates process, sequence, and events. This task tests the basic mode.
Diana’s full response:
So, basically, the situation, the situation. Well, actually, I haven’t really had anything lately, because for the past few months I’ve been working on my thesis, so I’m like a mole, I don’t come out of my hole. But among conflicts… well, there was this kind of delicate situation, to be honest, not exactly a full-on conflict.
So, we had a trip. Well, for those who don’t know, we’re kind of theater people, we travel with performances. So, before the day we leave, we have a rehearsal, we gather equipment, gifts, balloons, I pick out costumes. And we have a full run-through rehearsal, and there’s this one girl there. She’s kind of like… a “Natasha” type. Pretty immature, like, “I want this, I don’t want that.” That kind of person.
So, I was assigned a role. Actually, there were two performances… well, not important. The point is, we’re rehearsing, and it’s her scene, and she doesn’t come out. And I ask her, “Why aren’t you going on? It’s your scene, take the microphone, go.” And she says, “You don’t really need me there. I… I’m not going.”
I ask, “Why?” And first of all, I just had this wave rise up in my throat, because before that I had spent an hour looking for her costume, picking things out, because she didn’t want this one, didn’t want that one, “I don’t want this.” I mean, I’m generally fine when people want to change costumes, because I don’t like that either, the whole “let’s wear this today, that tomorrow.” If people show initiative, I’ll help.
But what made me furious was that we had spent so much time, and now she’s not going. That’s basically time wasted.
So I think, okay, if I start telling her off now—like, what the hell did you come here for, why did I pick a costume for you, why did we do all this stuff for you, we did so much so that you could go, we even arranged paperwork so she’d be let off from university if needed—why all that, and why are you saying this now? We’re leaving in like ten hours, we’re basically heading out, and you’re saying this now?
I think, okay, no, I can’t. She’ll just walk out and slam the door. So, okay, I need to be calmer.
I kind of let it go a bit and say, “Listen, we need you. Yes, your role is small, secondary, but it’s a connecting role. It appears in almost every scene. You’re necessary.”
She counters: “But your role in that performance is small too.” And yes, there are two performances—one where I have a main role, another where it’s smaller. I say, “Yes, but then my time on stage increases fourfold, and I have a lot of costume changes in that performance. I need to manage that, because we might not make it in time, and that scene is complicated.” I say, “We need you. I can’t manage alone without you.”
So I start pressing on that: “Yes, we need you, you’re valuable,” that kind of tone.
Then her next argument was… what did she say… basically, “I don’t want to, I want to sleep. I won’t have any days off, because we travel on Sunday, rehearsals on Saturday, so no days off this week.”
I say, “Yeah, I’m tired too. I want to sleep too. But you’re already here, so no backing out. It’s too late. You’re going, it’s not up for discussion.”
Then she said something else. I pushed again: “No, you’re going, because a costume has been chosen for you, a gift prepared for you, paperwork done for you. If you didn’t want to go, you should’ve said so two days ago. Tomorrow you show up at 6:30 a.m. like everyone else. This is not up for discussion.”
So yeah, that was it. She showed up, everything was fine. I don’t know if she was offended, but I don’t really care. That’s the situation.
Analysis:
The first thing that stands out: the speech doesn’t just describe events—it pulls the listener through them, almost by the hand. There are barely any pauses.
Connections and transitions. The speech is held together by constant linkers: “so… then… like… and… I think… okay… if… then…”. This is not a list of facts but a stream of decision-making in real time. The listener learns not only what happened, but how the internal process unfolded: “first I wanted to pressure her—then I stopped myself—chose a strategy—then adjusted again.”
Modeling alternative branches. Diana constantly simulates options right in her speech:
- “if I start telling her off now… she’ll slam the door”
- “I need to be calmer”
- “if that happens—I won’t have time to change”
This is not just a narrative—it’s almost a scenario simulation where possibilities are played out and immediately verbalized.
Lack of fixation. Even when Diana gives evaluations (“immature,” “it made me furious”), these are not stopping points or final judgments—they’re just part of the flow. She doesn’t dwell on them or treat them as independent objects.
Interdependence of fragments. If you remove any piece from the middle, the surrounding parts lose context. The fragments are not self-contained—they generate each other.
Markers:
- Marker 2 (description through actions): even objectively static situations are described as processes — “I spent an hour looking for a costume,” “we did a lot”
- Marker 3 (verb aspect): predominance of imperfective forms (more obvious in the original, Russian text)— “was looking,” “was choosing,” “wanted”
- Marker 4 (scene boundaries): boundaries are blurred; transitions are causal
Preliminary assessment: the speech is entirely organized in a process-oriented way. However, this is still only the narrative mode, which by itself tends to pull toward dynamics. Verification in other conditions is needed.
TASK 2. Self-description through generalization: “What are you like in a conflict?” This checks whether the person shifts into describing states (“I am like this,” “I become like that”) or still speaks through actions.
Diana’s full response:
I actually recorded a very long voice message at first, then realized I started giving examples anyway and ended up explaining everything through examples, so I decided to make a new one, shorter, and try without examples.
But the point is this: look, there’s a dispute, and there’s a conflict. If we’re talking about a dispute or discussion, then the main thing there is truth. The goal isn’t to prove who’s right, but to find some kind of shared truth. Very often that’s what happens—truth is somewhere in the middle. But a conflict is different: there you need to be right. In the end, truth doesn’t really matter—it’s about being the last one speaking, figuratively speaking, about not being the one who runs out of arguments, but the one who still has some left. Basically, to win through argumentation.
And that’s generally what I do.
Okay, I’ll still give an example. We had a conflict with another participant a long time ago, when I was in my first year. She had a very strong victim complex, and she often let us down in work—she’d disappear somewhere, or something would happen, she could vanish for months. There were a lot of issues with her, honestly. And this constant complaining about life really got on my nerves more than once—it was hard to deal with.
And when we had that conflict… that’s when it stopped being just a dispute. For me, a conflict is when emotions kick in, when I start losing control. In a discussion, I still treat the person more lightly, like, okay, I won’t push this topic, I see it’s hard for them, maybe it touches something sensitive, I won’t go there. I stay careful, respectful, with some sensitivity, some empathy.
In a conflict, I switch that off completely. That’s it. There’s a moment when I absolutely don’t care what you feel, what you think, your inner world—none of it matters. That’s like a final threshold you cross, and there’s no way back. No matter how the conflict ends, that person is basically crossed out of my life as someone I need to treat kindly or with any positive intent.
She was one of those people, and she pushed me to that point. Well, she had pushed me long before, but at that moment I was still holding back because my friends were trying to treat her well. But at some point she crossed the line hard—actually not even with me, but with a friend.
She left her position without telling anyone—basically quit, you could say. We had a festival, and she just left, said nothing, and because of that all her responsibilities fell on my friend and another person. My friend literally worked herself to the point of bleeding feet, got a fever afterward; another guy has heart problems, he shouldn’t be running like that, but he had to, and they almost had to call an ambulance—all because she just left, saying nothing, because her stomach hurt.
Then days later we meet again, when she finally shows up, and she starts saying how she spent the whole day lying down, how bad she felt, how her stomach hurt, and then she starts complaining about life, about her thesis—and that’s a whole separate story. What finally pushed me over the edge was her complaining to a friend who had just barely recovered, still covered in bandages, almost ended up with pneumonia, while she was talking about how her stomach hurt for a few hours. That just felt wrong.
So when it comes to things like this, how do I argue? She had a certain range of topics she could use against me: the festival she left, our activities, the trips, and also her personal issue—basically that I’m “rude.”
My argumentation was structured like this: I broke down each point and showed that the issue was with her. For the festival—I said, you left, you abandoned the work, you didn’t warn anyone, and that’s why no one believes you about your stomach.
Second, about roles—it was simpler: you don’t attend, you don’t improve your vocals, you can’t be given roles if you’re not improving. She said she studies at home with a teacher—I said there’s no visible result. You only see results when you actually attend regularly; once you stop, they disappear.
Third, about me being rude—I said, in what way was I rude? And even if I was, we’re talking about you. You complain that things don’t work out, that you’re not cast, and you blame others. I told her: even if I’m speaking harshly, you’re responsible for everything—because in each case you didn’t do what you could have done.
Based on that, you simply have no right to complain, especially to someone who did your work for you.
That’s a short version—there was a long monologue with all the evidence. But the point is, my goal was to corner her, to leave her without arguments. Of course, I was telling the truth—but when you argue, you shouldn’t lie. Or rather, if you distort something, you mix truth with it in such a way that you can point to it and say, “Look, this is true,” and the person will assume the rest is true as well.
That’s actually a bad method—but if there’s no other option, it’s still possible.
The point is, I try to corner the person. My goal isn’t to prove I’m right—it’s to deprive them of the ability to argue their position.
Honestly, I don’t even remember what exactly triggered it—my emotions took over. Back then I didn’t even have that structured goal; now I can articulate it. At the time I just wanted to express everything I thought about how she constantly complains and has no right to complain, given how people helped her and how she let them down.
Anyway, I ended up giving an example again, but the point is: to corner the person with arguments—that’s my goal.
At the same time, I try to suppress my emotions as much as possible. Because if I go emotional, it turns into “you’re this, you’re that,” and then it’s over—I’ll just say I don’t want to communicate anymore and walk away. That’s the final stage, when everything is completely broken.
Analysis:
This is the key moment of the experiment. Diana herself notices the attempt—and its failure: “I recorded a long message, then realized I started giving examples… decided to try again without them.”
And what happens? Within a few paragraphs, she is fully back inside a story. Not just slipping into an example—it’s as if she’s pulled there.
Key observation: even when Diana formulates general principles, they sound not like fixed traits but like processes:
- “there is a dispute → there is a conflict → if it’s a dispute, then… if it’s a conflict, then…”
- “my goal isn’t to prove I’m right → my goal is to corner → to remove arguments”
Her self-description is organized as an action algorithm, not as a set of static traits.
She doesn’t say “I am harsh” or “I am rational.” She says: “I do this → because → if → then.” Even the statement “I don’t care about the person’s feelings” is unfolded as a switching process: “there comes a moment when… it turns off… a threshold is crossed.”
Markers:
- Marker 2: even self-description is expressed through actions
- Marker 3: action verbs dominate — “corner,” “structure,” “pressure,” “argue”
- Marker 4: fragments are interdependent, flowing into each other
- Marker 1: gradient vocabulary — “builds up,” “rises,” “kicks in”
Intermediate conclusion: thinking remains process-oriented even when the task is to describe a state. This is no longer an effect of the question format.
TASK 3. Forced statics: “Describe yourself in a conflict without stories, without ‘first–then,’ without examples.” This checks whether a person can maintain a static mode of description or whether they get “pulled” back into process.
Diana’s full response:
Oh my God, you’re setting quests or something, I don’t know. I almost fell just now.
Well, I’m a calm person. I always try not to involve my emotions as much as possible—they only get in the way. I break things down into facts, I rely on evidence, on arguments. I don’t resort to personal attacks—well, I can, of course, but that’s only when everything is already really bad.
In general, I argue. I approach it with a cool head. If we’re talking specifically about a conflict—when it’s already the final stage—then that’s when I no longer care about what the person feels, what they want, what they’re like. It becomes a purely substantive conversation. I completely switch off sensitivity, sympathy, anything like that.
My only goal is to corner the person. And I don’t necessarily do it only with pure arguments. I mean, pure evidence without manipulation—that’s needed in disputes or discussions where truth matters. When truth doesn’t matter, you can use manipulation. One common method—I wouldn’t say I like using it, but I don’t avoid it—is to mix truth into an argument that may be partly false.
So even if the person points out an inconsistency, I can say: “Well, this part is true, right?” And usually the person concludes that the rest must also be true.
There are many such methods—distorting information, presenting it in an order advantageous to me. For example, knowing how a person argues and what they rely on, I can present things in a sequence that leads them to the conclusion I want.
It’s hard without examples. What’s the problem… Anyway, these are different ways of conducting an argument.
The point is: using a cool head, to corner a person with arguments—to trap them so that whatever they say either undermines them or leaves them with nothing to say.
Often, if a person is not very sharp—or rather, if they understand where I’m leading—then at the moment they realize I’ve cornered them, they give up. Others don’t understand what’s happening and keep arguing, and then the trap closes, so to speak.
And the person comes to the conclusion themselves. I think I told a story once about how I led a guy back in elementary school to conclude that he was stupid—he arrived at that himself, at least in his own head, simply because no other option remained.
So yeah, that’s how I behave in a conflict. And when everything gets really bad—when I’m pushed too far—then yes, I switch to personal attacks, I can shout something like “you’re all like this,” slam the door and leave. At that point I’m no longer arguing—I just explode and leave, and until I calm down, I’m not capable of continuing.
There were cases where I had to continue, but it’s very hard, really very hard. So yeah, that’s it.
Analysis:
This response is the most revealing, because it clearly shows two distinct phases.
Phase 1: temporary maintenance of statics. In the first few sentences, Diana does hold the required format:
- “I am a calm person”
- “I approach it with a cool head”
- “I argue”
- “Emotions are not needed, they only interfere”
These are pure static formulations—fixed characteristics, descriptions of “what I am like.” Diana can operate in this mode.
Phase 2: return to process. With the slightest drop in control, she returns to her default mode:
- goal → “to corner”
- mechanism → “through arguments”
- strategy → implicit sequencing and structuring
- branching → “if the person understands… if not…”
- scenarios → “the person reaches the conclusion, the trap closes”
Even her traits are explained through mechanisms. “I am calm” is immediately unpacked as: “because emotions interfere → I switch them off → I act through arguments.” The state is explained as a control process.
The key moment is that she explicitly notes the difficulty: “It’s hard without examples. What’s the problem?”
This is almost a direct admission: it’s difficult for her to sustain static thinking—not because she lacks the ability, but because it’s not her “native” mode.
Source: S. Ionkin
See also: The Link Between Statics-Dynamics and Extero-Interoception
Dynamic Subgroups
Temperaments
- EJ, or Linear-Assertive Temperament (Extroverted, Rational, Dynamic)
- IP, or Receptive-Adaptive Temperament (Introverted, Irrational, Dynamic)
- 'Caring', or 'Comforting' Romance Style (Sensory, Dynamic, Judicious)
- 'Victim', or 'Provocateur' Romance Style (Intuitive, Dynamic, Decisive)
Cognitive Styles