Frequently Asked Questions about Socionics

Can I develop all my functions equally? [ back to top ]

Equal development of all functions is not really attainable. This would imply that someone has no preference for sensing or intuition, logic or ethics, etc. Jung states that he did indeed come across people like this, but found their "equal development of functions" to be the result not of purposeful self-improvement, but of almost no development of functions at all! Augusta and Jung both state that healthy, happy individuals have a clearly-defined type structure dominated by a well-developed leading function.

Harmonious type development, then, does not mean not equal development of all functions, but a condition where the individual clearly relies on and has achieved a high level of mastery of his strong functions, and his weak functions he or she has developed to a competent level through close cooperation with other individuals — especially complementary types.

Is socionics a 'hard' science? [ back to top ]

No, not in the sense of being based on experimentally obtained data and repeatable experiments. Augusta, the founder of socionics, emphasized that all of her claims were based on observation and study and that she was simply elaborating on Jung's typology. If we take people whose types have been correctly identified, it is possible to obtain various hard data on behavior and interaction between them. However, the main weakness of socionics as a potentially empirical science is that socionic types themselves cannot be determined mechanically, but must be identified by a human specialist, which introduces subjectivity issues. As a conceptual structure socionics is easily supportable logically.

How can I view online translations of Russian sites? [ back to top ]

Open the page you would like to view and paste the following link directly before the complete address of the page you are at:

http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?lp=ru_en&trurl=

Not all pages can be viewed translated this way; it depends on how the language code is defined on the page.

How are the socionic types distributed? [ back to top ]

The socionic types are approximately evenly distributed in society. Read this article for an in-depth discussion of this topic and why I make this claim.

What are the correct socionic type names? [ back to top ]

The correct full type names are "intuitive logical extravert," "sensing ethical introvert," and so forth. The proper abbreviations are, as in Russian, ILE, SEI, and so on (the abbreviation of the full type name). Some people use names borrowed from the MBTI (ENTp, ISFp, etc.), but they are not technically correct and mislead readers into thinking the typologies are equivalent. As a professional translator, I recognize that terminology should correspond as closely as possible to the language of the original. Socionics has been or will be used in many different countries, and these different countries should be using very similar terminology rather than creating their own unique terminology in each language. That's the way new scientific terms are translated from language to language.

Why are there only 16 socionic types? [ back to top ]

Some people wonder why there are only 16 recognized socionic types when there exist 40320 possible orderings of 8 functions. Augusta based her model on Jung, who said that there were two different varieties of each of the eight basic types, depending on which of two functions came second. In her observations of these types she recognized patterns in the way they perceived different types of information and created logical rules for the ordering of functions, as well as descriptions of each function, that reflected these patterns. Read about the rules for building a type model here.

What about socionic subtypes? [ back to top ]

Many socionists use subtypes for convenience as a way of describing differences between people of the same type. I personally do not use subtypes (at least for the moment) for a number of reasons:

1. Many different subtype systems are used; none is universally recognized. There are a number of socionic subtype systems that are unknown in the West.
2. The theoretical underpinnings are unclear and are not sufficiently logically consistent with socionics theory.
3. The idea of introducing more discrete categories of types doesn't appeal to me. I'd prefer to describe individual differences between people of the same type using continuous, not discrete, descriptors.
4. When I look at people of the same type I sometimes see subsets of characteristics, but there seem to be are more than two or four subsets.