Socionics and Psychology

Do you know what makes SOCIONICS unique as a subject of interest for the “PSYCHOLOGY OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES”? Socionics is the only current in the psychological classification of people that, throughout its long history, relied exclusively on mass observations and a broad oral tradition, rather than on predetermined standard measurement methods (that is, not on questionnaires, as in MBTI or in BIG FIVE).

And what’s the advantage here, one may ask? In the non-fixedness of boundaries and in open-mindedness.

MBTI has always dealt only with four basic dichotomies, and continues to do so to this day. And it knows absolutely no other psychological factors (that is, independent dimensions of human personality) apart from this fixed quartet of its own. Vertness, nality, logic-ethics and intuition-sensorics — and that is all, basta.

Socionics is another matter. Initially, it too proceeded only from this narrow basis. But later, at all stages of its formation, it constantly dealt with EXPERT typing of living people, searching for essential differences between them as a whole, and not by questionnaire — and therefore inevitably involved ALL personality factors in the essential properties of types, not only the selected Myers-Briggs ones.

In addition, three most important socionic innovations greatly contributed to this expanded involvement of absolutely all psychological factors in the marker properties of sociotypes. The first is the introduction of 8 information aspects (functions). Where there are 8 new entities (and also hierarchical combinations between them), one inevitably begins to search for substantive content for these new axes. Along this path, four value-based quadral traits are immediately born, and their substantive content is found rather quickly.

There is another most important trait — Questimity, not accounted for in any way in the Myers-Briggs “four.” And two other innovations of socionics played an important role in its distribution among the 16 sociotypes — first, the Reinin traits, which compelled people to search for the substantive content of each of them, and second, the socionic principle of dual attraction. As a result, substantively filled Questimity, with its opposite pole, Declatimity, was also evenly distributed among the marker properties of all 16 sociotypes. What role did the principle of dual attraction play here? Duals differ not only in logic-ethics and intuition-sensorics, but also in the pole of Questimity-Declatimity. This is because Questimity is also a genetically conditioned trait, and when marital pairs are formed, people of one of its poles are unconsciously attracted to the other, opposite pole, with a different basic set of genes (the general principle of dual attraction is maximal genetic mixing).

Considering dual pairs, Aushra instinctively endowed the members of attracting pairs not only with logic-ethics and intuition-sensorics, but also with Questimity. The Questim EIE is attracted to the Declatim LSI, and not at all to an equally Questim LII, nor to a Questim SLI. If we took an EIE and an LSI with blurred Questim-Declatim traits (and such people also exist in the population, just as there are people with an inversion of the poles of this trait altogether), then their dual attraction to each other would be significantly weaker than the attraction of analogous EIEs and LSIs with pronounced poles of Questimity-Declatimity. This trait was not reflected in Aushra’s aspects (there was not enough insight here), but it entered the integral properties of the types! And since Aushra’s time we have known that Hamlet is not good-natured and is always dissatisfied with something (Questim), and differs in this from ESE, while the “real” LSI, on the contrary, is insensitive to pain and dangers (Declatim traits), which in turn also distinguishes him from the “real” LII. Could it have turned out the other way around? Who knows. Most likely, hardly. Because Questimity has a weak attraction toward intuition and ethics (all of them are slightly more right-hemispheric), while Declatimity has an attraction toward logic and sensorics (both of them, together with Declatimity, gravitate slightly toward the left hemisphere). If, instead of the EIE-LSI pair, Aushra had concentrated her attention on the less noticeable pair in the socion, IEE-SLI, then Questimity-Declatimity might perhaps have ended up distributed among the types of the socion with the most opposite sign possible. But what happened, happened.

In the end, it turned out that all the “standard” psychotypes of socionics were built not on 4 personality factors, but on 15 independent personality factors redundant for 16 types, that is, on 15 orthogonal dimensions (among which at least 7 are very strong). This does not at all mean that all, for example, INTJs automatically turn out to be Questims — no, among them there are both Questims and Declatims (since the trait of Questimity is independent of the others!). But the “classical” LII in socionics is always necessarily a Questim. And those INTJs who are Declatims — in socionics they turn out, simply “by definition,” to be, as it were, not “pure,” but intermediate types, namely LIIs with strong additional accents toward all sociotypes of the Declatim pole.

Thanks to the fact that 15 independent personality traits are distributed among the 16 sociotypes not randomly, but in a quite definite way, according to the Reinin matrix, just 16 sociotypes symmetrically covered the 15-dimensional psychological space. Knowing the distance of any point in this space to each of the sociotypes, one can also obtain the coordinate of this point in the form of its projections onto 15 axes of multidimensional psychological space. Measuring the distances of any point (that is, a concrete person) to 16 reference points in the space of 15 traits turns out to be fully identical to the complete assignment of the coordinates of this point in 15-dimensional Cartesian space. And for this, it is not at all necessary to define 2^15=32768 psychotypes; 16 (that is, 2^4) turns out to be quite sufficient.

Incidentally, why was the quite strong FACTOR OF QUESTIMITY, noticed in socionics and included in the properties of sociotypes, not “caught” in the BIG FIVE trait model based on factor analysis of psychological properties?

Because factor analysis in the case of BIG FIVE was conducted not on people’s answers to questionnaires, but on a list of adjectives describing human personality. That is, it was conducted on linguistic units. From the point of view of brain physiology, such properties as squeamish, irritable, doubting, suspicious, afraid of pain, heavily experiencing loss, having difficulty giving up habits — these are closely correlated traits in their manifestations, provided by the same brain structures and belonging to one and the same factor (namely: the pole of Questim properties). In one and the same person, all of them manifest jointly, correlatively. But from the point of view of factor analysis of adjectives in language, all of them are already substantially different properties, because they refer to different situations that do not overlap in their content. It is precisely for this reason that the BIG FIVE factor model “limps”, missing important real factors and distorting the direction of the axes even of the factors it has identified, that is, in the end it does not correspond to the physiological realities of the brain.

Let us note that in another system, Eysenck’s factor model (based on observations of people and not relying on linguistic analysis), the factor of Questimity is in fact reflected — it is an important component of Eysenck’s factor of neuroticism (since in Eysenck’s model there are only three factors, the resulting neuroticism passed diagonally through several really existing independent, orthogonal factors at once, among which Questimity made the greatest contribution).

Thus, the inevitable conclusion: SOCIONIC TYPES WITH ALL THEIR PROPERTIES, WITH THE TRAITS AND FUNCTIONS BUILT ON THEIR BASIS — THIS IS THE BEST CLASSIFYING SCHEME OF ALL POSSIBLE ONES FOR CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES.

TALANOV’S QUESTIONNAIRES AND SOCIONICS
Talanov’s questionnaires are self-learning. Therefore, they are by definition based on the real substantive content that sociotypes, functions, and traits have in socionics (that very modern socionics that emerged as the result of many years of collective oral culture of expert observations of people).

Therefore, it is precisely Talanov’s questionnaires, with their real filling by 15 psychological factors, that are adequate to socionic types, and not the MBTI questionnaire with its 4 factors, nor any models of “informationists,” which also ignore the multidimensional trait filling of sociotypes.

TALANOV’S QUESTIONNAIRES AND PSYCHOLOGY

V. Talanov has collected unique statistical material that makes it possible to conduct any factor and cluster psychological-statistical studies. 50 thousand respondents, 10 thousand questionnaire items, for each of which an average of 2.5 thousand answers have been collected from people of different types (that is, with a known magnitude of each of the 15 psychological factors). This is a broad prospect for further research, even on the basis of the already collected statistics alone. Such compatible statistics on 10 thousand questionnaire items are obviously possessed by no one else in the world. Conclusions from these statistics directly concern the differences between people specifically, and not linguistic units (as is the case in the Big Five). These statistics make it possible to obtain projections of any concrete psychological manifestation (among the 10 thousand tested) onto all possible psychological personality factors — since all of them are used in socionics. It allows the primary 10 thousand properties to be grouped by enlarged substantive clusters as well, ultimately obtaining detailed factor portraits for any conceivable psychological manifestations of a person. Further, it makes it possible to correlate any purely psychological properties with physiological manifestations that are markers of certain biological features of the brain (that is, for example, genes, specific neurotransmitter or neurohormonal activity, as well as various zones of cerebral activation).

For example:

1. Acetylcholine activity has quite clear marker manifestations at the physiological level. These are pupil size, muscle tone, the functioning of the respiratory center, the level of moisture of the body’s mucous membranes, memory and attention capacity, etc. Thanks to these markers (reflected in many examined questionnaire items with large statistics), the projections of acetylcholine activity onto all 15 personal psychological factors are easily calculated; thanks to V. Talanov’s studies, they are known. Then, for any psychological property one chooses, it is already possible to predict how much the magnitude of brain acetylcholine activity is reflected in it. For this, it is enough to compare the profile of projections of this property onto all 15 personality factors with the analogous profile of projections onto the same factors for the acetylcholine activity of the brain. If the correlation between these profiles is zero, the activity of cerebral acetylcholine does not participate in the formation of this property. If the correlation is positive and high, then, unambiguously, high acetylcholine plays an important role in the manifestation of this property. And if the correlation is negative, it means that for the manifestation of this property, on the contrary, reduced acetylcholine activity of the brain is necessary. For example, in this way it has been shown that many manifestations of strong Ni are accompanied by reduced cholinergic (acetylcholine) activity, while manifestations of Se, on the contrary, are accompanied by its increase. Incidentally, here you have one of the bases of dual attraction between these functions — genes responsible for a low level of cholinergic activity are drawn to genes responsible for its high level.

2. Or another example. There is such a gene — ABCC11. Until today (before Talanov’s research), science knew one very specific role of it — namely, the purely recessive (Asian) allele of the ABCC11 gene results in dry earwax and weak underarm sweating. In short, different versions of the gene determine the intensity of sweating under the arms and in the ear canal. Most Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese have dry ears, while Europeans have the opposite. Any psychological influences of this gene were not known. But it turns out they exist! Physiological manifestations of different versions of this gene are easily formulated in questionnaire items: do you often sweat under the arms, where do you sweat more — under the arms or on the neck and back, are your ears usually dry, what is the consistency of earwax — liquid, smeary, or dry flakes, etc. All this work, using a couple of dozen relevant questionnaire items, was carried out by Talanov, and it turned out that the Asian version of the ABCC11 gene has a profile of 15 psychological factors sharply different from the European version. Thanks to this, Asians, in particular, are much more questim and also somewhat more logical than the average European. And this single gene, it turns out, is responsible not for some 1–2% of the variance of corresponding psychological traits (which is usual for any genes in the polygenic nature of most psychological factors), but for almost an order of magnitude more! Both the higher average IQ of Asians, and their weaker, restrained emotionality (in Chinese clubs Europeans are specially used as initiators), and their collective intolerance of violations of their civil rights (events in Hong Kong) are, quite possibly, explained by just a few genes — and ABCC11 is most likely the most important among them (God grant it’s not the only one). Thus, based on the analysis of purely questionnaire statistics, V. Talanov made a discovery that essentially belongs to the sphere of human behavioral genetics.