Complete Psychological Portrait of the Ethical-Sensory Extravert (ESE) — Results of an Experimental Study

V. L. Talanov

St. Petersburg, December 2011

Introduction

This article is part of a large new series of our works devoted to 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 responses were obtained from more than 5000 different respondents whose socionic psychotypes had been determined in advance.

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 type theory, which in the resulting structuring of psychological space is very close to socionics, this is not the case at all: the basis is invariably taken to be not the psychotypes but, on the contrary, 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. However, socionics in Russia, Ukraine, and a number of other European countries subsequently came to rely in diagnosing psychological types not on four-factor diagnostic questionnaires, but on live expert diagnosis of types in their “holistic” expression. For all its obvious disadvantages from the standpoint of diagnostic standardization, this tradition yielded undeniable scientific advantages. The “advantages” in this case consisted in the fact that, within the developing socionic culture, the most diverse characteristic properties of psychotypes arising at the intersection of four dichotomies were more readily noticed. These properties were studied rather than ignored, although they often constituted a kind of new 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 by 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 extraverted sensing, in the other — as introverted sensing, 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. The theoretical models of socionics developed accordingly, incorporating new concepts. No such development occurred in type theory, where rigid restrictions at the diagnostic “input” prevented fundamentally new conclusions from being discovered at the “output”. Unlike type theory, 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 could not be directly reduced 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. Nothing implies, for example, that intuition must manifest itself 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), yet the founders’ initial “rough hypothesis”, especially beginning with Briggs and Myers, prescribed that intuition, within this initially “rough hypothesis”, should manifest identically in different types, and Briggs-Myers diagnosis was likewise directed toward identifying in types exclusively the common features of their dichotomous pole. Accordingly, the boundaries between types were distorted in type theory and shifted away from their points of natural attraction. Another example is the rationality-irrationality axis, which, likewise being unambiguously fixed in the original Briggs-Myers diagnostic questionnaires, prescribed identical behavioral manifestations of rationality or irrationality for all types — although today we already know well that irrationality in intuitive types manifests somewhat differently than in sensing types, and in extraverts — somewhat differently than in introverts (for example, if the key feature of irrationality in extraverts is improvisation, then for introverts the key features are passivity and laziness, although broadly speaking both manifestations arise from a deficit of evaluative functions and the resulting lack of planning). Nevertheless, such nuances were ignored in type theory, which led to incorrect placement of boundaries between types on the basis of purely voluntaristically selected and arbitrarily chosen “diagnostic” properties fixed in questionnaires. This blurred and prevented research from revealing 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.

Socionics avoided these shortcomings in the course of 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 better than others 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 specifically within the boundaries between types accepted in socionics that new properties are identified which are generated nonlinearly at the intersection of several “basic” traits (for physiological reasons, 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 deficiency that casts doubt on the achievements of socionics as a science. When reading the many descriptions of psychotypes by different socionic authors, it is not difficult to see that, for each type, the authors generally notice 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. But this knowledge indeed cannot always be transmitted in the reverse direction, from the general to the particular, when it is necessary to type-diagnose a subject whose type is not so strongly expressed. It should be noted that agreement between expert diagnoses is low even among representatives of the same socionic school. If we set aside a number of obvious socionics-adjacent “reinventors of the wheel” and fraudulent amateurs, inventors of their own socionics who present themselves as experts, then the dispersion of diagnoses is not so much a difference in the views of different schools regarding the boundaries between types as it is a consequence of the fundamental limitation of any expert’s ability to simultaneously take into account and weight the diagnostic contribution of the many 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 only a strictly probabilistic character. There are no properties or manifestations that can be called necessary or sufficient for diagnosing any type. One can only say that, within a type, some particular property occurs among its representatives with greater probability than in the population as a whole. Reliable type diagnosis can therefore be based only on simultaneously taking into account 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 cannot do this — no matter how experienced or socionically “advanced” the expert may be. Socionic expert type diagnosis is especially unreliable in cases where the person being typed, in terms of psychological characteristics, objectively lies in a problematic zone near the boundary between sectors of psychological space (and there are plenty of such cases). In our experience-based view, the reliability of expert type diagnosis cannot in principle exceed 60%, and only with special selection of the most strongly contrasting persons being typed can it approach 90%. Formalized procedures (for example, well-constructed large questionnaires) do not have these accuracy limitations, but for this reason such questionnaires must necessarily take into account the full diversity of psychotype properties described in socionics (that is, ideally, diagnose psychotypes holistically rather than by several basic traits) and must not repeat the other errors of questionnaires constructed according to the outdated recipes of Briggs-Myers inventories.

By today, 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 mental 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 with the language of mathematical statistics, precise and sensitive even to subtle psychological nuances, will it subsequently be possible to build interdisciplinary bridges from socionics to brain physiology. Only by formalizing in standard 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 type-theory questionnaire) can present-day socionic type diagnosis be standardized and its accuracy sharply increased. If applied type diagnosis can still (and sometimes must) tolerate expert typing “by eye”, reliable and modern diagnostic questionnaires are simply indispensable for scientific research. Without them, socionics researchers have been in a scientific dead end for a decade, engaging in the worst case in openly unscientific myth-making and in the best case — chewing over 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 the corresponding current problems of socionics.

Our study is the first and unique study of this kind concerning 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 derivatives of the properties of psychotypes, because the properties of particular functions in different positions and 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 extraverted 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 using questionnaires from correlations between respondents’ response vectors and the “reference” (averaged) responses to the same questions given by the “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). All 16 correlations together formed the respondent’s complete individual psychological profile, characterizing his individual distinctiveness as fully as possible. Thus, if the maximum correlation assigned a person to the LII type, the second-highest correlation could assign him to one of several other types (EII, LSI, LIE, ILE, even SLI or IEI). Accordingly, the heights of the other peaks in the profile, apart from the highest peak, indicate the individual character of accentuation supplementary to the basic type. The reliability of determining respondents’ leading type by this procedure in our study, as calculations showed, averaged no less than 90% correct diagnoses (the percentage was verified by convergence of diagnoses in retest testing with a questionnaire containing completely different diagnostic questions). At the first stages of developing the system of diagnostic coefficients (identical to ideal reference responses), the “reference responses” of types (the basis of diagnosis) were understood as the averaged responses 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 evaluated by the number of discrepancies in the basic dichotomies between the stated type and the initial preliminary type diagnosis based on the questionnaire. Stated diagnoses with three or more dichotomy mismatches were rejected from the training sample as clearly false or erroneous. Other instruments for quality control of incoming questionnaires and stated diagnoses were also used; these were unrelated to their socionic content and therefore could not negatively affect the analysis results as a consequence of partial rejection of material. Ultimately, within each type in the training sample, all honestly given responses of respondents who had previously been typed by different experts with partially divergent views of the boundaries between types were averaged. This achieved a representation of the view of type boundaries averaged across the general “socionic culture” of Russia and Ukraine. Additional correction of the reference responses of types, increasing the accuracy and reliability of the diagnostic coefficients, was introduced using three special mathematical procedures. The first of these coefficient-refining procedures was stepwise recurrent refinement of respondents’ diagnoses. The second refining procedure — the so-called symmetrization of the training-sample data array (the procedure is based on the fact that the reference response of any type to a given question can be predicted with fairly high accuracy – by decomposition over Reinin traits - from the reference responses given to that question by the other 15 types). The third and most important refining procedure — symmetrization of diagnostic coefficients in an array of two thousand enlarged psychological properties that describe, with sufficient uniformity, the entire 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 the space of properties) 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 forth. If the stated equality of distances is not achieved, the inequality is partially corrected by rotating 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 controlled for the presence of negative excess kurtosis at the boundary of the poles in probability-density graphs describing the distribution of the magnitude of the four basic socionic traits; the other controlled maximization of the generated substantive content of the three quadra traits while varying the rotation of the four basic axes subject to preserving their mutual orthogonality. 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 of the previous approximation, while further refinements were introduced only through the procedure of symmetrizing the array of diagnostic coefficients (also taking into account the requirement for the greatest possible orthogonalization of all socionic axes). The same reduced procedure was also performed when the database was supplemented with new, additional questionnaire items.

Thus, first (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 under the condition of having sufficient socionic experience or had been typed by DIFFERENT experts from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Ukraine and who 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 responses for each questionnaire question (when the mean is calculated, errors in opposite directions in most cases cancel one another - the statistical law of large numbers). At the next stage, statistical procedures were performed to control negative excess kurtosis, maximize the content of the quadra traits subject to their maximum orthogonality to the basic traits, and finally symmetrize the results (TIMs in multidimensional psychological space should be equidistant from one another, forming a symmetrical structure). As a rule, these procedures introduced minor corrections, which nevertheless 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 turn out to be preferred over others). At the final stages, the diagnostic coefficients obtained using the training samples were already used for diagnosis directly from questionnaires, while previously stated TIMs were ignored. Diagnostic coefficients were recalculated on the expanded sample and checks were again carried out - of the symmetry of the placement of TIMs in psychological space, of the correspondence between the most characteristic properties identified for TIMs and their “canonical” descriptions by the majority of authors, and of the resulting properties of the 8 functions and poles of the basic traits - again, whether the results obtained corresponded to the majority of descriptions. All checks were passed. In individual cases where apparent roughness was detected, additional source material was collected for clarification. 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, allowing any shorter diagnostic questionnaires to be formed from them subsequently with very high reliability of type determination. The validity of the diagnostic procedures developed was confirmed by the very high correlation of diagnostic results between pairs of questionnaires containing completely different questions that were repeatedly administered to the same subjects (above 0,93). Content validity is also confirmed by the maximal correspondence of the experimentally obtained “psychological portraits” of psychotypes and functions to descriptions of their characteristic properties by the majority of authors.

Obtaining valid diagnostic coefficients for more than 5500 original questionnaire questions characterizing more than 2000 different mental properties makes it possible to assemble from them an arbitrary number of different diagnostic questionnaires, each of which is immediately ready for use without requiring any additional adaptation. When selecting questions from the database for any new questionnaire, it is necessary only to satisfy the condition of preserving diagnostic symmetry of the coefficients (roughly speaking, the sums of squares of the diagnostic coefficients for all 16 psychotypes across the selected questions must coincide, while 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 equal to zero). Selecting questions for a questionnaire while satisfying these conditions is easily accomplished using simple mathematical control procedures.

Thus, the method of socionic questionnaire-based type diagnosis developed by us, subsequently used in a large series of studies to obtain detailed “psychological portraits” of psychotypes and mental functions, is distinguished 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. complete absence of authorial subjectivity in selecting questions and assigning particular diagnostic values to them;
2. use of questions with maximum discriminative capacity, which is mathematically confirmed;
3. absence of distortions - when, for example, some other questionnaires previously used for diagnosing irrationality those manifestations of irrationality that were characteristic primarily only of intuitive types;
4. absence of reliance on traits at all - 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 issue is extraversion-introversion and rationality-irrationality or, for example, Questimity and Positivism - because before this diagnostic method all traits are equal and none has an advantage initially built into it by the questionnaire’s construction). The same applies to the purity, guaranteed by the method, of constructing “psychological portraits” of mental functions in their various positions (program, creative, etc.).

Complete Psychological Portrait of ESE — Experimental Results

The more than five thousand questionnaire statements analyzed on the basis of the multi-year experiment, which respondents rated by “trying them on” themselves, were manually grouped by us — on the basis of their semantic content and mutual correlations — into approximately 2300 enlarged clusters containing from one to several dozen questionnaire items similar in meaning and generally characterizing more generalized psychological properties. On the one hand, replacing primary questionnaire statements with their generalized clusters simplifies presentation of the results because it reduces the number of primary properties under consideration; on the other hand — averaging across several items further increases the accuracy of projections of psychological properties onto psychotypes. It should be taken into account, however, that in all tables below, the stated ratio 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 the averaged properties (clusters), but still for individual single members of the cluster, that is, for specific questionnaire statements. In reality, this indicator refers not to the probability that representatives of the type actually possess a given property, but to the probability that a respondent agrees that he possesses that property. If the statistical characteristics of several questionnaire statements within one cluster are averaged, the stated 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 less than 0,5, it will decrease still further, approaching zero. Accordingly, the probability-ratio indicators should also increase substantially for clusters consisting of several statements (increasing two- to threefold or more). This increase is ignored in the tables. The reason is that the tables are intended for practical application. When in practice we assess whether a person possesses some property and rely for this either on his self-assessment or on an outside observer’s view, we are in fact 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-ratio values calculated for individual specific questionnaire statements will also provide a sufficiently accurate minimum approximate estimate when a cluster property previously derived by averaging several questionnaire items is tested on the basis of a single experiment.

The tables can be very 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; in addition, table columns reflecting the complete system of diagnostic coefficients (reference responses) suitable for use in diagnostic questionnaires have been temporarily excluded. The indicators retained in the tables provide a quite clear picture of the most characteristic properties of the psychotypes.

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

Table 2. Psychological and psychophysiological properties (content clusters combining several questions similar in meaning) that are highly characteristic of the ESE psychotype, but only in second or third place after other psychotypes

Table 3. Properties that maximally distinguish ESE from SEI

Table 4. Properties that maximally distinguish ESE from ESI

Table 5. Properties that maximally distinguish ESE from SEE

Table 6. Properties that maximally distinguish ESE from EIE

Table 7. Properties that maximally distinguish ESE from LSE

Table 8. Properties that maximally distinguish ESE from IEE