Complete Psychological Portrait of the Logical-Sensory Extravert (LSE) — 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 psychotypes, the 8 socionic functions (in their various positions), and the poles of socionic dichotomies. The results of all works in the series (including the results presented in the tables of this article) were obtained from mathematical-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 (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 a whole. In American typology, which is very close to socionics in the resulting structuring of psychological space, this is entirely different: the basis is invariably taken to be not psychotypes, but four basic dichotomies. These dichotomies are extraversion-introversion, rationality-irrationality, logic-ethics, and intuition-sensing. Each dichotomy represents a hyperplane in psychological space; the four hyperplanes ultimately divide the space into 16 sectors, each of which received the name of one of the 16 psychotypes. This approach was also used both in the works of Carl Gustav Jung and in the early theoretical constructions of the founder of socionics, Aušra Augustinavičiūtė. 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 produced unquestionable scientific advantages. The “advantages” in this case consist in the fact that, within the developing socionic culture, a wide variety of characteristic properties of psychotypes arising at the intersection of four dichotomies were more readily noted. These properties were studied rather than ignored, although they were often something of a novel formation relative to the semantic content of the four basic diagnostic dichotomies. 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 dichotomies; accordingly, the same sensing may behave differently in “decisive” and “judicious” psychotypes — in one case as aggressive “force sensing” (Se), in the other as “sensing of sensations” (Si), which differs very substantially in semantic content. Differences were similarly identified between the manifestations of extraverted and introverted intuition (Ne and Ni), extraverted and introverted ethics (Fe and Fi), and extraverted and introverted logic (Te and Ti). Socionic theoretical models developed accordingly, incorporating new concepts. This development did not occur in typology, where rigid constraints at the “input” of diagnosis did not allow fundamentally new conclusions to be discovered at the “output.” Unlike typology, socionics for a long time followed the path of empirically “feeling out” the most objective boundaries between psychological types; that is, in continuous direct contact with natural reality, it formed optimal boundaries of sectors in psychological space, without hesitating to take into account, when drawing these boundaries, newly discovered properties of types that could not be directly reduced to their differences in extraversion-introversion, rationality-irrationality, logic-ethics, and intuition-sensing. Was it good that this was the case? Yes, very good. The point is that the substantive content of the four basic dichotomies initially used in diagnosis was never “God-given,” but represented a preliminary result of those same empirical observations by the founding researchers of the diversity of human manifestations. Nothing implies, for example, that intuition must 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); nevertheless, the founders’ initial “rough hypothesis,” especially beginning with Briggs and Myers, prescribed within this initially “rough hypothesis” that intuition should manifest identically in different types, and Briggs-Myers diagnosis was likewise directed at identifying in types exclusively the common features of their dichotomous pole. Accordingly, in typology the boundaries between types were distorted and shifted away from the locations toward which they naturally gravitate. Another example is the rationality-irrationality axis, which, likewise having been 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 intuitive types does not manifest quite as it does in sensing types, and in extraverts not quite as it does in introverts (for example, if the key element of extravert irrationality is improvisation, then for introverts the key element is passivity and laziness, although in the broad sense both manifestations arise from a deficiency of judging functions and the resulting lack of planning). Nevertheless, such nuances were ignored in typology, which led to incorrect drawing of boundaries between types on the basis of purely voluntaristically selected and questionnaire-fixed, arbitrarily chosen “diagnostic” properties. In this way, 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 felt out by its expert “public opinion” today apparently correspond best 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 precisely within the boundaries between types accepted in socionics that new properties are identified which are nonlinearly generated at the intersection of several “basic” dichotomies (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 shortcoming that calls the achievements of socionics as a science into question. Indeed, when reading the numerous descriptions of psychotypes by different socionic authors, it is not difficult to see that for each type the authors generally 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 contrasted cases that are “obvious” from the standpoint of type diagnosis. But this knowledge, indeed, cannot always be transmitted in the reverse direction, from the general to the particular, when it is necessary to diagnose the type of a subject who 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 one sets aside a number of obvious para-socionic “reinventors of the wheel” and fraudulent dilettantes, inventors of their own socionics who present themselves as experts, the dispersion of diagnoses is not so much a difference in the views of different schools regarding the boundaries between types as a consequence of the fundamental limitation of any expert’s capacity to simultaneously take into account and weight the diagnostic contribution of the numerous manifestations of a subject that are important for type diagnosis. It follows directly from our studies, which will be discussed below, that any property “characteristic” of a psychotype, function, or pole of a socionic dichotomy is purely probabilistic in nature. There are no properties or manifestations that can be called necessary or sufficient for diagnosing any type. One can only say that, within a type, a particular property occurs among its representatives 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 rigidly formalized and sufficiently long expert interviews) can reliably make use of the statistical law of large numbers; human thinking is incapable of doing so — no matter how experienced or socionically “advanced” the expert may be. Socionic expert type diagnosis is especially unreliable in cases where the person being typed, by their psychological characteristics, objectively lies in a problematic zone near the boundary between sectors of psychological space (and there are plenty of such cases). In our opinion, based on experience, the reliability of expert type diagnosis cannot in principle exceed 60%, and only with special selection of the most strongly contrasted persons being typed can it approach 90%. Formalized procedures (for example, well-constructed large questionnaires) do not have these limitations in accuracy, but for this purpose 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 dichotomies), and they must not repeat the other errors of questionnaires constructed according to outdated Briggs-Myers questionnaire recipes.

At present, socionics has already exhausted all the advantages it could derive from the “non-formalized” development of its scientific culture. The characteristic properties of psychotypes and mental functions have been described; their further refinement within expert diagnosis is impossible. The time has come to fix and formalize the present achievements of socionics in the language of more exact sciences. Only with the language of mathematical statistics, precise and sensitive even to minor psychological nuances, will it be possible in the future to build interdisciplinary bridges from socionics to brain physiology. Only by formalizing in standard questionnaires the present level of socionic knowledge about the characteristic properties of types and functions (and this present level is an order of magnitude greater than 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 (and at times is compelled to) tolerate expert typing “by eye,” then reliable and modern diagnostic questionnaires are simply indispensable for scientific research. Without them, socionics researchers have already spent a decade in a scientific dead end, engaging in the worst case in openly unscientific myth-making, and in the best case 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 adopted within the socionic paradigm (or, more broadly, neo-Jungian personality typology, which divides the diversity of psychological space into 16 independent and comparatively symmetrically arranged sectors called psychotypes). The properties of functions and dichotomies are derived from the properties of psychotypes, because the properties of particular functions in different positions and the poles of socionic dichotomies 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 with questionnaires by the 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 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 peaks in the profile, in addition to 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 at least 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 “reference answers” of the types (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 the initial preliminary type diagnosis based on the questionnaire. Stated diagnoses with three or more dichotomy mismatches were discarded from the training sample as clearly false or erroneous. Other instruments for quality control of incoming questionnaires and stated diagnoses were also used; these were unrelated to their socionic content and therefore could not, through partial rejection of material, negatively affect the analysis results. Ultimately, within each type in the training sample, all honestly given answers of respondents who had previously been typed by different experts with partly divergent views on the boundaries between types were averaged. This made it possible to reflect the view of the boundaries between types averaged across the general “socionic culture” of Russia and Ukraine. Additional corrections to the reference answers of the types, increasing the accuracy and reliability of the diagnostic coefficients, were 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 answer of any type to a particular question can be predicted with fairly high accuracy – by decomposition in terms of Reinin dichotomies - 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 described the full diversity of possible manifestations of the hypothetical complete psychological space reasonably uniformly. The latter procedure is based 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 the EIE and EII, SLE and SLI types, etc., while the distance between ILI and SLI should be approximately the same as between LSI and LII, etc., and so forth. If the aforementioned equality of distances was not attained, the inequality was partially corrected by an additional rotation of the necessary axes in multidimensional space, which led to 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 refining procedures were used. One controlled for the presence of negative excess kurtosis at the boundary between poles in probability-density plots describing the distribution of the values of the four basic socionic dichotomies; the other controlled maximization of the substantive content generated by the three quadral dichotomies when the four basic axes were varied by rotation subject to preservation of their mutual orthogonality. At the final stages of refining the diagnostic coefficients, the stated psychotypes were no longer used, because all the information they could provide had already been used. In this case, diagnoses were made exclusively on the basis of the questionnaire itself using the diagnostic coefficients from the previous approximation, and further refinements were introduced only by means of 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 reduced 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 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 in Moscow, Saint 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 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 control negative excess kurtosis, maximize the content of quadral dichotomies under the condition of their maximum orthogonality to the basic dichotomies, and, finally, symmetrize the results (TIMs in multidimensional psychological space should 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 using the training samples were already used for diagnosis directly from the questionnaires, while previously stated TIMs were ignored. Diagnostic coefficients were recalculated on the expanded sample, and checks were again performed for the symmetry of TIM placement in psychological space, the correspondence of the most characteristic properties identified for TIMs to their “canonical” descriptions by the majority of authors, and analysis of the resulting properties of the 8 functions and poles of the basic dichotomies - 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 diagnostic procedures developed was confirmed by the very high correlation between diagnostic results from pairs of questionnaires containing completely different questions that were 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 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 questions from the database for any of the new questionnaires, it is necessary only to satisfy the condition of preserving diagnostic symmetry of the coefficients (roughly speaking, the sums of squares of the diagnostic coefficients for all 16 psychotypes across the selected questions must coincide, while the systems of diagnostic coefficients obtained on their basis for diagnosing the 15 dichotomies must be orthogonal to one another (which is equivalent to their scalar products being equal to zero). Selecting questions for a questionnaire while satisfying these conditions is readily 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 distinguished 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 discriminating 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. no reliance on dichotomies at all - TIMs are diagnosed holistically.

The method’s diagnosis of psychotypes on the basis of their holistic characteristics, without targeted use of socionic dichotomies during diagnosis, subsequently makes it possible to study manifestations of any socionic dichotomies with genuine validity and to test whether they possess substantive content (regardless of whether the subject is extraversion-introversion and rationality-irrationality or, for example, Questimity and positivism - because before this diagnostic method all dichotomies are equal, and none has an advantage initially built into it by the questionnaire’s construction). The same applies to the purity, guaranteed by the method, of constructing “psychological portraits” of mental functions in their various positions (program, creative, etc.).

Complete Psychological Portrait of the LSE — 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 correlation — into approximately 2300 aggregated 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 by reducing the number of primary properties that must 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 kept in mind that in all the tables below, the indicated factor by which the probability of detecting a property in a representative of a psychotype exceeds the probability of detecting it in the population as a whole or in groups of other psychotypes was calculated and is 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 indicator refers not to the probability that representatives of the type actually possess a particular property, but to the probability that a respondent agrees that they possess that property. If the statistical characteristics of several questionnaire statements within one cluster are averaged, the specified probability should become more contrasted through the leveling out of random errors in subjects’ self-assessments. Where the probability is greater than 0,5, it should become still closer to one for the generalized cluster of several statements; where it is initially less than 0,5, it will decrease still further, approaching zero. Accordingly, the factors by which probabilities are 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 possesses some property and use either their self-assessment or an outside observer’s view for this purpose, 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 factor by which the probability is exceeded, calculated for individual specific questionnaire statements, will also provide a sufficiently accurate minimum approximate estimate when a cluster property previously derived by averaging several questionnaire items is tested on the basis of a single experiment.

The tables can be highly useful both for obtaining a clearer understanding of the characteristic properties of a psychotype and for purposes of expert socionic type diagnosis.

All tables in the article are presented in a “newspaper version,” that is, with certain 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 excluded. The indicators retained in the tables provide a sufficiently clear picture of the most characteristic properties of the psychotypes.

Table 1. Psychological and psychophysiological properties (substantive clusters combining several questions similar in meaning) exclusively (that is, most strongly and primarily) characteristic specifically of the LSE psychotype. The conditional exclusivity indicator is defined as the amount by which the LSE type-mean value exceeds the population level, plus the distance from the LSE type-mean value to the type-mean value of the psychotype ranked second (in expression of the property).

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

Table 3. Properties that maximally distinguish LSE from SLI

Table 4. Properties that maximally distinguish LSE from LSI

Table 5. Properties that maximally distinguish LSE from SLE

Table 6. Properties that maximally distinguish LSE from LIE

Table 7. Properties that maximally distinguish LSE from ESE