Complete Psychological Portrait of the Ethical-Intuitive Extravert (EIE) — Results of an Experimental Study

V. L. Talanov

Saint Petersburg, December 2011

Introduction

This article is part of a large new series of our works devoted to the detailed experimental study and description of the empirical psychological portraits of the 16 basic socionic psychotypes, the 8 socionic functions (in their various positions), and the poles of socionic traits. The results of all works in the series (including the results presented in the tables of this article) were derived from mathematical-statistical analysis of respondents’ answers to psychological questionnaire items (more than 5500 different questionnaire items in total). These answers were obtained from more than 5000 different respondents whose socionic psychotypes had been determined beforehand.

Psychological types (in essence, independent non-overlapping sectors of multidimensional psychological space) gradually became the primary, basic concept in empirical socionics. In socionics they are most often diagnosed as wholes. In American typology, which is very close to socionics in the resulting structuring of psychological space, this is not the case at all; there, the basis is invariably taken to be not psychotypes but four basic traits. These traits are extraversion-introversion, rationality-irrationality, logic-ethics, and intuition-sensing. Each trait represents a hyperplane in psychological space; the four hyperplanes ultimately divide the space into 16 sectors, each of which received the name of one of the 16 psychotypes. This approach was also used both in the works of Carl Gustav Jung and in the early theoretical constructions of the founder of socionics, Aušra Augustinavičiūtė. Subsequently, however, socionics in Russia, Ukraine, and a number of other European countries came to rely, in diagnosing psychological types, not on four-factor diagnostic questionnaires but on live expert diagnosis of types in their “holistic” expression. Despite all its obvious disadvantages from the standpoint of diagnostic standardization, this tradition yielded undeniable scientific advantages. The “advantages” in this case consist in the fact that, within the emerging socionic culture, a wide variety of characteristic properties of psychotypes arising at the intersection of four dichotomies were more readily noted. These properties were studied rather than ignored, although they were often a kind of novel formation relative to the semantic content of the four basic diagnostic traits. Thus, for example, it was found that the psychotypes of the second and third quadras differ from the psychotypes of the so-called “peripheral” quadras in a new property of decisiveness-judiciousness that cannot be reduced to the four basic traits; accordingly, the same sensing can behave differently in “decisive” and “judicious” psychotypes — in one case as aggressive “force sensing,” and in the other as “sensing of sensations,” which differs very substantially in semantic content. Differences were similarly identified between manifestations of extraverted and introverted intuition, extraverted and introverted ethics, and extraverted and introverted logic. Theoretical models of socionics developed accordingly, incorporating new concepts. This development did not occur in typology, where rigid restrictions at the diagnostic “input” prevented fundamentally new conclusions from being found at the “output.” Unlike typology, socionics for a long time followed the path of empirically “feeling out” the most objective boundaries between psychological types, that is, in constant live contact with natural truth it formed optimal boundaries between sectors in psychological space, without shying away from taking into account, when drawing these boundaries, newly discovered properties of types that were not directly reducible to their differences in extraversion-introversion, rationality-irrationality, logic-ethics, and intuition-sensing. Was it good that this was so? Yes, very good. The point is that the substantive content of the four basic traits initially used in diagnosis was never “God-given,” but represented a preliminary result of the same empirical observations by the founding researchers of the diversity of human manifestations. There is no reason, for example, that intuition should manifest identically in all types of the so-called “intuitive” pole (today we know that these manifestations are highly distinctive in each of the eight types); nevertheless, the founders’ initial “rough hypothesis,” especially beginning with Briggs and Myers, prescribed that intuition, within this initially “rough hypothesis,” manifest in the same way in different types, and Briggs-Myers diagnosis was likewise directed toward identifying exclusively those traits that types shared by virtue of their dichotomous pole. Accordingly, the boundaries between types were distorted in typology and displaced away from the points toward which they naturally gravitated. Another example is the rationality-irrationality axis, which, likewise having been unambiguously fixed in the initial Briggs-Myers diagnostic questionnaires, prescribed the same behavioral manifestations of rationality or irrationality for all types — although today we already know well that the irrationality of intuitive types manifests not quite as it does in sensing types, and in extraverts not quite as it does in introverts (for example, if improvisation is the key feature of extraverted irrationality, then passivity and laziness are the key features for introverts, although broadly speaking both manifestations arise from a deficit of judging functions and the consequent lack of planning). Nevertheless, such nuances were ignored in typology, which led to incorrect drawing of boundaries between types on the basis of purely voluntaristically selected and questionnaire-fixed arbitrarily chosen “diagnostic” properties. As a result, any potentially new properties of psychotypes and their groups that could not be reduced to the diagnostic questions initially built into the Myers-Briggs questionnaire were blurred and remained undetected in research.

Socionics avoided these shortcomings in its development. As a result, among all existing psychological classifications, the boundaries between sectors of multidimensional psychological space gradually felt out by its expert “public opinion” today apparently correspond best to the real physiological factors of brain activity that objectively underlie the division of psychological diversity into psychotypes. The adequacy of the socionic classification is also emphasized by the fact that it is precisely within the boundaries between types accepted in socionics that new properties are identified which are generated nonlinearly at the intersection of several “basic” traits (on physiological grounds, precisely such generation should be expected from “correct” models of the organization of psychological space).

Socionics often criticizes itself for the low agreement of expert type diagnosis among different experts. It should be noted, however, that this is not a critical defect that calls into question the achievements of socionics as a science. Indeed, when reading the numerous descriptions of psychotypes by different socionic authors, it is not difficult to see that for each type the authors generally note the same characteristic manifestations. This knowledge and these observations are unquestionable scientific truths; they coincide across different authors and arise from their observation of numerous strongly contrasting cases that are “obvious” from the standpoint of type diagnosis. Yet this knowledge indeed cannot always be transmitted in the reverse direction, from the general to the particular, when it is necessary to diagnose the type of a subject whose type is not so strongly expressed. It should be noted that agreement among expert diagnoses is low even among representatives of the same socionic school. If one excludes a number of obvious socionics-adjacent “reinventors of the wheel” and fraudulent dilettantes who invent their own socionics while presenting themselves as experts, the dispersion of diagnoses reflects not so much differences among schools in their views of the boundaries between types as the fundamental limitation on any expert’s ability simultaneously to take into account and weight the diagnostic contribution of the numerous manifestations of a subject that are important for type diagnosis. Our studies, discussed below, directly imply that any property “characteristic” of a psychotype, function, or pole of a socionic trait has an exclusively probabilistic character. There are no properties or manifestations that can be called necessary or sufficient for diagnosing any type. One can say only that, within a type, a particular property manifests in its representatives with greater probability than in the population as a whole. Thus, reliable type diagnosis can be built only on simultaneous consideration of many specific properties, and a reliable socionic diagnosis is possible only by relying on the statistical law of large numbers. Only formalized procedures (questionnaires or rigidly formalized and sufficiently long expert interviews) can reliably rely on the statistical law of large numbers; human thinking is incapable of doing so, however experienced and socionically “advanced” the expert may be. Socionic expert type diagnosis is especially unreliable in cases where the person being typed, by objective psychological characteristics, lies in a problematic zone near the boundary between sectors of psychological space (and there are plenty of such cases). In our experience-based opinion, the reliability of expert type diagnosis cannot in principle exceed 60%, and only with special selection of the most strongly and contrastively expressed persons being typed can it approach 90%. Formalized procedures (for example, well-constructed large questionnaires) are not subject to these accuracy limitations, but for this reason such questionnaires must necessarily take into account the entire diversity of psychotype properties described in socionics (that is, ideally, diagnose psychotypes holistically rather than by a few basic traits) and must not repeat the other errors of questionnaires constructed according to the outdated recipes of Briggs-Myers questionnaires.

By the present day, socionics has already exhausted all the advantages it could derive from the “non-formalized” development of its scientific culture. The characteristic properties of psychotypes and psychic functions have been described; their further refinement within expert diagnosis is impossible. The time has come to fix and formalize the current achievements of socionics in the language of more exact sciences. Only through the precise language of mathematical statistics, sensitive even to subtle psychological nuances, will it subsequently be possible to build interdisciplinary bridges from socionics to brain physiology. Only by formalizing, in standardized questionnaires, the current level of socionic knowledge about the characteristic properties of types and functions (and this current level exceeds by an order of magnitude the level of knowledge available to the creators of the first Briggs-Myers typological questionnaire) can present-day socionic type diagnosis be standardized and its accuracy sharply increased. If applied type diagnosis can still tolerate (and sometimes is forced to tolerate) expert typing “by eye,” reliable and modern diagnostic questionnaires are simply indispensable for scientific research. Without them, socionists have already spent a decade in a scientific dead end, engaging at worst in openly unscientific mythmaking and at best in chewing over the same old theoretical cud. The present series of our scientific works, based on mathematical-statistical methods for analyzing a very large body of experimental material, is devoted to solving these corresponding current problems of socionics.

Our study is the first and unique study of this kind with respect to the structuring of psychological space adopted within the socionic paradigm (or, more broadly — neo-Jungian personality typology, which divides the diversity of psychological space into 16 independent and comparatively symmetrically arranged sectors called psychotypes). The properties of functions and traits are derived from the properties of psychotypes, because the properties of particular functions in different positions and of the poles of socionic traits are ultimately calculated by averaging the properties of particular groups of psychological types (for example, to identify the properties of program force sensing, the properties of the SLE and SEE psychotypes are averaged, etc.). Therefore, the key potential question for studies of this kind is — how are the psychotypes whose properties are subsequently analyzed diagnosed?

Psychotypes in our studies were determined by means of questionnaires, using correlations between respondents’ answer vectors and the “reference” (averaged) answers to the same questions given by “average representatives” of all 16 sociotypes. Thus, to determine the type of a particular person, 16 empirically obtained correlations were compared with one another. The maximum correlation indicated the diagnosis of the leading psychotype (sociotype). Taken together, all 16 correlations formed the respondent’s complete individual psychological profile, characterizing their individual distinctiveness as fully as possible. Thus, if the maximum correlation assigned a person to the LII type, the second-highest correlation could assign them to one of several other types (EII, LSI, LIE, ILE, even SLI or IEI). Accordingly, the height of the other profile peaks, in addition to the highest peak, indicates the individual character of an accentuation additional to the basic type. As calculations showed, the reliability of determining respondents’ leading type by this procedure in our study averaged at least 90% correct diagnoses (the percentage was verified by agreement of diagnoses in retest assessment using a questionnaire with completely different diagnostic questions). At the first stages of developing the system of diagnostic coefficients (identical to ideal reference answers), the “reference answers” of types (the basis of diagnosis) were understood as the averaged answers of respondents in the training sample who had stated their type with sufficient competence on the basis of self-typing or repeated external typing (predominantly by experts from professional socionic schools in Moscow and Kyiv). The competence of the stated diagnosis was assessed by the number of discrepancies on the basic dichotomies between the stated type and a preliminary provisional type diagnosis based on the questionnaire. Stated diagnoses with three or more dichotomy mismatches were discarded from the training sample as clearly false or erroneous. Other instruments were also used to control the quality of incoming questionnaires and stated diagnoses; these were unrelated to their socionic content and therefore, despite partial rejection of material, could not negatively affect the results of the analysis. Ultimately, within each type in the training sample, all honestly given answers of respondents who had previously been typed by different experts with partially divergent views on the boundaries between types were averaged. This made it possible to reflect the view of the boundaries between types averaged across the general “socionic culture” of Russia and Ukraine. Additional correction of the types’ reference answers, increasing the accuracy and reliability of the diagnostic coefficients, was introduced by means of three special mathematical procedures. The first of these coefficient-refining procedures was stepwise recurrent refinement of respondents’ diagnoses. The second refining procedure was the so-called symmetrization of the training-sample data array (the procedure is based on the fact that the reference answer of any type to a given question can be predicted with fairly high accuracy – by decomposition into Reinin traits - from the reference answers given to that question by the other 15 types). The third and most important refining procedure was symmetrization of the diagnostic coefficients in an array of two thousand aggregated psychological properties that rather evenly describe the full diversity of possible manifestations of a hypothetical complete psychological space. The latter procedure rests on the assumption that, in psychological space, the difference (that is, the mathematical distance in property space) between the LIE and LII psychotypes should be the same as between EIE and EII, SLE and SLI, etc., while that between ILI and SLI should be approximately the same as between LSI and LII, etc., and so on. If the aforementioned equality of distances is not achieved, the inequality is partly corrected by additional rotation of the required axes in multidimensional space, which leads to a small correction of the diagnostic coefficients originally obtained empirically for each questionnaire question and each of the 16 psychological types. At the first stages of obtaining and refining the diagnostic coefficients of questionnaire questions, two additional refining procedures were used. One monitored the presence of negative kurtosis at the boundary between poles in probability-density plots describing the distribution of the magnitude of the four basic socionic traits; the other monitored maximization of the generated substantive content of the three quadral traits while varying the rotation of the four basic axes under the condition that their mutual orthogonality be preserved. At the final stages of refining the diagnostic coefficients, the stated psychotypes were no longer used, because all the information they could provide had already been used. Diagnoses in this case were made exclusively from the questionnaire itself, using the diagnostic coefficients from the preceding approximation, while further refinements were introduced only through the procedure of symmetrizing the array of diagnostic coefficients (also taking into account the requirement of the greatest possible orthogonalization of all socionic axes). The same truncated procedure was also performed when the database was supplemented with new, additional questionnaire items.

Thus, initially (at the very first stage of developing the system of diagnostic coefficients for questionnaire questions), a “training sample” was formed for each TIM from people who had self-typed provided they had sufficient socionic experience, or who had been typed by DIFFERENT experts from Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Ukraine and had stated that TIM. It is clear that no more than 45-55% of the stated diagnoses in it were correct, but this is sufficient to obtain a sufficiently reliable mean value of quantitatively graded answers for each questionnaire question (when the mean is calculated, errors in opposite directions cancel one another in most cases - the statistical law of large numbers). At the next stage, statistical procedures were conducted to monitor negative kurtosis, maximize the substantive content of the quadral traits under the condition of their maximum orthogonality to the basic traits, and, finally, symmetrize the results (TIMs in multidimensional psychological space must be equidistant from one another, forming a symmetrical structure). As a rule, these procedures introduced only minor corrections, but they helped eliminate systematic errors (caused, for example, by the fact that some socionic schools for a time typed too many subjects as “Hamlets,” as well as by the fact that in self-typing some TIMs prove more preferable than others). At the final stages, the diagnostic coefficients obtained from the training samples were used directly for questionnaire-based diagnosis, ignoring the previously stated TIMs. Diagnostic coefficients were recalculated on the expanded sample, and checks were again performed - of the symmetry of TIM placement in psychological space, of the correspondence between the most characteristic properties identified for the TIMs and their “canonical” descriptions by most authors, and of the resulting properties of the 8 functions and the poles of the basic traits - again, whether the resulting findings corresponded to most descriptions. All checks were passed. In individual cases where apparent roughnesses were detected, additional source material was collected for refinement. As a result, after many approximations and using more than 5000 different subjects in total, a practically ideal system of diagnostic coefficients was obtained for more than 5500 questionnaire statements, making it possible subsequently to construct from them any shorter diagnostic questionnaires with very high reliability of type determination. The validity of the developed diagnostic procedures was confirmed by the very high correlation between the diagnostic results of pairs of questionnaires containing completely different questions and administered repeatedly to the same subjects (above 0,93). Content validity is also confirmed by the maximal correspondence between the experimentally obtained “psychological portraits” of psychotypes and functions and descriptions of their characteristic properties by most authors.

Obtaining valid diagnostic coefficients for more than 5500 original questionnaire questions characterizing more than 2000 different psychic properties makes it possible to assemble on their basis an arbitrary number of different diagnostic questionnaires, each of which is immediately ready for use and requires no additional adaptation. When selecting questions from the database for any new questionnaire, it is only necessary to satisfy the condition that the diagnostic symmetry of the coefficients be preserved (roughly speaking, the sums of squared diagnostic coefficients for all 16 psychotypes across the selected questions must be equal, and the systems of diagnostic coefficients derived from them for diagnosing the 15 traits must be orthogonal to one another, which is equivalent to their scalar products being zero). Questions can readily be selected for a questionnaire subject to these conditions by means of simple mathematical control procedures.

Thus, the method of socionic questionnaire-based type diagnosis that we developed and subsequently used in a large series of studies to obtain detailed “psychological portraits” of psychotypes and psychic functions is characterized by high accuracy and reliability of type diagnosis (above 90%); it proves more accurate than any expert typing and is free of experts’ subjective systematic errors. The method also differs fundamentally for the better from previously known socionic diagnostic questionnaires. It is characterized by:

1. a complete absence of authorial subjectivity in selecting questions and assigning particular diagnostic values to them;
2. the use of questions with maximal discriminative ability, confirmed mathematically;
3. the absence of distortions - for example, where manifestations of irrationality characteristic mainly only of intuitive types were previously used to diagnose irrationality in some other questionnaires;
4. the absence of reliance on traits altogether - TIMs are diagnosed holistically.

The method’s diagnosis of psychotypes on the basis of their holistic characteristics, without purposeful use of socionic traits during diagnosis, subsequently makes it possible to study the manifestations of any socionic traits with genuine validity and to test whether they possess substantive content (regardless of whether the question concerns extraversion-introversion and rationality-irrationality or, for example, Questimity and positivism - because all traits are equal before this diagnostic method, and none has an advantage built into it from the outset by the questionnaire’s construction). The same applies to the purity, guaranteed by the method, of constructing “psychological portraits” of psychic functions in their various positions (program, creative, etc.).

Complete Psychological Portrait of EIE — Experimental Results

The more than five thousand questionnaire statements analyzed on the basis of the multi-year experiment, which respondents evaluated by “trying them on” themselves, were manually grouped by us — on the basis of their semantic content and mutual correlations — into approximately 2300 aggregated clusters containing from one to several dozen questionnaire items close in meaning and generally characterizing more generalized psychological properties. On the one hand, replacing the primary questionnaire statements with their generalized clusters simplifies presentation of the results by reducing the number of primary properties to be surveyed; on the other hand — by averaging across several items, it further increases the accuracy of projections of psychological properties onto psychotypes. It should be borne in mind, however, that in all the tables below, the indicated multiplicative factor by which the probability of detecting a property in a representative of a psychotype exceeds the probability of detecting it in the entire population or in groups of other psychotypes was calculated and reported by us not for averaged properties (clusters), but, as before, for individual members of the cluster, that is, for specific questionnaire statements. In reality, this indicator relates not to the probability that representatives of the type actually possess a given property, but to the probability that a respondent agrees that they possess that property. When the statistical characteristics of several questionnaire statements within a single cluster are averaged, the indicated probability should become more contrasted because random errors in subjects’ self-assessments are leveled out. Where the probability is greater than 0,5, for a generalized cluster of several statements it should become still closer to one; where it is initially below 0,5, it should decrease even further, approaching zero. Accordingly, the probability-excess factors should also increase substantially for clusters consisting of several statements (increasing two- to threefold or more). This increase is ignored in the tables. This is because the tables are intended for practical use. When in practice we assess whether a person possesses a particular property and for this purpose resort either to that person’s self-assessment or to an outside observer’s view, we are in effect conducting an experiment on only one specific manifestation of that property, without averaging the results of several experiments testing for the property’s presence. Thus, in practical use, the reported probability-excess factors calculated for individual specific questionnaire statements will provide a sufficiently accurate minimum approximate estimate even when a cluster-level property previously derived by averaging several questionnaire items is tested on the basis of a single experiment.

The tables may be highly useful both for obtaining a clearer understanding of the characteristic properties of the psychotype and for expert socionic type diagnosis.

All tables in the article are presented in a “newspaper version,” that is, with some omissions and abridgments. For example, some properties whose analysis is continuing have been excluded, and, in addition, table columns reflecting the complete system of diagnostic coefficients (reference answers) suitable for use in diagnostic questionnaires have been temporarily omitted. The indicators retained in the tables provide a sufficiently clear picture of the most characteristic properties of psychotypes.

Table 1. Psychological and psychophysiological properties (substantive clusters combining several questions close in meaning) that are exclusive (that is, most and primarily characteristic) specifically of the EIE psychotype. The conventional exclusivity index is defined as the amount by which the EIE type mean exceeds the population level, plus the distance from the EIE type mean to the type mean of the psychotype ranking second in expression of the property.

Table 2. Psychological and psychophysiological properties (substantive clusters combining several questions close in meaning) that are highly characteristic of the EIE psychotype, but only secondarily or tertiarily after other psychotypes

Table 3. Properties that maximally distinguish EIE from IEI

Table 4. Properties that maximally distinguish EIE from EII

Table 5. Properties that maximally distinguish EIE from IEE

Table 6. Properties that maximally distinguish EIE from ESE

Table 7. Properties that maximally distinguish EIE from LIE

Table 8. Properties that maximally distinguish EIE from SEE