How is proximity to each of the 16 TIMs measured in Talanov´s questionnaires?

The questionnaires have been in use for a long time, and for each question in the questionnaire they have accumulated enormous statistics on the responses of people with TIMs known in advance (and verified many times). Thus, it is known how, on average, each TIM is predisposed to answer each of the questions in the questionnaire. Yes, the responses of particular individuals vary greatly, but in each type group there is nevertheless an average response score toward which that group tends.

If the questionnaire contains, say, 300 questions, then in this case, for each of the 16 TIMs, we have a vector of “reference” responses for that TIM, consisting of a sequence of 300 numbers. And in total we have 16 such “reference vectors.”

Next, we compare the vector of a particular subject’s responses to all 300 questions in the questionnaire with each of these 16 reference vectors. How is the comparison performed? By calculating the linear correlation between two sequences of numbers. As a result, we have 16 correlations of different magnitudes – between the subject’s responses and the 16 “TIM-specific” vectors of reference responses. The larger the correlation, the closer it is to plus one (although in practice it rarely rises above plus 0.5), the closer the subject’s responses are to the reference for the given type. Positive correlations with some type-specific reference response vectors indicate that the subject possesses the properties of these types to an above-average degree. Negative ones – indicate that the subject possesses the properties of these types to a below-average degree, that is, in terms of their properties the subject is rather opposite to these types.

This is how a complete type profile of 16 bars is obtained, where some bars are positive (extend upward from the middle line, which is conventionally taken as zero), while others are negative (extend downward from this middle line – in terms of their properties, the subject is rather opposite to these sociotypes). As for those types whose bars are degenerate and lie exactly on the zero line – it can be said of these types that the subject has exactly as much in common with them as is opposite to them (exactly half and half).

The upward-extending bar that is the highest – it is the one that corresponds to the sociotype to which the subject is closest in terms of their personal psychological properties.

However, in practice, the height of the bars in the diagrams that show the questionnaire summaries consists not of the correlations themselves, but of additionally transformed correlations (first, the so-called mathematical Fisher function is applied to them, then the resulting profile is also normalized, that is, brought to the same contrast for all subjects, in other words, to the same unit standard deviation across all subjects for the numbers characterizing their bars). But these are already mathematical details that do not change the essence of the matter in any way.

Even theoretically, the diagnostic method described is the most accurate of all possible methods. In calculations of this kind, no information is lost. This is clear at least because proximity to each sociotype, the magnitude of each socionic trait, and each socionic function are diagnosed not on the basis of a small subset of questions from the questionnaire, but on the basis of all its questions at once. Moreover, diagnosis is performed not on the basis of the total number of “yes” and “no” responses, but taking into account the substantially different “weights” of different questions when diagnosing each individual socionic indicator.

And this method was developed by V. L. Talanov and, as of today, is used ONLY in his sociodiagnostic questionnaires. That is why they are extraordinarily accurate. Additional accuracy is provided by the enormous accumulated statistics on 50 thousand people (using these statistics, the questionnaires also additionally self-train), and by the fact that they also have a multilevel system of corrections – the subjects’ raw responses are first, before final socionic processing, fully corrected for differences in subjects’ levels of self-assessment, their differing tendencies to give “socially desirable” responses, and their different response-style characteristics (for example, differing tendencies to answer “yes” or “no” more often). As a result, all kinds of non-socionic “noise-inducing” factors that may distort the result are eliminated.