| Primary Functions (Strengths and Motivations) | Shadow Functions (Sources of stress) |
| Ingrained: Introverted Feeling (Fi) | Extraverted Feeling (Fe) |
| Associative: Extraverted Intuition (Ne) | Introverted Intuition (Ni) |
| Exploratory: Introverted Sensing (Si) | Extraverted Sensing (Se) |
| Regulatory: Extraverted Thinking (Te) | Introverted Thinking (Ti) |
The ingrained nature of IFN is to get a feel of people and things around so as to generate and maintain a harmonious state of existence. An IFN maintains an internal model of ethics and expectations and uses it to navigate the world. They are immediately aware if something is off in their system that can disrupt the harmony and can quickly figure out the necessary calibrations to restore it.
New information is gathered by looking for new and interesting patterns in daily experiences, using extraverted intuition. Looking for and forming new patterns is one of the most interesting activities for IFN as well as the most preferred way of interacting with the world. Combined with ingrained Fi, they are good with picking out the patterns that indicate the internal states of others. This gives them the ability to understand the other person’s perspective and hence they are capable of being good listeners.
IFN’s exploratory is made up of Si. Which means IFN’s maps of do’s and don’ts are strongly inscribed in memory. When IFN encounters a new problem or information, it is quickly compared with all past experiences of similar sort and comes up with something that is ethically rewarding as well as intuitive. When a strategy that maximizes inner harmony and intuition cannot be picked, the IFN mostly sets it aside and hence routine maintenance tasks that are not internally rewarding might be avoided again and again, making IFN reluctant of addressing these type of tasks. So the exploratory of IFN works in a way to pick working strategies from memory as well as pushing unrewarding routine tasks into oblivion.
Regulatory of IFN is made up of Te, which is used to fine tune the other functions in a way that is efficient. The IFN expects world to be efficient and to reward actions that are ethically correct and novel. Combined with ingrained Fi, they generally don’t employ any action that can create conflict. If the world seems unfair, the IFN can recoil into their own self and may ignore and blame the world for the internal anguish and might avoid further interactions of similar kind to avoid conflict. When things go well, the IFN may not take enough credit because they might assume that it is what is naturally expected of them.
Type codes in other systems: INFP (MBTI), INFj (Socionics)