Full Psychological Portrait of the Intuitive-Logical Extravert (ILE) — 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 psychological types, the 8 socionic functions (in their various positions), and the poles of socionic traits. The results of all studies in the series (including the results presented in the tables of this article) were derived from mathematical-statistical analysis of respondents’ answers to items in psychological questionnaires (more than 5500 different questionnaire items in total). These answers were obtained from more than 5000 different respondents whose socionic psychological types had been determined in advance.

Psychological types (in essence, 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 type theory, which is very close to socionics in the resulting structuring of psychological space, this is not the case at all: the basis is invariably taken to be not psychological types 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 psychological types. This approach was also used 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 the diagnosis of psychological types not on four-factor diagnostic questionnaires but on direct expert diagnosis of types in their “holistic” expression. For all its obvious disadvantages from the standpoint of standardizing diagnosis, this tradition produced undeniable scientific advantages. The “advantages” in this case consist in the fact that, within the developing socionic culture, it was easier to notice the most diverse characteristic properties of psychological types arising at the intersection of four dichotomies. These properties were studied rather than ignored, although they often represented a kind of novel formation relative to the semantic content of the four basic diagnostic traits. Thus, for example, it was found that the psychological types of the second and third quadras differ from the types of the so-called “peripheral” quadras in a new property, Decisiveness-Judiciousness, which cannot be reduced to the four basic traits; accordingly, the same sensing may behave differently in “Decisive” and “Judicious” psychological types — in one case as aggressive “Force Sensing,” in the other case — 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. Socionic theoretical models developed accordingly, incorporating new concepts. No such development occurred in type theory, where rigid constraints at the diagnostic “input” prevented fundamentally new conclusions from being discovered at the “output.” Unlike type theory, socionics for a long time proceeded by empirically “feeling out” the most objective boundaries between psychological types; that is, in continual direct contact with natural reality, it formed optimal boundaries between sectors of psychological space, without hesitating to take into account, when drawing those boundaries, newly discovered properties of the types that could not be directly reduced to 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 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), yet the founders’ initial “rough hypothesis,” especially beginning with Briggs and Myers, required intuition, within that initial “rough hypothesis,” to manifest identically in different types, and Briggs-Myers diagnosis was likewise directed exclusively toward identifying in the types the common features of their dichotomous pole. Accordingly, in type theory the boundaries between types were distorted 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 the irrationality of intuitive types manifests somewhat differently from that of sensing types, and that of extraverts — somewhat differently from that of introverts (for example, if improvisation is the key feature of extraverted irrationality, 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 insufficiency of planning). Nevertheless, such nuances were ignored in type theory, leading to incorrect placement of boundaries between types on the basis of purely voluntaristically selected “diagnostic” properties arbitrarily chosen and fixed in questionnaires. In this way, any potentially new properties of psychological types and their groups that could not be reduced to the diagnostic questions originally built into the Myers-Briggs questionnaire were blurred and failed to be detected in research.

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 that were gradually felt out by its expert “public opinion” today appear to correspond best to the real physiological factors of brain activity that objectively underlie the division of psychological diversity into psychological types. 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 (from physiological considerations, 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 calls into question the achievements of socionics as a science. Indeed, when reading the numerous descriptions of psychological types by different socionic authors, it is not difficult to see that, for each type, the authors for the most part notice 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. Yet this knowledge 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 we set aside a number of obvious quasi-socionic “reinventors of the wheel” and fraudulent amateurs, inventors of their own socionics who present themselves as experts, then the dispersion of diagnoses is attributable not so much to differences among schools in their views of the boundaries between types as to the fundamental limitation of any expert’s ability to take into account and weigh simultaneously the diagnostic contribution of the subject’s numerous manifestations that are relevant to type diagnosis. Our studies, discussed below, directly imply that any property “characteristic” of a psychological type, 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 say only that, within a type, some particular property occurs among its representatives with a higher 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 rigidly formalized and sufficiently long expert interviews) can reliably make use of the statistical law of large numbers; human thinking cannot do so — however experienced and socionically “advanced” the expert may be. Socionic expert type diagnosis is especially unreliable when, in terms of psychological characteristics, the person being typed objectively lies in a problematic zone near the boundary between sectors of psychological space (and there are many 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 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 true such questionnaires must necessarily take into account the full diversity of psychological-type properties described in socionics (that is, ideally, diagnose psychological types 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 now, socionics has exhausted all the advantages it could derive from the “non-formalized” development of its scientific culture. The characteristic properties of psychological types and mental functions have been described; their further refinement within the framework of expert diagnosis is impossible. The time has come to record and formalize the present 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 present level exceeds by an order of magnitude the level of knowledge available to the creators of the first Briggs-Myers typological questionnaire) can current 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,” reliable and modern diagnostic questionnaires are simply indispensable for scientific research. Without them, socionics has for a decade remained in a scientific dead end, engaging at worst in openly unscientific myth-making and at best — in 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 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 psychological types). The properties of functions and traits are derived from the properties of psychological types, 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-position Force Sensing, the properties of the SLE and SEE psychological types are averaged, and so forth). Therefore, the key potential question for studies of this kind is — how are the psychological types whose properties are subsequently analyzed diagnosed?

In our studies, psychological types were determined using questionnaires by correlating respondents’ response vectors with the “reference” (averaged) answers to the same questions given by the “average representatives” of all 16 socionic types. 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 psychological type (socionic type). 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, apart from the highest peak, indicates the individual character of an accentuation supplementary to the basic type. As calculations showed, the reliability of determining respondents’ leading type by this procedure in our study averaged no less than 90% correct diagnoses (the percentage was verified by agreement 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 answers), the types’ “reference answers” (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 in the basic dichotomies between the stated type and a preliminary draft type diagnosis based on the questionnaire. Stated diagnoses with three or more mismatching dichotomies were rejected 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 could not, through partial rejection of material, negatively affect the results of the analysis. 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 on the boundaries between types were averaged. This produced a representation of 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 particular 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 fairly evenly describe the entire diversity of possible manifestations of the 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 psychological types should be the same as between EIE and EII, SLE and SLI, and so forth, while the distance between ILI and SLI should be approximately the same as between LSI and LII, and so forth and so on. If this equality of distances is not achieved, the inequality is partially corrected by an 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 controlled for the presence of negative excess kurtosis at the boundary between the 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 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 psychological types 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 from the previous approximation, while further refinements were introduced only through the procedure for symmetrizing the array of diagnostic coefficients (which also takes into account the requirement for the greatest possible orthogonalization of all socionic axes). The same truncated procedure was also applied 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, St. Petersburg, and Ukraine and had stated that TIM. Clearly, 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 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 under the condition of their maximum orthogonality to the basic traits, and, finally, symmetrize the results (TIMs in multidimensional psychological space must be equally distant 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 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 already used to diagnose directly from the questionnaires, ignoring previously stated TIMs. The diagnostic coefficients were recalculated on the expanded sample, and checks were performed on the symmetry of the placement of TIMs in psychological space, the correspondence of the most characteristic properties identified for TIMs to their “canonical” descriptions by most authors, and the 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 clarification. As a result, after many approximations and using more than 5000 different subjects in total, an almost ideal system of diagnostic coefficients was obtained for more than 5500 questionnaire statements, making it possible subsequently to construct any shorter diagnostic questionnaires from them 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 and administered repeatedly to the same subjects (above 0,93). Content validity is also confirmed by the maximal correspondence of the experimentally obtained “psychological portraits” of psychological types 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 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 necessary only to satisfy the condition of preserving the diagnostic symmetry of the coefficients (roughly speaking, the sums of squared diagnostic coefficients for all 16 psychological types across the selected questions must coincide, while the systems of diagnostic coefficients obtained from them for diagnosing the 15 traits must be mutually orthogonal, 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 that we developed and subsequently used in a large series of studies to obtain detailed “psychological portraits” of psychological types 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 of 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 maximal discriminative ability, mathematically confirmed;
3. the absence of distortions - for example, where some other questionnaires previously diagnosed irrationality using manifestations of irrationality that were characteristic primarily of intuitive types alone;
4. the complete absence of reliance on traits - TIMs are diagnosed holistically.

The diagnosis of psychological types used by the method, based on their holistic characteristics and without targeted use of socionic traits during diagnosis, subsequently makes it possible to study 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 all traits are equal before this diagnostic method; none has an advantage built into it from the outset by the construction of the questionnaire). 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 ILE — Experimental Results

The more than five thousand questionnaire statements analyzed as a result of the multiyear experiment, which respondents rated by “trying them on” themselves, were manually grouped by us — on the basis of their semantic content and mutual correlation — into approximately 2300 aggregated clusters, each containing from one to several dozen questionnaire items similar 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 under consideration; on the other hand — by averaging across several items, it further increases the accuracy of the projections of psychological properties onto psychological types. It should be borne in mind, however, that in all the tables below, the stated factor by which the probability of finding a property in a representative of a psychological type exceeds the probability of finding it in the entire population or in groups of other psychological types was calculated and reported by us not for the averaged properties (clusters), but still for individual single members of a cluster, that is, for specific questionnaire statements. In reality, this indicator refers not to the probability that a given property is actually present in representatives of a type, but to the probability that a respondent agrees that this property is present in them. When the statistical characteristics of several questionnaire statements are averaged within a single cluster, this probability should become more contrasted because random errors in subjects’ self-assessments are leveled out. Where the probability is greater than 0,5, it should become still closer to one for the generalized cluster of several statements, whereas where it is initially below 0,5, it will decrease still further, approaching zero. Accordingly, the factors by which the probability is exceeded 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 has some property and for this purpose rely either on their self-assessment or on an external 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 factors by which the probability is exceeded, 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 may be very useful both for obtaining a clearer understanding of the characteristic properties of the psychological type 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 abridgements. For example, some properties whose analysis is continuing have been excluded; in addition, table columns reflecting the complete system of diagnostic coefficients (reference answers) suitable for use in diagnostic questionnaires have temporarily been omitted. The indicators retained in the tables provide a quite clear picture of the most characteristic properties of the psychological types.

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

Table 3. Properties that distinguish ILE most strongly from LII

Table 4. Properties that distinguish ILE most strongly from ILI

Table 5. Properties that distinguish ILE most strongly from LIE

Table 6. Properties distinguishing ILE from IEE

Table 7. Properties distinguishing ILE from SLE

Table 8. Properties distinguishing ILE from EIE