Complete Psychological Portrait of the Ethical-Intuitive Introvert (EII) — Results of an Experimental Study

V. L. Talanov

St. 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, 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 derived from mathematical-statistical analysis of respondents’ answers to psychological questionnaire items (more than 5,500 different questionnaire items in total). These answers were obtained from more than 5,000 different respondents whose socionic psychotypes had been determined in advance.

Psychological types (in essence, 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 the case at all: 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. However, socionics in Russia, Ukraine, and a number of other European countries subsequently came to rely, in diagnosing 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 undeniable scientific advantages. The “advantages” in this case consist in the fact that, in the emerging socionic culture, the most diverse 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 often represented a kind of new 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 by a new property of Decisiveness-Judiciousness that cannot be reduced to the four basic dichotomies; accordingly, the same sensing can behave differently in “Decisive” and “Judicious” psychotypes — in one case as aggressive “force sensing” (Se), and in the other as “sensing of sensations” (Si), which differs very substantially in semantic content. Differences were similarly identified between manifestations of Ne and Ni, Fe and Fi, and Te and Ti. Socionic theoretical models developed accordingly, incorporating new concepts. This development did not occur in type theory, where rigid restrictions at the diagnostic “input” did not permit fundamentally new conclusions to be discovered at the “output.” Unlike type theory, socionics for a long time proceeded by empirically “feeling out” the most objective boundaries between psychological types, that is, by forming optimal boundaries of sectors in psychological space in constant living contact with natural reality, without shying away from taking 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 so? 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 the 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); however, the founders’ initial “rough hypothesis,” especially beginning with Briggs and Myers, prescribed that intuition, within this initially “rough hypothesis,” manifest identically in different types, and Briggs-Myers diagnosis was likewise directed exclusively at identifying features common to the types belonging to the same dichotomous pole. Accordingly, in type theory the boundaries between types were distorted and displaced away from the locations of their natural attraction. Another example is the rationality-irrationality axis, which, likewise being fixed unambiguously in the original Briggs-Myers diagnostic questionnaires, prescribed identical behavioral manifestations of rationality or irrationality for all types — although today we already know well that the irrationality of intuitive types manifests somewhat differently from that of sensing types, and that of extraverts somewhat differently from that of introverts (for example, if improvisation is the key element of extraverted irrationality, then passivity and laziness are the key elements for introverts, although broadly speaking both manifestations derive from a deficit of judging functions and the resulting insufficiency of planning). Nevertheless, such nuances were ignored in type theory, which led to incorrect placement of the boundaries between types on the basis of purely voluntaristically selected, arbitrarily chosen “diagnostic” properties fixed in questionnaires. This blurred and prevented the identification in research of 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.

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 precisely within the boundaries between types accepted in socionics that new properties are revealed which are generated nonlinearly at the intersection of several “basic” dichotomies (from physiological considerations, precisely this kind of 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 defect that calls into question the achievements of socionics as a science. When reading numerous descriptions of psychotypes by different socionic authors, it is easy to see that, for each type, the authors for the most part notice 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 contrastively expressed 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 type-diagnose a subject whose type is not so vividly expressed. It should be noted that agreement of expert diagnoses is low even among representatives of the same socionic school. If we set aside 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 is not so much a difference between the views of different schools on the boundaries between types as a consequence of the fundamental limitation of any expert’s ability simultaneously to take into account and weigh the diagnostic contribution of the many manifestations of the 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 dichotomy is purely probabilistic in nature. There are no properties or manifestations that can be called necessary or sufficient for diagnosis of any type. One can speak only of the fact 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 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 rely on the statistical law of large numbers; human thinking is incapable of doing so — however experienced and socionically “advanced” the expert may be. Expert socionic type diagnosis is especially unreliable in cases where, by his psychological characteristics, the person being typed is objectively located in a problematic zone near the 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 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 true such questionnaires must necessarily take into account the full diversity of psychotype properties described in socionics (that is, ideally, type psychotypes holistically rather than by several basic dichotomies) and must not repeat the other errors of questionnaires built according to outdated Briggs-Myers recipes.

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 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, which is 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 exceeds by an order of magnitude the level of knowledge available to the creators of the first Briggs-Myers type-theory 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,” then reliable and modern diagnostic questionnaires are simply necessary for scientific research. Without them, socionics researchers have already been in a scientific dead end for a decade, engaging at worst in openly unscientific myth-making and at best in chewing over 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 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, 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 from correlations between respondents’ answer vectors and the “reference” (averaged) answers to the same questions given by “average representatives” of all 16 sociotypes. Thus, 16 empirically obtained correlations were compared in order to determine the type of a particular person. 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 individual distinctiveness as fully as possible. Thus, if the maximum correlation assigned a person to the LII type, the second-highest correlation could assign him to one of several other types (EII, LSI, LIE, ILE, even SLI or IEI). Accordingly, the height of the other profile peaks, 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 no less than 90% correct diagnoses (the percentage was verified by agreement 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 types (the basis of diagnosis) meant 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 in the basic dichotomies between the stated type and a preliminary draft type diagnosis based on the questionnaire. Stated diagnoses with three or more mismatching dichotomies were rejected from the training sample as clearly false or erroneous. Other tools 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 results of the analysis. Ultimately, within each type in the training sample, all honestly given answers of respondents previously typed by different experts with partly divergent views on the boundaries between types were averaged. This achieved a reflection of the view of the boundaries between types averaged across the general “socionic culture” of Russia and Ukraine. Additional correction of the type reference answers, increasing the accuracy and reliability of the diagnostic coefficients, was introduced using 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 - using decomposition by Reinin dichotomies - 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 aggregated psychological properties that describe, fairly uniformly, the entire 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, 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 that 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 partly corrected by 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 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 dichotomies; the other controlled maximization of the resulting substantive content of the three quadra dichotomies 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 used. Diagnoses in this case 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 (also taking into account the requirement for the greatest possible orthogonalization of all socionic axes). The same truncated procedure was also carried out 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 under the condition of sufficient socionic experience or had been typed by DIFFERENT experts from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Ukraine and who 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 calculating the mean, 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 the quadra dichotomies under the condition of their maximum orthogonality to the basic dichotomies, 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 minor corrections, which nevertheless helped eliminate systematic errors (caused, for example, by the fact that some socionic schools at one time typed too many subjects as “Hamlets”, and also by the fact that in self-typing some TIMs prove preferable to others). At the final stages, the diagnostic coefficients obtained with the training samples were already used to diagnose directly from the questionnaires, ignoring the previously stated TIMs. Diagnostic coefficients were recalculated on the expanded sample, and checks were again performed - of the symmetry of TIM placement in psychological space, of the correspondence between the most characteristic properties of TIMs identified and their “canonical” descriptions by most authors, and of the resulting properties of the 8 functions and the poles of the basic dichotomies - again, whether the results obtained corresponded to the majority of descriptions. All checks were passed. In individual cases where apparent irregularities were identified, additional source material was collected for clarification. As a result, after many approximations, using more than 5,000 different subjects in total, a practically ideal system of diagnostic coefficients was obtained for more than 5,500 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 a very high correlation between the diagnostic results of pairs of questionnaires with completely different questions that were repeatedly administered to the same subjects (above 0.93). Content validity is also confirmed by the maximum agreement of the experimentally obtained “psychological portraits” of psychotypes and functions with descriptions of their characteristic properties by most authors.

Obtaining valid diagnostic coefficients for more than 5,500 original questionnaire questions characterizing more than 2,000 different psychic properties makes it possible to group on their basis an arbitrary number of different diagnostic questionnaires, each of which immediately becomes ready for use without requiring any additional adaptation. When selecting questions from the database for any new questionnaire, it is necessary only to observe the condition that diagnostic symmetry of the coefficients be preserved (roughly speaking, the sums of squares of the diagnostic coefficients for all 16 psychotypes across the selected questions must coincide, and the systems of diagnostic coefficients derived from them for diagnosing the 15 dichotomies must be mutually orthogonal, which is equivalent to their scalar products being equal to zero). Selection of questions for a questionnaire while observing these conditions is readily performed 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 from 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 discriminative power, which is mathematically confirmed;
3. the absence of distortions - for example, when manifestations of irrationality that were 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, makes it possible subsequently to study the manifestations of any socionic dichotomies in a genuinely valid way and to test whether they possess substantive content (whether the matter concerns 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 methodological guarantee of purity in constructing the “psychological portraits” of psychic functions in their various positions (program, creative, etc.).

Complete Psychological Portrait of the EII — 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 2,300 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 because it reduces the number of primary properties to be surveyed; on the other hand, averaging across several items further increases the accuracy of the projections of psychological properties onto psychotypes. It should be taken into account, however, that in all the tables below, the indicated ratio 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 still for individual single members of a 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 he possesses this property. If the statistical characteristics of several questionnaire statements within one cluster are averaged, the indicated probability should become more contrasted because random errors in the subjects’ self-assessments are leveled out. 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 less than 0.5, it should decrease still further, approaching zero. Accordingly, the ratios by which probability is 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 for this purpose resort either to his self-assessment or to an outside view, we are in fact conducting an experiment on only one specific manifestation of that property, without averaging the results of several experiments testing for the presence of the property. Thus, in practical use, the reported ratios by which probability is exceeded, calculated for individual specific questionnaire statements, will provide a sufficiently accurate minimum approximate estimate also in cases where 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 representation 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 abridgments. 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 been temporarily excluded. The indicators 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 to the EII psychotype. The conventional exclusivity index is defined as the amount by which the EII type mean exceeds the population level, plus the distance from the EII 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 EII psychotype, but only in second or third place after other psychotypes

Table 3. Properties that maximally distinguish EII from IEE

Table 4. Properties that maximally distinguish EII from EIE

Table 5. Properties that maximally distinguish EII from IEI

Table 6. Properties that maximally distinguish EII from ESI

Table 7. Properties that maximally distinguish EII from LII

Table 8. Properties that maximally distinguish EII from SEI