Complete Psychological Portrait of the Sensory-Logical Extravert (SLE) — Results of an Experimental Study

V. L. Talanov

Saint Petersburg, December 2011

Introduction

This article forms part of a large new cycle of our work 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 traits. The results of all studies in the cycle (including the results presented in the tables of this article) were derived 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 wholes. In American typology, whose resulting structuring of psychological space is very close to that of socionics, this is not at all the case: the basis is invariably taken to be not psychotypes but four basic traits. These traits — 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 came to be named after one of the 16 psychotypes. This approach was also used both in the work of Carl Gustav Jung and in the early theoretical constructions of the founder of socionics, Aušra Augustinavičiūtė. Later, 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. Despite all its obvious disadvantages from the standpoint of diagnostic standardization, this tradition produced indisputable scientific advantages. The “advantages” in this case consist in the fact that, within the emerging socionic culture, the widest variety of characteristic properties of psychotypes arising at the intersection of the four dichotomies were more readily noticed. These properties were studied rather than ignored, although they were often, in a sense, newly emergent 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 those 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” psychotypes — in one case as aggressive “volitional sensing,” and in the other case — as “sensing of sensations,” which differs very substantially in its semantic content. Analogously, differences were identified between manifestations of extraverted and introverted intuition, extraverted and introverted ethics, and extraverted and introverted logic. The theoretical models of socionics developed accordingly, incorporating the 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, through constant living contact with natural truth, it formed optimal boundaries between sectors of psychological space and did not hesitate, when drawing those boundaries, to take 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 happened? Yes, very good. The point is that the substantive content of the four basic traits originally used in diagnosis was never “God-given”; it was a provisional 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 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 from Briggs and Myers onward, prescribed that intuition, within this initial “rough hypothesis,” manifest in the same way across different types, and Briggs-Myers diagnosis was likewise directed at identifying only those characteristics shared by types belonging to the same dichotomous pole. Consequently, typology distorted the boundaries between types, moving them away from their loci of natural attraction. Another example is the rationality-irrationality axis, which, likewise being unambiguously fixed in the original Briggs-Myers diagnostic questionnaires, prescribed the same behavioral manifestations of rationality or irrationality for all types — although today we already know well that irrationality in intuitive types manifests somewhat differently than in sensing types, and in extraverts — somewhat differently than in introverts (for example, if improvisation is the key element of extraverted irrationality, then for introverts the key elements are passivity and laziness, although in broad terms both manifestations stem from a deficit of judging functions and the resulting insufficiency of planning). Nevertheless, such nuances were ignored in typology, which led to the incorrect drawing of boundaries between types on the basis of purely voluntaristically selected, arbitrarily chosen “diagnostic” properties 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 the course of 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 underscored by the fact that it is specifically within the type boundaries adopted in socionics that new properties are identified which are generated nonlinearly at the intersection of several “basic” traits (on physiological grounds, precisely this kind of 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 calls into question the achievements of socionics as a science. When one reads the numerous descriptions of psychotypes by different socionic authors, it is easy to see that, for each type, the authors mostly notice 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 strongly expressed cases that are “obvious” from the standpoint of type diagnosis. Yet it is indeed not always possible to apply this knowledge in reverse, from the general to the particular, when one must diagnose the type of a subject whose type is not so strongly expressed. It should be noted that convergence of expert diagnoses is low even among representatives of the same socionic school. If we set aside a number of obvious fringe-socionics “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 between schools in their views of type boundaries as 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 important 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. 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. Reliable type diagnosis can therefore 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 rigorously formalized and sufficiently long expert interviews) can reliably exploit the statistical law of large numbers, while human thinking cannot do so — however experienced or socionically “advanced” the expert may be. Expert socionic type diagnosis is especially unreliable when the person being typed, by virtue of their psychological characteristics, objectively lies in a problematic zone near a boundary between sectors of psychological space (and such cases are plentiful). 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 contrasted persons being typed can it approach 90%. Formalized procedures (for example, well-constructed large questionnaires) are not subject to 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 Briggs-Myers inventories.

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; 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 by means of the language of mathematical statistics, which is precise and sensitive even to fine psychological nuances, will it become 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 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 tolerate (and sometimes is forced to tolerate) expert typing “by eye,” 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 at worst in frankly unscientific myth-making, and at best — in re-chewing old theoretical cud. The present cycle of our scientific studies, based on mathematical-statistical methods for analyzing a very large body of experimental material, is devoted to solving the corresponding current problems of socionics.

Our study is the first and unique investigation of this kind with respect to the structuring of psychological space adopted 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 derived from 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 volitional sensing, the properties of the SLE and SEE psychotypes are averaged, and so forth). Therefore, the key potential question for studies of this kind — how are the psychotypes whose properties are subsequently analyzed diagnosed?

In our studies, psychotypes were determined by questionnaires using correlations between respondents’ answer vectors and the “reference” (averaged) answers 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). 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 heights of the other profile peaks, in addition to the highest peak, indicate the individual character of accentuation supplementary to the basic type. As calculations showed, the reliability of determining respondents’ leading type by this procedure averaged no less than 90% correct diagnoses in our study (the percentage was verified by convergence of diagnoses in a retest using a questionnaire with completely different diagnostic questions). At the initial stages of developing the system of diagnostic coefficients (equivalent 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 declared 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 a declared diagnosis was evaluated by the number of discrepancies in the basic dichotomies between the declared type and a preliminary draft type diagnosis based on the questionnaire. Declared diagnoses with three or more dichotomy mismatches were rejected from the training sample as clearly false or erroneous. Other instruments for quality control of incoming questionnaires and declared diagnoses were also used; these were unrelated to their socionic content and therefore could not, through partial rejection of the material, adversely affect the analysis results. Ultimately, within each type in the training sample, all honestly given responses of respondents who had previously been typed by different experts with partly divergent views on the boundaries between types were averaged. This produced a representation of the view of type boundaries 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-refinement procedures - stepwise recurrent refinement of respondents’ diagnoses. The second refinement procedure — 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 into Reinin traits - from the reference answers given to that question by the other 15 types). The third and most important refinement procedure — symmetrization of the diagnostic coefficients in an array of two thousand aggregated psychological properties that fairly uniformly 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 the 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 — approximately the same as between LSI and LII, and so forth. If the stated equality of distances is not achieved, the inequality is partially corrected by rotating the required axes in multidimensional space, which produces a small correction of the diagnostic coefficients originally obtained empirically for each questionnaire item and each of the 16 psychological types. At the initial stages of obtaining and refining the diagnostic coefficients of questionnaire items, two additional refinement 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 for maximization of the substantive content generated for the three quadral traits while varying the rotation of the four basic axes subject to preservation of their mutual orthogonality. At the final stages of refining the diagnostic coefficients, the declared psychotypes were no longer used, because all the information they could provide had already been utilized. Diagnoses at this stage were made exclusively on the basis of the questionnaire itself, using the diagnostic coefficients from the preceding approximation, while 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 applied when the database was expanded with new, additional questionnaire items.

Thus, at first (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 they had sufficient socionic experience, or who had been typed by DIFFERENT experts from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Ukraine, and who declared that TIM. It is clear that no more than 45-55% of the declared 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, oppositely directed errors 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 substantive content of the quadral traits subject to their maximum orthogonality to the basic traits, and, finally, symmetrize the results (TIMs in multidimensional psychological space must be equidistant from one another, forming a symmetrical structure). As a rule, these procedures introduced only small corrections, but they 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 are preferred over others). At the final stages, the diagnostic coefficients obtained from the training samples were already used for direct questionnaire-based diagnosis, ignoring the previously declared TIMs. Diagnostic coefficients were recalculated on the expanded sample and checks were performed - on the symmetry of the placement of TIMs in psychological space, on whether the most characteristic properties identified for the TIMs corresponded to their “canonical” descriptions by the majority of authors, and on the properties obtained for 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 detected, additional source material was collected for clarification. 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 thereafter 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 a very high correlation between the diagnostic results of pairs of questionnaires containing completely different questions and repeatedly administered to the same subjects (above 0,93). Content validity is also confirmed by the maximal correspondence of the experimentally obtained “psychological portraits” of psychotypes and functions with descriptions of their characteristic properties by the majority of authors.

Obtaining valid diagnostic coefficients for more than 5500 original questionnaire items characterizing more than 2000 different psychic 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 preserve the diagnostic symmetry of the coefficients (roughly speaking, the sums of squared diagnostic coefficients across the selected questions must be equal for all 16 psychotypes, while the systems of diagnostic coefficients derived from them for diagnosing the 15 traits must be mutually orthogonal, which is equivalent to their scalar products being equal to zero). Selecting questionnaire items while satisfying these conditions is readily accomplished using 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 psychic functions, is distinguished 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 them particular diagnostic values;
2. the use of questions with maximum discriminating ability, confirmed mathematically;
3. the absence of distortions - for example, those arising when some other questionnaires previously diagnosed irrationality using manifestations of irrationality that were characteristic mainly of intuitive types;
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, 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, 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, and so forth).

Complete Psychological Portrait of the SLE — Experimental Results

The more than five thousand questionnaire statements analyzed over the course 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 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 projecting psychological properties onto psychotypes. It should be kept in mind, however, that in all the tables below, the reported factor by which 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 a cluster, that is, for specific questionnaire statements. In reality, this indicator pertains not to the probability that representatives of the type actually possess a given property, but to the probability that a respondent agrees that they possess this property. When the statistical characteristics of several questionnaire statements are averaged within a single cluster, the stated probability should become more contrasted because random errors in subjects’ self-assessments are leveled out. Where the probability is greater than 0,5, for a generalized cluster of several statements it should become still closer to one; where it is initially less than 0,5, it will decrease still further, approaching zero. Accordingly, for clusters consisting of several statements, the probability-ratio indicators should increase substantially (by a factor of two or three 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 certain property and rely either on their self-assessment or on an outside observer’s view, we are in effect conducting an experiment on only one particular manifestation of that property, rather than averaging the results of several experiments testing for the property. Thus, in practical use, the reported probability-ratio values calculated for individual specific questionnaire statements will provide a reasonably 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 highly useful both for providing a clearer conception 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 certain omissions and abridgements. For example, some properties whose analysis is still continuing have been excluded, and the table columns representing the complete system of diagnostic coefficients (reference answers) suitable for use in diagnostic questionnaires have also been temporarily omitted. 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) that are exclusive to the SLE psychotype (that is, most characteristic first and foremost of SLE). The conventional exclusivity index is defined as the amount by which the SLE type mean exceeds the population level, plus the distance from the SLE type mean to the type mean 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 SLE psychotype, but only in second or third place after other psychotypes

Table 3. Properties that most strongly distinguish SLE from LSI

Table 4. Properties that most strongly distinguish SLE from SLI

Table 5. Properties that most strongly distinguish SLE from LSE

Table 6. Properties that most strongly distinguish SLE from SEE

Table 7. Properties that most strongly distinguish SLE from ILE