Socionics Blog

July 2006

Socionic typings as hypotheses

In light of my vision of socionics as a theory that attempts to explain human relations and interaction, every socionic typing can be seen as a hypothesis about what kind of interaction and relationships the person will have with other people we have typed. Significant discrepancies require that we re-think our typings or pinpoint additional factors that are influencing the interaction.

People's conceptions of others' types are remarkably rigid. It is not uncommon to think a friend or family member is a certain type for years on end, then finally realize that they are a different type, and that this new type accounts perfectly for the numerous discrepancies one noted over the years.

As an antidote to this slow-wittedness I recommend looking for the obvious and applying the following rule of thumb when typing people you know well:

Which type would provide the simplest possible explanation of our particular interaction pattern?

More "bad socionics"

Today I wrote a summary of an essay on whether socionics should be taken to the masses. In the article there is a warning that people who are not sufficiently educated or intellectually prepared will tend to use socionics to justify discrimination and bigotry. Here is an excerpt from an article called "Whom to Choose for a Leadership Post" (link is to machine translation):

It is preferable that people with the trait of introversion do not occupy leadership positions, since they do not possess responsibility, activeness, and initiative in activities and, once in leadership, lose the ability to treat people decently.

Much of the rest of this site is written in this same preachy tone and smacks of narrow-mindedness.

The worst of "visual identification"

I generally don't like to criticize other people, but this really deserves it. There is a notorious site on "physiognomical socionics" (in Russian only) that is consistently denounced by other socionists, but still manages to dupe a fair number of people by providing a detailed methodology based on more or less quantifiable physical features, courses, articles, and a sense of authoritativeness and all-knowingness. For instance, in response to a question about why there are so few EII women in his type catalog, the author ("Typologist") replies:

EIIs and, in particular, EII women are in the minority in our society. There is a catastrophic shortage of them. Together with the other intuitive ethical types (IEI, EIE, IEE) they form the least numerous group — 1-5% in different groups. I couldn't believe it at first either. But what can you do — facts are facts. Intuitive ethical types are least common. [source]

The site presents a list of the U.S. presidents and their types (in Russian, but the pictures and universal function symbols should help figure things out easily). Note that the first 15 presidents were all LSEs. In total 32 presidents were LSE, 3 were LIE, and the rest remain uncertain. Assuming these results were obtained using the site's stated "physiognomical" methods, none of these presidents' biographies were studied. Regarding the accuracy of his typings of famous people, the author claims that "more than 90% are typed correctly, by their appearance." Everywhere in his writings, the author uses the term "exact result," saying that other socionists "are not able to guarantee exact typing results," and, if what you want is an exact result, send him pictures and he will tell you your "guaranteed" type. When critics type people on his site differently, he tells them that they "apparently are typing wrong," but that "if they have the desire, they can learn to type better."

This narrow and manipulative approach should go down in history as a farce of socionics.

Inadequacy of popular psychology

I'm often amused by how little is actually understand about human psychology, even when pop-explanations abound. For instance, in reading biographies of famous people one often reads things like:

The roots of his reclusiveness clearly go back to his childhood, when his father mercilessly ridiculed him...

And then in another biography of another person we read something like:

His rebellious nature formed in his childhood under the influence of his father's constant ridicule...

In the first biography, it is suggested that parental ridicule leads to reclusiveness, while in the second it supposedly leads to rebelliousness. In other words, no one really has any idea why people turn out the way they do, although biographers sense that it has something to do with various episodes in people's lives, usually in their growing up years. It will take a much greater knowledge of the human mind and workings of the psyche to move beyond these logically inconsistent pop-psychology explanations of human behavior and development.

Popularity of socionic types

One thing I've noticed is that certain types are more "popular" among the community of socionics enthusiasts. It's possible the types that are popular in the Russian speaking world (what I talk about below) are different from those that are popular in the English speaking world (due to the influence of MBTI-related stereotypes). Forgive me for exaggerating here somewhat:

The tendency is clearly for people to mistype themselves in favor of more "popular" types that are written about and discussed more often. I know SLIs who think they are ILEs and SEIs who think they are IEEs, but never the other way around. EIEs often masquerade as ILE, LSIs as LII, and so forth.

Limitations on function definitions

In the quest for understanding, there is a tendency for people to try to reduce as many phenomena as possible to a single explanation. In socionics (and other typologies) this takes the form of trying to explain all differences between people within a single system of 16 types. In particular, socionics enthusiasts look for functional explanations of highly visible personality traits. There is a constant temptation to switch from studying traits related to information metabolism to more readily visible personality traits. While these two spheres certainly overlap, pursuing one or the other route will lead to two quite different places.

It is crucial for the development of socionics that we recognize our goal to be perfecting a system of types that explains relationships as well as possible. The socionics community as a whole seems to keep this in mind, but this principle has not yet been stated outright, and many socionists have strayed away from it. In my opinion, if socionics strays too far from this goal and drifts to describing personality traits with an ever looser view of intertype interaction, another typology that does explain relationships will eventually come along and take over. There is now intellectual demand for such a typology, so if socionics doesn't meet the challenge, something else eventually will.

In light of socionics' goal as I see it, we can formulate two rules for correctly understanding the socionic functions.

1. In order to be "true," function definitions (e.g. " as a leading function means...") must be limited to the traits that are common to all people who share the given function. Traits of famous people that are an obvious outgrowth of a particular function, but are not shared by all representatives of the type, technically cannot be included in the function definition.
2. Function definitions are interdependent, since their definitions must lead to adequate explanations of intertype relations. In other words:
   - "What is ?"
   - " is everything that complements "
   If we have built function definitions according to point 1, but find that they do not satisfy criterion 2, then we have the "wrong" types. If our understanding (or stereotypes) of is full of things that are not in fact complementary to what we understand to be , then we are probably typing incorrectly much of the time.

Point 2 above is related to what I call socionics' "quality control criterion." The criterion is that however we type, our typings must somehow account for much of what goes on in relationships.