Complete Psychological Portrait of the Intuitive-Logical Introvert (ILI) — Results of an Experimental Study

V. L. Talanov

St. Petersburg, December 2011

Introduction

The present article is part of a large new series of our works devoted to a 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 the present article) were derived from a 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 psychotypes had been determined in advance.

Psychological types (essentially, 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 at all the case: the basis is invariably taken to be not psychotypes, but four basic traits. These traits are extraversion–introversion, rationality–irrationality, logic–ethics, and intuition–sensorics. 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 the diagnosis of 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 standardizing diagnosis, this tradition yielded undeniable scientific advantages. The “advantages” in this case consisted in the fact that, within the emerging socionic culture, it was easier to note a wide variety of characteristic properties of psychotypes arising at the intersection of four dichotomies. These properties were studied rather than ignored, even though 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 psychotypes of the second and third quadras differ from the psychotypes of the so-called “peripheral” quadras in a new property of decisiveness–judiciousness that cannot be reduced to the four basic traits; accordingly, the same sensorics may behave differently in “decisive” and “judicious” psychotypes — in one case as aggressive “force sensorics,” and in the other as “sensorics of sensations,” whose semantic content differs very substantially. Analogously, differences were identified between manifestations of black and white intuition, black and white ethics, and black and white logic. Theoretical models of socionics 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 felt out 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 living contact with natural truth it formed optimal boundaries of sectors in psychological space, without shying away from taking into account, when drawing those boundaries, newly discovered properties of types that could not be directly reduced to their differences in extraversion–introversion, rationality–irrationality, logic–ethics, and intuition–sensorics. 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 had never been “God-given”; rather, it represented a preliminary result of the same empirical observations by the founding researchers of the diversity of human manifestations. There is no reason, for example, why intuition should 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 within that initial “rough hypothesis” that intuition should manifest itself identically in different types, and Briggs–Myers diagnosis was likewise directed exclusively at identifying in types the features common to their dichotomous pole. Accordingly, in type theory the boundaries between types were distorted and displaced 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 to all types — although today we already know well that the irrationality of intuitives manifests itself not quite as it does in sensoric types, and that of extraverts not quite as it does in introverts (for example, if the key feature of extravert irrationality is improvisation, then for introverts the corresponding key feature is passivity and laziness, although in the broader sense both manifestations derive from a deficit of evaluative functions and the resulting lack of planning). Nevertheless, such nuances were ignored in type theory, which led to the incorrect placement of boundaries between types on the basis of purely voluntaristically selected and arbitrarily chosen “diagnostic” properties fixed in questionnaires. In this way, any potentially new properties of psychotypes 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 identified in research.

Socionics avoided these shortcomings in its development. As a result, among all existing psychological classifications, the boundaries between sectors of multidimensional psychological space gradually felt out by its expert “public opinion” today appear to 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 identified which are generated nonlinearly at the intersection of several “basic” traits (from physiological considerations, precisely such generation should be expected of “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 shortcoming that casts doubt on the achievements of socionics as a science. When reading the 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 indisputable scientific truths; they coincide across different authors and arise from their observation of numerous cases that are contrastively expressed and “obvious” from the standpoint of type diagnosis. But, indeed, 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 some less clearly expressed subject. It should be noted that the agreement of expert diagnoses is low even among representatives of the same socionic school. If one excludes a number of obvious para-socionic “reinventors of the wheel” and fraudulent amateurs, inventors of their own socionics who present themselves as experts, then the dispersion of diagnoses reflects not so much differences among the views of different schools concerning the boundaries between types as it does the fundamental limitation of any expert’s ability simultaneously to take into account and weight the diagnostic contribution of the many manifestations of a subject that are significant for type diagnosis. Our studies, discussed below, directly imply 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 occurring 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 through reliance on the statistical law of large numbers. Only formalized procedures (questionnaires or strictly formalized and sufficiently long expert interviews) can reliably exploit the statistical law of large numbers; human thinking cannot do so — no matter how experienced and socionically “advanced” the expert may be. Expert socionic type diagnosis is especially unreliable in cases where, by objective psychological characteristics, the person being typed lies in a problematic zone near the boundary between sectors of psychological space (and such cases are abundant). In our experience-based opinion, the reliability of expert type diagnosis cannot in principle exceed 60%, and only with special selection of the most 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 prescriptions of the Briggs–Myers questionnaires.

By the present day, socionics has already exhausted all the advantages it could derive from the “non-formalized” development of its scientific culture. The characteristic properties of psychotypes and psychic functions have been described; their further refinement within 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 aid of the language of mathematical statistics, which is 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 standardized questionnaires the present level of socionic knowledge about the characteristic properties of types and functions (and this present level is an order of magnitude higher than 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 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, socionics researchers have for a decade remained in a scientific dead end, engaged at worst in frankly unscientific mythmaking and at best in re-chewing 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 accepted within the socionic paradigm (or, more broadly — neo-Jungian personality typology, which divides the diversity of psychological space into 16 independent and comparatively symmetrically arranged sectors called psychotypes). The properties of functions and traits are derived from the properties of psychotypes, because the properties of particular functions in different positions and the poles of socionic traits are ultimately calculated by averaging the properties of particular groups of psychological types (for example, to identify the properties of program force sensorics, the properties of the SLE and SEE psychotypes are averaged, and so forth). 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 by means of questionnaires, on the basis of correlations between respondents’ answer vectors and the “reference” (averaged) answers 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). Taken together, all 16 correlations formed the respondent’s complete individual psychological profile, characterizing his or her individual distinctiveness as fully as possible. Thus, if the maximum correlation assigned a person to the LII type, the second-highest correlation could assign that person 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 an accentuation additional 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 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 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 on the basic dichotomies between the stated type and an initial preliminary questionnaire-based type diagnosis. Stated diagnoses with three or more dichotomy mismatches were discarded from the training sample as obviously 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, through partial rejection of the 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 holding partially divergent views on the boundaries between types were averaged. This made it possible to reflect an averaged view of the boundaries between types for the shared “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-refinement procedures was stepwise recurrent refinement of respondents’ diagnoses. The second refinement procedure was the so-called symmetrization of the training-sample data array (the procedure is based on the fact that the reference answer of any type to a given question can be predicted with fairly high accuracy – by decomposition across Reinin traits - from the reference answers given to that question by the other 15 types). The third and most important refinement procedure was symmetrization of the diagnostic coefficients in an array of two thousand enlarged psychological properties that rather evenly describe the full diversity of possible manifestations of a hypothetical complete psychological space. The latter procedure rests on the assumption that, in psychological space, the difference (that is, the mathematical distance in property space) between the LIE and LII psychotypes should be the same as between EIE and EII, SLE and SLI, 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 the stated equality of distances is not achieved, the inequality is partially corrected by an additional rotation of the required axes in multidimensional space, which produces a small correction of the diagnostic coefficients initially 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 refinement procedures were used. One monitored 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 monitored maximization of the generated substantive content of the three quadral traits while varying the rotation of the four basic axes under the condition that their mutual orthogonality be preserved. At the final stages of refining the diagnostic coefficients, the stated psychotypes were no longer used, because all the information they could provide had already been utilized. In this case, diagnoses were made exclusively on the basis of the questionnaire itself, using the diagnostic coefficients from the preceding 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 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 while possessing sufficient socionic experience, or who had been typed by DIFFERENT experts in 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 answers for each questionnaire question (when the mean is calculated, errors in opposite directions cancel one another in most cases - the statistical law of large numbers). At the next stage, statistical procedures were performed to monitor 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 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,” as well as by the fact that in self-typing some TIMs prove preferable to others). At the final stages, the diagnostic coefficients obtained from the training samples were already used for direct questionnaire diagnosis, with previously stated TIMs ignored. Diagnostic coefficients were recalculated on the expanded sample, and checks were again carried out: on the symmetry of the placement of TIMs in psychological space; on whether the most characteristic properties identified for TIMs corresponded to their “canonical” descriptions by the majority of authors; and on the properties obtained for the 8 functions and 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 rough edges were identified, additional source material was collected for refinement. As a result, after many approximations and using more than 5000 different subjects in total, a practically ideal system of diagnostic coefficients was obtained for more than 5500 questionnaire statements, making it possible subsequently to construct from them any shorter diagnostic questionnaires with very high reliability of type determination. The validity of the developed diagnostic procedures was confirmed by 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 maximum 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 psychic properties makes it possible to group from them 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 that the diagnostic symmetry of the coefficients be preserved (roughly speaking, the sums of squared diagnostic coefficients for all 16 psychotypes across the selected questions must 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 observing these conditions is easily accomplished by means of 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 psychic functions, is characterized by high accuracy and reliability of type diagnosis (above 90%); it proves more accurate than any expert typing and is free of experts’ subjective systematic errors. The method also differs fundamentally for the better from previously known socionic diagnostic questionnaires. It is characterized by:

1. a complete absence of authorial subjectivity in selecting questions and assigning particular diagnostic values to them;
2. the use of questions with maximum discriminative ability, confirmed mathematically;
3. the absence of distortions - for example, when in some other questionnaires irrationality was formerly diagnosed using manifestations of irrationality that were characteristic mainly only of intuitives;
4. the 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 targeted use of socionic traits during diagnosis, makes it possible subsequently 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 concerns 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 psychic functions in their various positions (program, creative, etc.).

Complete Psychological Portrait of the ILI — Experimental Results

The more than five thousand questionnaire statements analyzed as a result of the multi-year experiment, which respondents evaluated by “trying them on” themselves, were manually grouped by us — on the basis of their semantic content and mutual correlations — into approximately 2300 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 the primary questionnaire statements with their generalized clusters simplifies presentation of the results because it reduces the number of primary properties that must be surveyed; on the other hand — through averaging over several items — it further increases the accuracy of the projections of psychological properties onto psychotypes. It should, however, be borne in mind that in all the tables presented below, the reported index of 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 the 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 representatives of the type actually possess a particular property, but to the probability that a respondent agrees that he or she possesses that property. When the statistical characteristics of several questionnaire statements within a single cluster are averaged, the stated probability should become more contrasted through the leveling out 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 below 0,5, it should decrease still further, approaching zero. Accordingly, the indices of the fold excess in probability should increase substantially for clusters composed 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 rely for this either on that person’s self-assessment or on an outside observer’s view, we are in effect conducting an experiment on only one specific manifestation of that property, without averaging the results of several experiments testing for the property’s presence. Thus, in practical use, the reported fold-excess values 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 highly 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 abridgements. For example, some properties whose analysis is continuing have been excluded, and, in addition, table columns reflecting the complete system of diagnostic coefficients (reference answers) suitable for use in diagnostic questionnaires have temporarily been excluded. The indices retained in the tables provide a quite clear representation of the most characteristic properties of the psychotypes.

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

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

Table 3. Properties that maximally distinguish ILI from LIE

Table 4. Properties that maximally distinguish ILI from ILE

Table 5. Properties that maximally distinguish ILI from LII

Table 6. Properties that maximally distinguish ILI from IEI

Table 7. Properties that maximally distinguish ILI from SLI

Table 8. Properties that maximally distinguish ILI from EII