Final Recalculation of the Database of Past Socionic Data – Scientific Information on the Work Carried Out

The author (V. L. Talanov) has finally completed three months of work (more than 800 working hours were required) recalculating the entire database of questionnaires from 46,098 respondents from the previous 90 questionnaires of different versions.

THE OBJECTIVES OF THE WORK WERE:

1. For each questionnaire separately, to reduce the parasitic variance of trait intercorrelations by at least 10 times
2. As a result – to bring the directions of the trait axes of all questionnaires in the Database to a common unified standard under the condition of trait orthogonality.
3. As a result – to make much more accurate the collection of trait and other socionic profiles of all 12,718 tested questionnaire questions (statements), whose profiles are formed by summing data obtained from different questionnaires.
4. As a result – also to increase the accuracy and reliability of socionic diagnostics carried out using questions from the collection with known socionic profiles. An important indicator of diagnostic accuracy is the convergence of questionnaire results with the sociotypes declared by the subjects (by self-typing). After the work carried out, this convergence, on average across the sample of 28,512 respondents from the previous 90 questionnaires who declared their types, amounted to 60.7%, increasing immediately by two and a half percentage points.
5. Another objective of the work was to determine the proportion in which different socionic traits are taken into account in the properties of sociotypes, as is used on average by people interested in socionics when self-typing.

Regarding the last point, as expected, it turned out that on average among the 28,512 respondents who declared their types, socionic traits are used with very different intensities for different traits when assigning oneself one sociotype or another in the course of self-typing.

The greatest degree of underestimation of the role of traits in the general psychological properties of personality during self-typing occurs for traits of the Questimity-Declatimity group (especially Questimity, Democracy, and Process). The reason is understandable and is evidently subjective in nature – in the old socionic Model A, which many “socionic gurus” still adhere to, and their followers after them, Questimity-Declatimity traits are practically ignored.

At the same time, the role of the four so-called basic traits shared by socionics and MBTI (Logic, Intuition, Extraversion, Irrationality – in precisely this descending order) is, on average, overestimated during self-typing.

If in the objective (“theoretical”) model of the sociotype, where all orthogonal traits participate in the properties of the type proportionally to their actually observed contributions to personality properties, the contribution of the four principal traits (the basic ones shared with MBTI) amounts to about 60% of the total variance of sociotype properties (see Tables 1 and 2), then in the practical (reduced) model of the sociotype obtained from self-typing data, the contribution of these four traits to sociotype properties already amounts to about 80% of the total variance, while the remaining 11 traits account for only 20% of the variance taken into account.

It should be noted that the maximally complete representation of the broad spectrum of personality properties in a sociotype is possible only when all 15 socionic traits are fully taken into account in constructing the sociotype, without overestimating or underestimating them, but in exact proportion to their contribution to the sociotype and their actual factor strength.

Until now, in the summaries issued for the questionnaires, as the final type profile we showed the profile corresponding to an approximate model of self-typing (that is, with an overestimation of the contribution of the four “strongest” personality factors and an underestimation, to one degree or another, of the contribution of all the remaining 11 traits). Apparently, in the future we will show in the summaries not only this profile, but also the profile corresponding to the model of the ideal theoretical sociotype, for which the contribution of all traits to the sociotype is taken into account proportionally to their actual strength, without overestimating or underestimating the role of individual traits.

More detailed results of the study accompanying the work carried out are presented in the attached table.

Table 3. Matrix of intercorrelations of measured dichotomies in a sample of 46068 respondents (based on the total data of 90 questionnaires by V.L. Talanov, different versions)