Complete Psychological Portrait of the Ethical-Sensory Introvert (ESI) — Results of an Experimental Study

V. L. Talanov

St. Petersburg, December 2011

Introduction

This article is 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 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 (essentially, 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, which is very close to socionics in the resulting structuring of psychological space, this is not at all the case: the basis is invariably taken to be not psychotypes, but four basic traits. These traits are vertness, nality, logic-ethics, and intuition-sensing. Each trait is 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. Despite all its obvious disadvantages from the standpoint of diagnostic standardization, this tradition yielded undoubted scientific advantages. The “advantages” in this case consist in the fact that, within the developing socionic culture, it was easier to notice the most diverse characteristic properties of psychotypes that arise at the intersection of four dichotomies. These properties were studied rather than ignored, even though they were often something of a novel formation 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 the psychotypes of the so-called “peripheral” quadras by a new property of Decisiveness-Judiciousness that cannot be reduced to the four basic traits, and, accordingly, the same sensing can behave differently in “decisive” and “judicious” psychotypes — in one case as aggressive “force sensing,” and in the other as “sensing of sensations,” which differs very substantially in its semantic content. Differences were similarly identified between manifestations of black and white intuition, black and white ethics, and black and white logic. The theoretical models of socionics developed accordingly, incorporating new concepts. No such development occurred in typology, where rigid restrictions at the diagnostic “input” did not allow fundamentally new conclusions to be felt out at the “output.” Unlike typology, socionics for a long time proceeded by empirically “feeling out” the most objective boundaries between psychological types, that is, in constant living contact with natural truth it formed optimal boundaries between sectors in psychological space, 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 vertness, nality, 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 traits 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. It does not follow from anywhere, 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), yet the founders’ original “rough hypothesis,” especially beginning with Briggs and Myers, prescribed within that initial “rough hypothesis” that intuition should manifest identically in different types, and Briggs-Myers diagnosis was likewise directed exclusively toward identifying features common to the types belonging to their dichotomous pole. Accordingly, in typology the boundaries between types were distorted and shifted away from the locations of their natural attraction. Another example is the nality 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 the irrationality of intuitives 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 aspect of extraverted irrationality, then for introverts the key aspects are passivity and laziness, although in the broader sense both manifestations arise from a deficit of judging functions and the resulting insufficiency of planning). Nevertheless, such nuances were ignored in typology, leading to incorrectly drawn boundaries between types on the basis of purely voluntaristically chosen “diagnostic” properties arbitrarily selected and fixed in questionnaires. As a result, 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 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 that were gradually felt out by its expert “public opinion” today appear to correspond best to the real physiological factors of brain activity that objectively underlie the partition of psychological diversity into psychotypes. The adequacy of the socionic classification is also emphasized by the fact that it is specifically within the boundaries between types adopted in socionics that new properties are identified which are generated nonlinearly at the intersection of several “basic” traits (from physiological considerations, precisely this kind of generation should be expected from “correct” models of the structure of psychological space).

Socionics often criticizes itself for the low agreement of expert type diagnostics among different experts. It should be noted, however, that this is not a critical deficiency that calls into question the achievements of socionics as a science. When reading numerous descriptions of psychotypes by different socionic authors, it is not difficult 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 among different authors and arise from their observation of numerous strongly contrasting cases that are “obvious” from the standpoint of type diagnosis. Yet, indeed, this knowledge cannot always be transferred in the reverse direction, from the general to the particular, when it is necessary to diagnose the type of a subject whose type is not expressed so vividly. It should be noted that agreement among expert diagnoses is low even among representatives of the same socionic school. If one excludes a number of obvious quasi-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 regarding the boundaries between types as it is 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 relevant to type diagnosis. Our studies, which will be discussed below, directly imply that any property “characteristic” of a psychotype, function, or pole of a socionic trait is purely probabilistic in nature. There are no properties or manifestations that can be called necessary or sufficient for diagnosing any type. One can speak only of a particular property being manifested among representatives within a type with greater probability than in the population as a whole. Thus, reliable type diagnostics can be based only on the simultaneous consideration of many specific properties, and a reliable socionic diagnosis is possible only through reliance 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 — no matter how experienced or socionically “advanced” the expert may be. Socionic expert type diagnostics are especially unreliable in cases where, by their psychological characteristics, the person being typed is objectively located in a problematic zone near the boundary between sectors of psychological space (and there are plenty of such cases). In our experience-based opinion, the reliability of expert type diagnostics cannot in principle exceed 60%, and only with special selection of the most strongly and contrastively expressed 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 to be true such questionnaires must necessarily take into account the entire 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 questionnaires.

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 functions of the psyche have been described; their further refinement within 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 with the language of mathematical statistics, which is precise and sensitive even to minor psychological nuances, will it subsequently be possible 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 typological questionnaire) can current socionic type diagnostics be standardized and their accuracy sharply increased. If applied type diagnostics can still tolerate (and at times are forced to tolerate) expert typing “by eye,” then reliable and modern diagnostic questionnaires are simply indispensable for scientific research. Without them, socionists have for a decade remained at a scientific impasse, engaging in the worst case in openly unscientific mythmaking and, in the best case, in chewing over old theoretical cud. The present cycle 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 — the neo-Jungian typology of personality, 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 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 force sensing, the properties of the SLE and SEE psychotypes are averaged, and so forth). Therefore, the key potential question regarding studies of this kind is: how are the psychotypes whose properties are subsequently analyzed diagnosed?

Psychotypes in our studies were determined with questionnaires by 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). All 16 correlations together 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 the person to one of several other types (EII, LSI, LIE, ILE, even SLI or IEI). Accordingly, the heights of the other peaks in the profile, besides the highest peak, indicate the individual character of accentuation additional to the basic type. The reliability of determining respondents’ leading type by this procedure in our study, as calculations showed, averaged no less than 90% correct diagnoses (the percentage was verified by agreement of diagnoses in retesting with a questionnaire containing 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) 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 the declared diagnosis was assessed by the number of discrepancies in the basic dichotomies between the declared type and a primary preliminary 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 quality-control instruments were also used for incoming questionnaires and declared diagnoses; they were unrelated to their socionic content and therefore could not, through partial rejection of the material, negatively affect the results of the analysis. Ultimately, within each type in the training sample, all honestly given answers of respondents who had previously been typed by different experts with partially 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 types’ reference answers, 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 into Reinin traits - on the basis of 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 describe, with sufficient uniformity, the full diversity of possible manifestations of a hypothetical complete psychological space. The latter procedure is based on the assumption that, in psychological space, the difference (that is, the mathematical distance in the space of properties) 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 should be approximately the same as between LSI and LII, and so forth, and so on. If the aforementioned equality of distances is not achieved, the inequality is partially corrected by additionally rotating the required axes in multidimensional space, which leads to a small correction of the diagnostic coefficients initially obtained empirically for each questionnaire item and each of the 16 psychological types. At the first stages of obtaining and refining the diagnostic coefficients of questionnaire items, two additional refining procedures were used. One controlled for the presence of negative excess kurtosis at the boundary between the poles in probability-density plots describing the distribution of the magnitude of the four basic socionic traits; the other controlled maximization of the generated substantive content of the three quadral traits 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 declared 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 preceding approximation, and further refinements were introduced only by means of the procedure for symmetrizing the diagnostic-coefficient array (also taking into account the requirement for the maximum possible orthogonalization of all socionic axes). The same truncated procedure was also applied when the database was expanded with new, additional questionnaire items.

Thus, initially (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 that they had sufficient socionic experience, or had been typed by DIFFERENT experts from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Ukraine and had declared that TIM. Clearly, 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, errors in opposite directions cancel one another out 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 content of the quadral traits under the condition of their maximum orthogonality to the basic traits, and, finally, symmetrize the results (TIMs in multidimensional psychological space must be located 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 questionnaires, ignoring the TIMs declared earlier. 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 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 refinement. 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 developed diagnostic procedures was confirmed by the very high correlation of the diagnostic results of pairs of questionnaires containing completely different questions that were repeatedly administered 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 the descriptions of their characteristic properties given by the majority of authors.

Obtaining valid diagnostic coefficients for more than 5,500 original questionnaire items characterizing more than 2,000 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 new questionnaire, it is necessary only to satisfy 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 be equal, while the systems of diagnostic coefficients obtained from them for diagnosing the 15 traits 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 using simple mathematical control procedures.

Thus, the method of socionic questionnaire-based type diagnostics that we developed, subsequently used in a large series of studies to obtain detailed “psychological portraits” of psychotypes and functions of the psyche, 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. the complete absence of authorial subjectivity in selecting questions and assigning them particular diagnostic values;
2. the use of questions with maximum discriminative ability, which has been mathematically confirmed;
3. the absence of distortions - when, for example, some other questionnaires previously diagnosed irrationality using manifestations of irrationality that were characteristic mainly only of intuitives;
4. the complete absence of reliance on traits - TIMs are diagnosed holistically. The diagnosis of psychotypes used by the method on the basis of their holistic characteristics, without the targeted use of socionic traits in the diagnostic process, subsequently makes it possible to study the manifestations of any socionic traits in a genuinely valid manner and to test whether they have substantive content (regardless of whether the issue is vertness and nality or, for example, Questimity and Positivism - because all traits are equal before this diagnostic method, and none has an advantage built into it from the outset by the construction of the questionnaire). The same applies to the purity, guaranteed by the method, of constructing “psychological portraits” of functions of the psyche in their various positions (program, creative, etc.).

Complete Psychological Portrait of ESI — Experimental Results

The more than five thousand questionnaire statements analyzed from the results 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 2,300 aggregated clusters comprising from one to several dozen questionnaire items close 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 — by averaging across several items — it further increases the accuracy of the projections of psychological properties onto psychotypes. It should, however, be borne in mind 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, as before, for individual members of a cluster, that is, for specific questionnaire statements. In reality, this indicator refers not to the probability of the actual presence of a given property among representatives of the type, but to the probability that a respondent will agree that they possess 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 subjects’ self-assessments are leveled out. Where the probability is greater than 0.5, for the generalized cluster of several statements it should become even closer to one, whereas where it is initially less than 0.5, it should decrease still further, approaching zero. Accordingly, the probability-exceedance ratios for clusters consisting of several statements should also increase substantially (by two to three times 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 has a particular property and rely for this either on the person’s self-assessment or on an external observer’s view, we are in fact conducting an experiment on only one particular manifestation of this property, without averaging the results of several experiments testing for the property’s presence. Thus, in practical use, the reported probability-exceedance ratios calculated for individual specific questionnaire statements will also provide a sufficiently accurate minimum approximate estimate in cases where a cluster property previously derived by averaging several questionnaire items is tested on the basis of a single experiment.

The tables may be very useful both for obtaining a clearer understanding of the characteristic properties of the psychotype and for purposes of expert socionic type diagnostics.

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, and, 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 fully clear picture of the most characteristic properties of the psychotypes.

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

Table 2. Psychological and psychophysiological properties (content clusters combining several questions close in meaning) that are highly characteristic of the ESI psychotype, but only secondarily or tertiarily after other psychotypes

Table 3. Properties that most strongly distinguish ESI from SEE

Table 4. Properties that most strongly distinguish ESI from ESE

Table 5. Properties that most strongly distinguish ESI from SEI

Table 6. Properties that most strongly distinguish ESI from EII

Table 7. Properties that most strongly distinguish ESI from LSI

Table 8. Properties that most strongly distinguish ESI from IEI

Table 9. Properties that most strongly distinguish ESI from SLI