Why Socionics Is Necessary and Could Be Very Useful for Modern Neuroscience

Unfortunately, most modern scientific works devoted to the study of the genetics and neurophysiological basis of psychological traits have the most serious shortcomings in the psychological part of their methodological support, even in very solid Western university laboratories. To this day, this greatly reduces their effectiveness and informativeness, slowing the progress of science in this direction. Let us examine the topic in more detail. Modern socionics provides, compared to other personality classifications in differential psychology, the fullest possible description of virtually all innate personality traits of a person. It takes into account and uses not 5 personality factors, but at least ten, that is, it gives a much more detailed “complete map of personality” for each individual.

A functional profile, composed of a set of values of 12 socionic functions characterizing an individual, already describes more than 95% of the variance of all possible personality traits at his or her innate, i.e. temperamental level, while a full type profile, which represents a quantitative measure of an individual’s closeness to each of the 16 “standard” socionic psychotypes (or a profile of 15 socionic orthogonal factors-traits), describes almost 100% of this variance. Unlike the factors extracted by different psychologists within trait theory on the basis of purely formal factor analysis, the socionic functions are localized in a multidimensional space of psychological properties in such a way that they are easily understandable and explainable from the standpoint of the advantages and even the stages of their evolutionary formation, and therefore they are maximally close to the objective physiological and genetic factors that underlie individual differences in brain functioning among different people. Many neural networks discovered to date in neuroscience—that is, stable interconnections of various structural elements in the brain that become active when a person is faced with solving some specific task—fit very well in their psychological properties with the socionic functions. For example, the so-called “default mode network” is practically Ni.

And full socionic profiles, constructed on the basis of our fragmentary information about a given person, then allow one to accurately predict those of his or her characteristics that were not reported at the moment the profiles were constructed—in other words, socionic profiles, built using modern socionic questionnaires, possess significant predictive power. Let us consider a relatively recent example from neuroscience. James Fallon showed significant hypofunction of the amygdala and temporal lobes in imprisoned serial killers. From this he concluded that there was a link between aggression and reduced amygdala size (an important subcortical brain structure responsible primarily for the accumulation of negative emotional experience). The only thing that puzzled Fallon was that among several subjects whose amygdalae were also reduced in size (including himself), no increase in aggressive motivation was observed at all. However, a competent socionicist in Fallon’s place would not have drawn the erroneous conclusion of an unequivocal link between aggression and reduced amygdala size, but would have immediately said that among serial killers, according to socionic canons, one should expect both increased aggression in the form of a high rise of Se, and simultaneously (though not dependent on it) a deficit of empathy, compassion, and understanding of another’s emotional state, associated with a sharp decline in the Fi function in their socionic profiles. Therefore, Fallon’s results regarding reduced amygdala size and hypofunction of the temporal lobes may relate not at all to increased aggression—that is, not to Se—but to a defect of empathy, that is, to a deficit of socionic “white ethics.” After all, many other studies have shown the role of the amygdala in providing the feeling of fear, pangs of conscience, and the imprinting of negative emotional experience, which in socionics, according to its experimental data, relates primarily to the Fi property complex, white ethics. A socionicist would therefore immediately predict amygdala hypofunction both in criminals and in many creative scientists—because socionics knows that a deficit of Fi is observed in two different psychological types out of the sixteen, one of which possesses the highest competitiveness and aggressiveness in the socion, not always restrained (SLE), and the other of which differs little from the population average in aggression but is frequently found among scientists (ILE). Instead of, for the purposes of searching for physiological markers of psychological traits, taking and studying very strange psychological samples in extremely expensive physiological studies—samples united by unclear psychological markers (such as “criminals,” “psychopaths,” “creative people,” “athletes,” “air traffic controllers,” “schizothymes,” etc.)—a socionicist would conduct fMRI and genetic studies on a random sample of volunteers, ensuring control over the representation in it, preferably equally, of all 16 psychological types, having verified them using reliable questionnaires. The socionicist would then examine which mental functions and which socionic traits correlate within this sample with various physiological features of the brain. And only after that, solely to make the results more convincing for the general public and research sponsors, one could add to the program an additional “professional” sample in which these mental functions should, in theory, be extreme—for example, criminals, air traffic controllers, or someone else. Unfortunately, not only in Fallon’s experiment, but in most other expensive physiological studies of individual brain differences, everything is done completely differently in the psychological part. Testing just one volunteer in an fMRI and MRI program often costs several thousand, if not tens of thousands of dollars. In the psychological part of the experiment, however, researchers usually use either some very vague achievement test—vague in terms of the psychological factors underlying it—or at best some single short self-report scale of 20–30 questions, also aimed at some psychologically almost arbitrary trait (often by its nature, according to the questions in the scale, evidently composite, that is, supported according to socionics by several functions at once). For example, many expensive neuroimaging studies are devoted to examining the features of people with high creativity. Creativity is measured either by self-report scales containing elements of both Ne and Ni and Fe, or by achievement tests—for example, the classic test in which one must come up with as many possible uses for some object within a limited time. In the case of this test, high scores are contributed first by general extraversion (speed of actions), then by general intelligence, and then specifically by two distinct functions—Ne and Se (and their role in the results is almost equal). It is clear that with respect to their physiological correlates, the two different ways of measuring creativity—self-report and achievement tests—do not coincide among different researchers (and should not coincide), and in any given study it is also impossible to determine which exact psychological factor the observed physiological correlates belong to—whether they were obtained due to Se or due to Ne. If a researcher uses a sample in which “decisive” subjects predominate, he will conclude that the neural network corresponding to high creativity consists of such-and-such brain areas (corresponding to the operation of Se). And if his sample predominately contains subjects of “reflective” psychotypes, then the correlates of high creativity in that study will be entirely different brain areas, corresponding to high Ne. Similar defects in the planning of the psychological part of the experiment are widespread in modern genetic research aimed at identifying which gene variants correlate with particular psychological behavioral traits. For example, in the conclusions of some study they may state that risk-taking tendency coincided with the predominance of such-and-such gene variants in the genome. And one researcher confirms these results in his sample, while another does not. Whom should one believe, and what do these suspect gene variants actually correspond to? Do they really correspond to risk-taking? Hardly. Risk-taking in its socionic profile has elevated peaks of Se, Ne, and even Ni, as well as sharply negative peaks of Si, Fi, and partly Ti. Therefore, based on statistical association of some gene variant with such an obviously composite psychological trait as risk-taking (which only at first glance seems simple and elementary), it is simply impossible to uncover the genetic nature of the true psychological factors underlying this trait. Let us imagine for a moment that some gene variant identified as associated with high risk-taking is such because it encodes the balance between Ne and Si (incidentally, a quite plausible situation for some candidate genes). It would hardly surprise us that due to this same gene, albeit to a lesser extent, the balance between Ni and Se also increases (again in favor of intuition). Then, if the experimental sample whose genetic maps were analyzed and whose risk-taking tendencies were assessed consists primarily of strongly expressed Ne-types and strongly expressed Si-types, the researcher will find a very high positive correlation of risk-taking with our candidate gene. But in another researcher’s sample, the most strongly represented types may instead be strong Se-types and strong Ni-types. In such a sample, the sign of the correlation between the gene and risk-taking will be the opposite!

Thus, it is easy to suppose that most contradictions in the published results of genetic experiments by different researchers are explained not by chance but by differences in the socionic composition of their samples and in the percentages of psychotypes represented in them. Competent methodological support for the psychological part of experiments aimed at finding relationships between the psychological and physiological levels of the human being must necessarily include meeting several conditions:

• FIRST, the researcher must necessarily obtain the full temperament-psychological profile of each subject, including the values of ALL psychological factors describing personality, and not limit himself to applying a single psychological scale measuring some one psychological property. In the acceptable case this can be a description in the language of the Big Five personality factors—at least that—but even better (and much better) if it is a full socionic profile (type, trait, or functional), which can be obtained with good reliability for almost all people with intelligence at or above the average level using questionnaires of about 300 questions. What is the optimal length of psychological questionnaires when searching for correlations of neuro-indicators with psychological indicators? Often in expensive physiological studies, psychological questionnaires of 30–40 questions are used, and this is laughable. Let us recall that the MMPI questionnaire consists, for example, of 566 questions—twice as many as 300. Using questionnaires shorter than 250 questions to obtain a multifactor profile is unacceptable—they will not provide the necessary accuracy even in people with slightly above-average intelligence. Nonetheless, in studies that still attempt to measure several psychological indicators in subjects, this “economy” on the number of questions occurs everywhere. Let us remind that in studies where the physiological part of the experiment costs the research laboratory several thousand dollars per subject, and volunteer subjects receive compensation above $500 (or even much higher), economizing on the time spent completing the psychological questionnaire is simply foolish.
• SECOND, as already mentioned, the socionic profile is far preferable to the five or six factors obtained via questionnaires like the Big Five, HEXACO, etc. Let us explain why. For example, the “Openness to experience” factor corresponding to socionic intuition absorbs both Ne and Ni (in excess), as well as Se and Si (in deficit). But each of these four functions, we can now confidently assert, is associated with its own neurochemical activity, different for all four functions! Therefore, when conducting research using psychological factors rather than mental functions, the researcher is dealing with a hodgepodge of different physiological causes, not with a single isolated physiological factor as he hopes. Only in socionics are twelve mental functions distinguished and calculated, whose complete hierarchical quantitative profile practically fully describes the personal-temperamental features of a given individual. The direction of the “factor axes” of these functions and their semantic content are far more physiological than the direction and semantics of the factors extracted in factor models such as the Big Five or HEXACO, where factors are obtained from skewed samples, their directions gravitate toward linguistic culture rather than toward human physiology, they often “wander” in direction among different researchers, and they overlap in unclearly distinguished content (in HEXACO). Moreover, to obtain the indicators of the Big Five and HEXACO, only coarse short questionnaires (about 100 questions) have been developed and used worldwide, designed for mass work with large samples, and not for expensive fMRI experiments where research costs are high and samples are very small (usually about 20 people). Therefore, to obtain any reliable results, the highest possible accuracy of psychological measurement is required. The main advantage of socionics is, of course, its use of the functional representation alongside the factor-trait representation. Traits (used exclusively in factor personality models) are already an aggregation of several functions and, as a rule, an aggregation of several neurohormonal and neurotransmitter influences at once. Relying only on traits, as is done in the Big Five or HEXACO, we will always be operating with the sum of influences from at least four socionic mental functions at once, each of which, however, may have its own physiology and its own genetic code. Thus, using the trait approach, instead of studying separately the properties of Ne and Se, we will always study a mixture of influences from Ne, Ni, Se, and Si. This is a deliberate reduction of the resolution of the physiological experiment in terms of its psychological correlates, and only socionics has so far learned to avoid this reduction. The fact that most researchers conducting this kind of experiment know nothing about modern socionics (which, among other things thanks to the works of the author, has now gone very far beyond merely assigning a person to one of 16 types) does not excuse them.

• THIRD, any sample of subjects, both large and small (and small ones especially), must be controlled for the composition and proportion of psychotypes represented in it. And if the calculation of correlations between psychological and physiological indicators is performed on a sample that is heterogeneous in type composition, then before the calculations, a procedure for mathematically equalizing the type composition of the sample must be performed, consisting of multiplying all indicators of each subject by the square root of the proportion of representation of his psychotype in the sample. This, too, is currently never done anywhere, and as a result, the researcher’s conclusions about the discovered relationships (even about their sign) are unreliable.