Central Meanings of Socionic Traits

Extraversion

• General energeticness
• Communicativeness
• Sociability
• Initiative
• Loudness of speech
• Demonstrativeness
• Self-confidence
• Motivation
• Enterprisingness

Introversion

• Restraint
• Inertness, phlegmaticity - difficult to “stir up”
• Rigidity - repetition of the habitual
• Slowness
• Taciturnity
• Little energy, tires quickly
• Passivity, followership, compliance
• Secretiveness, inconspicuousness
• Seriousness

Ethics

• Ability to give something subjective value
• Attention to other personalities, their characteristics and needs
• Ability to influence others’ relations and mood
• Sentimentality
• Strong emotional reaction to damage
• Ethical perceptiveness
• Empathy for another’s misfortune
• Dependence on social approval

Logic

• Ability to calculate the objective value of something
• Interest in mathematics and logic
• Indifference to others’ experiences
• Blindness to ethical intrigues
• High self-assessment of intelligence
• Independence of thought and action
• Minimalism in everyday life and work

Intuition

• Dreaminess, tendency to “fall out of reality”
• Orientation toward the distant in space and time
• Unusualness, originality of ideas
• Tendency toward generalizations, understanding of abstractions and analogies
• Anticipation of reactions and events
• Physical awkwardness, ineptitude
• Tendency toward errors of perception and self-perception

Sensorics

• Precision of movement coordination
• Precision of spatial orientation
• Precision of sensory perception
• Precision of reproducing something
• Speed of precise physical reaction
• Concreteness of judgments
• Concreteness of desires, confidence in them
• Lives “here and now”
• Materialism - things are more important than ideas

Irrationality

• Disorganization
• Does not plan the future
• Failure to bring matters to completion
• Unreliability, lack of discipline
• Impulsiveness and unpredictability of reactions and actions
• Problems with mobilization and concentration of attention
• Laziness - avoidance of “social burdens”

Rationality

• Orientation toward long-term order
• Strong self-control
• Social “correctness”, normativity
• Serious attitude toward obligations
• Anxiety over the results of one’s work
• Bringing matters to completion
• Perfectionism

Judiciousness

• Recognition of the value of another’s life, another’s interest and labor
• Respect for the weak, desire to support the weak (partly connected with a parental attitude toward others and overlaps with child-lovingness)
• Peacefulness - the desire to create, rather than destroy (overlaps with a preference for agriculture over hunting)
• Basic trust in the world and people
• Selflessness (a consequence of expanded self-identification and trust in the world)
• Readiness to forgive (thereby breaking chains of revenge and restoring peace)
• Avoidance of overstrain (overlaps with an intensified self-preservation instinct and the prevention of crises in the surrounding environment)

Decisiveness

• Derives pleasure from conflicts
• Loves risk and danger
• Understands only the language of force
• Orientation toward competition of interests (among aristocrats this may take the collective form of “we vs. they”)
• Orientation toward betrayal, anticipation of betrayal
• Vindictiveness
• In favor of harsher punishments
• Sadomasochistic tendencies

Merryness

• Passionarity - “one, but fiery passion”
• Gnosticism - conviction in the knowability of the world, in the existence of a single truth for everyone
• Ideologization - the importance of having an integral picture of the world corresponding to the inner essence of you or your group
• Intolerance toward other views, desire to voluntaristically remake the world in one’s own way
• Love of heroic symbolism that inspires extraordinary deeds
• Fundamentalism, struggle for foundations - their preservation or radical restructuring
• Rebels in order to assert one’s subjectness

Seriousness

• Dislikes bright manifestations of emotions
• Tolerance toward other views and cultures
• Utilitarianism - the opinion that the moral value of an action is determined by its usefulness
• Money-oriented thinking
• Economy and practicality in work and creativity, avoidance of monumentality (created only to make an impression, requiring excessive costs and not paying off in principle)
• Preference for moderate, “cosmetic” solutions
• Attention to another’s subjectness without attempts to impose one’s own
• Striving to extract benefit from any social reality

Democratism

• Individualism
• In favor of equality of rights
• Orientation toward the future, in favor of social change
• Easily reduces communicative distance
• Does not tolerate dictate and violence* [the contribution of democratism to this trait even exceeds the contribution of judiciousness]
• In favor of freedom of speech
• In favor of privatization of property

Aristocratism

• In favor of one-man rule and censorship
• Conservatism, traditional values, idealization of the past
• Protection of one’s prestige and privileges
• Militarism, need for external enemies, intensification of fear in society for managerial purposes
• Parochial altruism [more connected with Di, but this: “everything for one’s own, the law for outsiders” - is rather generally aristocratic]
• Xenophobia, isolationism
• Love of role-playing social roles

Statics

• Asceticism - indifference to wealth, appearance, and pleasures
• Orientation toward eternal values (above all - toward the defense of justice and fulfillment of duty to other people, the world, and oneself), rather than toward the current market and social conjuncture
• Discreteness of thinking - especially in terms of clear separation in consciousness of moral categories - good and evil, truth and falsehood
• Externally angular and sharp
• Self-sufficiency - “one man in the field is still a warrior”
• Idealism, capacity for self-sacrifice in the name of an idea
• Politics of respect, capacity to respect even an enemy

Dynamics

• Hedonism - savoring sensations, love of grooming and comfort
• Readiness to please others, to adapt to the strong and “resourceful”
• Desire to have resources, thriftiness
• Immoralism - takes the easy path, easily yields to temptations
• Focuses in oneself and in other people on “low” motivations (connected with improving quality of life, sometimes - frankly self-interested), does not deny their presence and importance
• Externally smooth
• Emotions and decisions depend on well-being; fastidiousness and capriciousness
• Naturally feels oneself in the role of a victim and knows how to use this

Questimity

• Inflexibility in behavior
• Another’s presence causes irritation
• Narrow zone of the permissible, much in the world and in people provokes protest and indignation
• Strong squeamishness and disgust toward what one considers dirty, infected, “non-kosher”, wrong
• Inclined to object* and argue
• Fault-finding
• Aggression when personal interests are encroached upon
• Loner in life

[* - irritated “questioning” is precisely “questimity” as such, and not at all asking questions in order to learn someone’s opinion - the latter is already quite declatimity; please do not confuse them! - author’s note]

Declatimity

• Readiness to adapt
• Patient toward another’s presence in one’s life
• Striving for interdependence and mutual support
• Accepts others’ vices without condemnation
• Multitasking - simultaneously takes into account many different interests, including others’
• Blurring of personal boundaries, weak awareness of personal interests, feeling oneself to be an element of a whole, acting for the good of the whole

Positivism

• Euphoricness, benevolence
• Love of people
• Underestimation of dangers, tendency toward excessive risk
• Does not doubt decisions once made

Negativism

• Nothing is liked, sees only the bad in everything
• Malicious attitude toward people
• Skepticism
• Tendency toward overinsurance

Constructivism

• Minor, sad-melancholic mood
• Moralizing, often led by an inner “voice of conscience”
• Feeling of one’s own brokenness, suicidal motifs
• Obsessive thirst for justice (especially in combination with statics)
• Distancing from other people, focused on one’s own emotions (in introverts this exacerbates their introversion, while in extraverts it provokes an uncontrolled emotional outburst that ignores others’ experiences)

Emotivism

• Joy from the feeling of involvement in life
• Likes to joke, is not afraid of looking funny
• Avoidance of unpleasant and heavy thoughts
• Light attitude toward life - ability to “not overthink things” and “let go” of the past
• Ability to be liked and confidence that one is liked by others

Yielding

• Tendency to care for and support close ones [yielding to their needs]
• Developed sense of guilt [condemns oneself for non-yieldingness]
• Attraction to vagrancy and travel, search for a better place for oneself in the world [a consequence of readiness to yield the existing one?]
• Inability to conduct a thought experiment, hurries to react with real action and waits for evaluations from others based on the outcome of this action
• Readiness for altruistic self-sacrifice [more among yielding judicious types]
• Courage, fearlessness, endurance of pain [more among yielding decisive types]
• Industriousness [among yielding rational types]

Obstinacy

• Shameless egoism [more among obstinate decisive types]
• Careful attitude toward oneself, fears illnesses and injuries [more among obstinate judicious types]
• Talent for intrigue, ability to charm [more among obstinate ethical types]
• Knows how to act secretly, concealing one’s true motives; capable of living among enemies
• Smooth persuasive speech
• Inner relaxation (indifference, not caring about consequences, since one knows that one will always be able to “wriggle out”)

Carelessness

• Relies too much on surrounding society and the world - “everything will somehow sort itself out”, “whoever is supposed to will deal with this”
• Likes to gossip (readily invests in the common “information field”, depends on it in decision-making)
• Absence of a general vector of movement in life, chaotic search for new impressions
• Higher satisfaction with the existing order of things in the world
• Does not like the strange and defective, which forces one to think deeply
• Conservatism (that component of it which is connected with unwillingness to think about the fact that the world is changing and that it is necessary to constantly adjust one’s activity in accordance with emerging new circumstances)

Foresight

• Feeling oneself in a cold world, on a dangerous path, where if something happens - no one will help
• Anticipation of future problems and obstacles
• Personal control over the situation - “I keep everything important with me”, “I carry everything of mine with me”
• Interest in complex problems of existence - “forewarned is forearmed”
• Increased precision of reaction - “you and only you are responsible for the consequences of your actions”

Tactics

• Attention to small details
• Verbosity; against an extraverted background - tendency to chatter and fuss, against an introverted one - to get bogged down in details, often never reaching the main problem
• Defends interests well [because remembers all the details]
• Good short-term planning [tracking a multitude of small goals]
• Movement toward goals in small steps
• Fault-finding about details
• Truth-seeking [desire to find out all missing details]
• Distinguishes people well [attentive to nuances of others’ appearance, especially if ethical and/or sensoric, i.e. if one pays attention to human appearance in principle]

Strategy

• Coarsening of perception with cutting off and ignoring small details (unimportant in the context of achieving the goal)
• Slower, but also more interference-resistant thinking, making capital conclusions
• Taciturnity - does not like empty chatter, immediately gets to the point
• Rough division in consciousness of objects and people into large groups; higher tendency toward stereotyping of thought, for example - toward nationalism
• Preference for large and distant goals, achieved not by many small steps, but in one or two large risky leaps

Process

• Interest in complex problems of existence, world history, politics, and philosophy
• Love of classification and analysis of complex systems
• Capacity for harmonizing complex relations

Result

• Avoidance of complex topics - “many sorrows come from much knowledge”
• Preference for simple and clear relations
• Preference for simple, fast, and effective solutions