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Cause of weaker separability on the Sensing/Intuition axis under MBTI priming

Establish whether the comparatively weaker separability of the Sensing/Intuition (S/N) dichotomy observed in MBTI-based personality priming of LLM agents is caused by the abstract nature of the S/N axis and its subtle manifestation in language-only interactions, relative to the socially grounded Extraversion/Introversion and emotionally related Thinking/Feeling dimensions.

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Background

Using the 16Personalities test, the authors find strong separability for Extraversion/Introversion, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving axes, while Sensing/Intuition appears weaker for some MBTI types.

They hypothesize this is due to how S/N governs information-gathering style that may be less overt in single-turn language outputs, suggesting a need to confirm the mechanism behind the reduced separability.

References

While the Sensing/Intuition (S/N) distinction is still detectable, it appears comparatively weaker for certain specific MBTI types. We conjecture that this may be due to the abstract nature of the S/N axis: unlike the socially grounded E/I or emotionally related F/T dimensions, S/N primarily governs information-gathering style, which manifests more subtly in verbal reasoning and is less reliably expressed in single-turn responses.

— Psychologically Enhanced AI Agents (2509.04343 - Besta et al., 4 Sep 2025) in Section 4.1 (Ensuring Robust Psychological Priming)