What is a Socionic Profile?

From the early years of socionics, experienced typologists recognized that even when people are divided into 16 types, there remains significant internal diversity within each of the resulting groups. The issue of classifying this diversity became prominent, but no unified solution was proposed.

Some socionicists preferred to ignore the existence of intra-type differences, declaring them either insignificant or illusory. Others suggested that these differences were the result of external, acquired distortions—“masks”—which should be skillfully removed during typological diagnostics to uncover the original type. Since masks were often attributed certain type characteristics (leaving only secondary personality factors for the “original” type), this process quickly became controversial, and the schools using it veered toward superficiality.

Some believed that external distortions could be explained using other typologies. However, the results here were similar to the second group, as most typologies in use within the psychological community address essentially the same psychological factors, with only slight modifications.

A fourth group tried to remain within the framework of socionics and proposed a more detailed classification, dividing each type into subtypes. This approach, despite its ambiguity (the question of how and to what extent types can be divided into subtypes remains unresolved), proved to be the most productive at a certain stage.

Later, a theory emerged explaining intra-type diversity by the strengthening or weakening of individual functions within the type’s structure. The dead end in this approach was when it simply duplicated the type and its accents (e.g., when a type with the program function X and an accent on the strengthening of function X was declared unrelated to one another). For a long time, and even now, many socionicists from the “old school” have not accepted the fact that “accents” can sometimes be so strong that a person’s characteristics almost align with those of another type, making it extremely difficult to determine the leading type.

V.L. Talanov proved that none of the complex characteristics of personality in socionics form two or more isolated clusters in the population—so that 16 discrete types simply cannot exist. Instead, we should talk about a continuous space of psychological traits, where the standard types are merely reference points in this space (not points of attraction or concentration of probability, but simply positions around which individuals cluster depending on their traits).

For more details see the works of V.L. Talanov:

  1. Magnitude and distribution of accentuations in a population. Investigation of boundaries between psychotypes, population distribution of values of socionic functions and traits (2012) http://www.sociotoday.narod2.ru/granicy_tipov1.doc [download].
  2. Are psychological types quantized? Testing the density of the population distribution on the boundaries between 16 “standard” psychotypes. Introducing new 4 functions of the psyche. (2016) http://sociotoday.narod.ru/funkc_3.html

After these studies were published, it became clear that people with a relatively “pure” type are in the minority. Most individuals have personality traits that lie between several types, and forcing oneself into a single type in such cases is a way not to improve one’s understanding of oneself, but to worsen it.

Debates about the principles of dividing types into subtypes became pointless; a fundamentally new approach was needed.

In modern socionics, a person’s personality is most fully described not by a single type, but by a socionic profile.

A psychological profile is a set of numbers (often represented as a line graph or bar chart), each of which indicates how much a particular personality trait deviates from a baseline level. This method of calculating psychological profiles is widely used in experimental psychological tests that provide a comprehensive personality diagnosis (such as MMPI / SMIL, 16PF by Cattell, etc.).

The socionic profile typically uses the following parameters:

The trait profile is usually normalized, meaning that the sum of the squares of all the traits in the profile must equal 1. The trait profile and the type profile are equivalent and can be transformed into each other without loss of information. When calculating the type profile from the trait profile, the values for all 15 dichotomies are summed for each of the 16 types, using the signs corresponding to the poles of that type. When calculating the trait profile from the type profile, the values for all types are summed using the signs corresponding to the positive pole of the dichotomy (traditionally, the pole for the ILE type), and the result is divided by 16. A function profile can be created based on either the trait profile or the type profile, although this results in a loss of information about six secondary traits.

All three variants of socionic profiles essentially represent the same personality portrait, but depicted in different ways.

Why is the method of determining the socionic profile fundamentally better than a simple typing into one of the types? Because it allows for a precise assessment of the contribution of all socionics factors to a person’s unique personality. If only the leading type is identified, ignoring the rest, significant information about a person’s qualities is lost.

For example, it is quite possible that a person is closest to the reference sociotype of ILE in terms of the totality of all factors, but at the same time is objectively a socionic ethicist. In classical socionics, typologists in this case face a dilemma: either assign the person to the IEE type (based on Jung’s basis) or to ILE (based on all the factors combined).

Both of these approaches are categorically bad. The first is flawed because IEE in classical socionics is associated with Delta values, which may be entirely foreign to this person, and searching for a Delta dual would be a major mistake. The second option is flawed because ILE is a logical type, and a person who lacks logical traits might view this as a personal defect or an old trauma, leading them to try to “fix” this perceived shortcoming in vain.

The socionic profile method helps avoid such mistakes. According to this approach, it’s entirely possible for a person to closely align with the ILE type, which embodies Alpha values, but still be an ethicist. This combination is just as natural and valid as a more “classic” ILE, IEE, or any other type. In fact, one could describe this as a “ILE with additional accents on IEE, IEI, and SEE”. However, the socionics profile method is especially useful because it allows for a more accurate and quantitative determination of the contribution of all atypical traits to the dominant type and the relative strength of all accents, rather than merely diagnosing their presence.

Any personality trait also has its own unique socionic profile, differing both in the relative contribution of each of the factors and in the cumulative share of these factors in the total dispersion of this trait in the population. The value of the linear correlation coefficient between the profiles of the properties allows us to assume the existence of a connection between these properties (either directly or through a third factor). Also, by considering the magnitude of correlation between the calculated personality profile and the profiles of different personality traits, we can determine which of these traits are more likely (and in a more vivid form) to be diagnosed in a given person, and which are less likely to be diagnosed. (Although this probability is also influenced by a number of other factors, first of all, the very share of dispersion of extrasocionic factors in the total variance of each of the properties).

As mentioned above, the method of calculating the type profile was successfully used in professional multifactor questionnaires such as Cattell’s MMPI and PF-16 before it was introduced into socionics. But even in comparison with these psychological questionnaires, V.L. Talanov significantly improved the methodology for calculating the psychological profile. Thus, in the questionnaires created according to Talanov’s methodology:

  1. each questionnaire question participating in the diagnostics has its own socionic profile, calculated on the basis of the previous statistics, and therefore the answer to it simultaneously contributes to the calculation of the strength of all socionic factors (attributes, functions), etc., and not just one;
  2. respondents’ answers are adjusted by the personal average and by the average (or rather, average) answer to each questionnaire question;
  3. a multi-stage quality control system is used, which makes it possible to filter out questionnaires with obviously unreliable data (when the respondent in one way or another “played” with the questionnaire, and did not answer the questions seriously);
  4. Questions are selected in the questionnaire so that its structure meets a number of criteria: a minimum of parasitic correlations between the vectors of the main socionic traits; minimum differences between the lengths of vectors corresponding to the 16 types; minimum connection of the prevailing choice of positive or negative answers with any socionic factors, etc.;
  5. When calculating the socionic profiles of the questions on the basis of the available statistics, such factors as the uneven number of people of different types or poles of characteristics in the sample are taken into account and corrected; different confidence of people in their type; different levels of non-socionic dispersion - “noise” in the respondents’ answers (the value of which can be associated with different levels of people’s knowledge of themselves, as well as with the real depth of personal accentuation); the factor of dissimulation (the influence of the level of general self-esteem on the choice of answers), etc.

Thus, in our opinion, Talanov’s questionnaires, based on thousands of statistics of type diagnostics, are at the moment perhaps the best personality questionnaires in terms of their accuracy and coverage of psychological qualities not only in socionics, but also in modern psychology as a whole.

How Should Socionic Profiles Be Read?

  1. The zero level on the graphs does not indicate the complete absence of a trait, but rather its average population value. This means that for half of the population, the trait is expressed more strongly, and for the other half, less strongly.
  2. Rare and common traits: some personality traits are rare and appear much less often than in half of the population. Therefore, even if your profile is similar to a type with a rare trait, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you possess that trait. The same applies to traits that are almost universal.
  3. Different personality traits have different shares of contribution of socionic factors to the total variance. At the same time, the profiles of all properties on the charts visually have the same range of values. This can sometimes mislead uninformed people. For example, some purely physiological properties of a person can gravitate towards a certain trait and have a profile in which this trait clearly dominates. However, in the dispersion of these properties in the population, there will be a significant share of random (extrasocionic) factors. So such properties cannot be reliable markers of this feature.
  4. In the same way, the profile of any person filling out the questionnaire on the graphs will have the same standard range of values - regardless of the real variance in the values of his characteristics - that is, the depth of individual personal accentuation. Why is that? Firstly, it is difficult to separate the real depth of personal accentuation from the share of noise in the respondents’ answers (which may be a consequence, for example, of the respondent’s low level of intelligence or his low diligence in filling out the questionnaire). Secondly, it is simply wrong to assume that the strength of functions and characteristics visible on graphs indicates a measurable number of personality skills. Even if we made a correction for all conceivable factors, socionic parameters are still basically not quantitative, but qualitative. The strength of functions is not absolute, but relative, and indicates exclusively the balance of the strength of the individual’s motivations - which strategy of behavior dominates over others and to what extent. If we represent the personality trait profile as a vector in the 15-dimensional space of psychological coordinates, then the length of this vector will be partially reflected only in the parameter S (profile sigma, an indicator of the total measured variance of socionic traits). The strength of the functions will depend only on the angles of this vector relative to the 15 axes of such a space.