Full Psychological Portrait of the Intuitive Ethical Introvert (IEI) — 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 the detailed experimental study and description of empirical psychological portraits of the 16 basic socionic psychotypes, 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 and 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 in advance.

Psychological types (essentially, independent non-overlapping sectors of a 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 in the resulting structuring of psychological space is very close to socionics, this is not the case at all; there, on the contrary, the basis has consistently been not psychotypes but four basic traits. These traits are extraversion-introversion, rationality-irrationality, logic-ethics, and intuition-sensing. Each trait constitutes 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 direct expert diagnosis of types in their “holistic” expression. Despite all its obvious disadvantages from the standpoint of standardizing diagnosis, this tradition yielded undeniable scientific advantages. The “advantages” in this case consist in the fact that, in the developing socionic culture, a wide variety of 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 represented a kind of emergent formation relative to the semantic content of the four basic diagnostic traits. It was found, for example, 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, and accordingly the same sensing can behave differently in “decisive” and “judicious” psychotypes — in one case as aggressive “force sensing,” in the other as “sensing of sensations,” which differs very substantially in semantic content. Differences were similarly identified between manifestations of Ne and Ni, Fe and Fi, and Te and Ti. Socionic theoretical models developed accordingly, incorporating new concepts. No such development occurred in typology, where rigid restrictions at the diagnostic “input” prevented fundamentally new conclusions from being discovered at the “output.” Unlike typology, socionics for a long time proceeded by empirically “feeling out” the most objective boundaries between psychological types; that is, in continuous direct contact with natural reality, it formed optimal boundaries between sectors in psychological space, without shying away from taking into account 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, within this initial “rough hypothesis,” intuition should manifest itself identically in different types, and Briggs-Myers diagnosis likewise aimed to identify in types exclusively the common features of their dichotomous pole. Accordingly, in typology the boundaries between types were distorted and shifted away from the places toward which they naturally gravitated. 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 the irrationality of intuitive types manifests itself 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 extravert irrationality, then passivity and laziness are the key features for introverts, although in the broader sense both manifestations stem from a deficiency of judging functions and the resulting insufficiency of planning). Nevertheless, such nuances were ignored in typology, which led to incorrect placement of boundaries between types on the basis of purely voluntaristically selected “diagnostic” properties arbitrarily chosen and fixed in questionnaires. 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 went 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 identified by its expert “public opinion” today apparently correspond better than any 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 revealed 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 convergence of expert type diagnosis among different experts. It should be noted, however, that this is not a critical shortcoming that casts doubt on the achievements of socionics as a science. When reading numerous descriptions of psychotypes by different socionic authors, it is not difficult to see that for each type the authors, for the most part, note the same characteristic manifestations. This knowledge and these observations are unquestionable scientific truths; they coincide among different authors and arise from their observation of numerous strongly expressed cases that are “obvious” from the standpoint of type diagnosis. But, indeed, this knowledge cannot always be translated in the reverse direction, from the general to the particular, when it is necessary to diagnose the type of a subject who is not so strongly expressed. It should be noted that the convergence of expert diagnoses is low even among representatives of the same socionic school. If we exclude a number of obvious para-socionic “reinventors of the wheel” and fraudulent amateurs, inventors of their own socionics who present themselves as experts, the dispersion of diagnoses is caused not so much by differences among schools in their views of the boundaries between types as by the fundamental limitations on any expert’s ability simultaneously to take into account and weight the diagnostic contribution of the numerous manifestations of a subject that are significant for type diagnosis. It follows directly from our studies discussed below that any property “characteristic” of a psychotype, function, or pole of a socionic trait is purely probabilistic in nature. There are no properties or manifestations that can be called necessary or sufficient for diagnosing any type. One can speak only of a particular property manifesting itself among representatives of a type with greater probability than in the population as a whole. Thus, reliable type diagnosis can be based only on the 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 strictly formalized and sufficiently long expert interviews) can reliably rely on the statistical law of large numbers; human thinking is incapable of doing so — no matter how experienced and socionically “advanced” the expert may be. Socionic expert type diagnosis is especially unreliable in cases where, by psychological characteristics, the person being typed objectively lies in a problematic zone near the boundary between sectors of psychological space (and there are more than enough 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) do not have these accuracy limitations, but for this to be so 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 the Briggs-Myers questionnaires.

By the present day, socionics has already exhausted all the advantages that 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 record and formalize today’s achievements of socionics in the language of more exact sciences. Only with the language of mathematical statistics, precise and sensitive even to small 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 typological questionnaire) can present-day socionic type diagnosis be standardized and its accuracy sharply increased. If applied type diagnosis can still tolerate, and at times is forced to tolerate, expert typing “by eye,” then reliable and modern diagnostic questionnaires are simply indispensable for scientific research. Without them, socionic researchers have for a decade remained in a scientific dead end, engaging in the worst case in openly unscientific myth-making and in the best case in chewing over old theoretical cud. The present series of our scientific works, based on mathematical and statistical methods of 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 accepted within the socionic paradigm (or, more broadly, within 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 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 Se, 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?

In our studies, psychotypes were determined using questionnaires from correlations between respondents’ response vectors and the “reference” (averaged) responses 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). All 16 correlations together 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 nature of an accentuation additional 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 a retest using a questionnaire with 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 provisional questionnaire-based type diagnosis. Stated diagnoses with three or more dichotomy mismatches were discarded from the training sample as clearly false or erroneous. Other tools were also used to control the quality of incoming questionnaires and stated diagnoses; these were unrelated to their socionic content and therefore could not, through partial rejection of material, negatively affect the analysis results. Ultimately, within each type in the training sample, all honestly given responses of respondents previously typed by different experts with partly differing views of the boundaries between types were averaged. This made it possible to reflect the view of type boundaries averaged across the general “socionic culture” of Russia and Ukraine. Additional adjustment of the types’ reference responses, 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 was 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 particular question can be predicted with fairly high accuracy – by decomposition across Reinin traits - from the reference responses 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 describe, with sufficient uniformity, the full diversity of possible manifestations of a hypothetical complete psychological space. The latter procedure is based 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 the distance 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 additional rotation of the necessary axes in multidimensional space, resulting in a small correction of the diagnostic coefficients initially obtained empirically for each questionnaire item and each of the 16 psychological types. At the first stages of obtaining and refining the diagnostic coefficients of questionnaire items, two additional refining procedures were used. One controlled for the presence of negative excess kurtosis at the boundary between poles in probability-density graphs describing the distribution of the magnitude of the four basic socionic traits; the other controlled the maximization of the substantive content generated for 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 on the basis of the questionnaire itself, using the diagnostic coefficients of the previous approximation, and further refinements were introduced only by means of the procedure for symmetrizing the diagnostic-coefficient array (also taking into account the requirement for the maximum 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 items), a “training sample” was formed for each TIM from people who had self-typed provided that they had sufficient socionic experience, or who had been typed by DIFFERENT experts from Moscow, St. 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 responses for each questionnaire item (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 carried out to control negative excess kurtosis, maximize the content of the quadral traits subject to their maximum orthogonality to the basic traits, and, finally, symmetrize the results (TIMs in multidimensional psychological space should be located at equal distances from one another, forming a symmetrical structure). As a rule, these procedures introduced only minor corrections, which nevertheless helped eliminate systematic errors (caused, for example, by the fact that for a time some socionic schools typed too many subjects as “Hamlets,” and also by the fact that in self-typing some TIMs prove preferable to others). At the final stages, the diagnostic coefficients obtained using the training samples were already used for direct questionnaire-based diagnosis, ignoring previously stated TIMs. Diagnostic coefficients were recalculated on the expanded sample and checks were again performed: the symmetry of the placement of TIMs in psychological space; whether the most characteristic properties identified for TIMs corresponded to their “canonical” descriptions by most authors; and analysis of the resulting properties of the 8 functions and the poles of the basic traits - again, whether the resulting findings corresponded to the majority of descriptions. All checks were passed. In individual cases where apparent irregularities were identified, additional source material was collected for refinement. As a result, after many approximations, 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 a very high correlation between the diagnostic results of 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 maximum correspondence of the experimentally obtained “psychological portraits” of psychotypes and functions with descriptions of their characteristic properties by most authors.

Obtaining valid diagnostic coefficients for more than 5500 original questionnaire items characterizing more than 2000 different mental properties makes it possible to group 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 items from the database for any new questionnaire, it is necessary only to observe the condition that the diagnostic symmetry of the coefficients be preserved (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 obtained on their basis for diagnosing the 15 traits must be orthogonal to one another, which is equivalent to their scalar products being equal to zero). Selecting items for a questionnaire while observing these conditions is easily accomplished with simple mathematical control procedures.

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

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

The method’s diagnosis of psychotypes on the basis of their holistic characteristics, without the targeted use of socionic traits during diagnosis, subsequently makes it possible to study the manifestations of any socionic traits in a genuinely valid manner 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.).

Full Psychological Portrait of the IEI — Experimental Results

The more than five thousand questionnaire statements analyzed as a result of the multiyear 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 comprising from one to several dozen questionnaire items similar in meaning and, as a rule, 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, averaging across several items further increases the accuracy of projections of psychological properties onto psychotypes. It should, however, be taken into account that in all the tables below, the reported index showing by how many times 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 single members of the cluster, that is, for specific questionnaire statements. In reality, this index refers not to the probability that a particular property is actually present in representatives of a type, but to the probability that a respondent agrees that they possess that property. When the statistical characteristics of several questionnaire statements are averaged within one cluster, the stated probability should become more contrasted through the smoothing of random errors in subjects’ self-assessments. Where the probability is greater than 0,5, for a generalized cluster of several statements it should become even closer to one; where it is initially less than 0,5, it will decrease even further, approaching zero. Accordingly, the indices of the multiplicative excess of probability should 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 a particular property and for this purpose rely either on their self-assessment or on an outside observer’s view, we are in fact conducting an experiment on only one particular manifestation of that property, without averaging the results of several experiments testing for the presence of the property. Thus, in practical use, the reported values of the multiplicative excess of probability calculated for individual specific questionnaire statements will provide a sufficiently accurate minimum approximate estimate even 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 purposes of 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 still continuing have been excluded, and in addition table columns reflecting the complete system of diagnostic coefficients (reference responses) suitable for use in diagnostic questionnaires have been temporarily excluded. The indices retained in the tables provide a sufficiently clear representation of the most characteristic properties of the psychotypes.

Table 1. Psychological and psychophysiological properties (content clusters combining several questions similar in meaning) exclusively (that is, most strongly and primarily) characteristic specifically of the IEI psychotype. The conditional exclusivity index is defined as the amount by which the IEI type mean exceeds the population level, plus the distance from the IEI 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) highly characteristic of the IEI psychotype, but only in second or third place after other psychotypes

Table 3. Properties that most strongly distinguish IEI from EIE

Table 4. Properties that most strongly distinguish IEI from IEE

Table 5. Properties that most strongly distinguish IEI from EII

Table 6. Properties that most strongly distinguish IEI from ILI

Table 7. Properties that most strongly distinguish IEI from SEI

Table 8. Properties that most strongly distinguish IEI from LII