Complete Psychological Portrait of the Intuitive-Ethical Extravert (IEE) — 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, the 8 socionic functions (in their various positions), and the poles of socionic traits. The results of all works in the series (including the results presented in the tables of this article) were obtained 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 beforehand.

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 is very close to socionics in the resulting structuring of psychological space, this is not at all the case; instead, the basis is invariably taken to be not psychotypes but four basic traits. These traits are 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 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. Later, however, socionics in Russia, Ukraine, and a number of other European countries 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 yielded indisputable scientific advantages. The “advantages” in this case consist in the fact that, in the developing socionic culture, the most diverse characteristic properties of psychotypes arising at the intersection of four dichotomies were more readily noticed. These properties were studied and were not ignored, although they were often a kind of 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 “volitional sensing,” in the other case as “sensing of sensations,” which differs very substantially in semantic content. Differences between manifestations of extraverted and introverted intuition, extraverted and introverted ethics, and extraverted and introverted logic were identified in the same way. 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 allow fundamentally new conclusions to be discovered at the “output.” Unlike type theory, socionics for a long time followed the path of empirically “feeling out” the most objective boundaries between psychological types, that is, in constant living contact with natural reality it formed optimal sector boundaries 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 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,” 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 itself 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 beginning with Briggs and Myers, prescribed that intuition within this initial “rough hypothesis” manifest itself identically in different types, and Briggs-Myers diagnosis was likewise aimed exclusively at identifying the common features of their dichotomous pole across types. 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, having likewise been unambiguously fixed 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 intuitives manifests itself somewhat differently than that of sensing types, and that of extraverts somewhat differently than that of introverts (for example, if improvisation is the key point in extraverted irrationality, then passivity and laziness are the corresponding key point in introverts, although in the larger sense 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 drawing of type boundaries on the basis of purely voluntaristically selected and questionnaire-fixed arbitrarily chosen “diagnostic” properties. In this way, 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 remained unidentified in research.

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 apparently 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 circumstance that it is specifically within the type boundaries accepted in socionics that new properties are revealed which are generated nonlinearly at the intersection of several “basic” traits (from physiological considerations, precisely such 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 shortcoming that calls into question the achievements of socionics as a science. For, 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 as a result of their observation of numerous strongly expressed, diagnostically “obvious” cases. But indeed, this knowledge 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 strongly expressed. It should be noted that agreement among expert diagnoses is low even among representatives of the same socionic school. If we set aside 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 reflects not so much differences in different schools’ views of the boundaries between types as the fundamental limitations on any expert’s ability to simultaneously take into account and weigh the diagnostic contribution of the numerous manifestations of a subject that are significant for type diagnosis. It follows directly from our studies, which will be discussed below, 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 only say that within a type, a particular property manifests itself in its representatives with a higher 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 make use of the statistical law of large numbers; human thinking is incapable of doing so — however experienced and socionically “advanced” the expert may be. Socionic expert type diagnosis is 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 diagnosis 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 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 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 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, precise and sensitive even to fine psychological nuances, will it later 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 is an order of magnitude above 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 at times is forced to tolerate) expert typing “by eye,” reliable and modern diagnostic questionnaires are simply indispensable for scientific research. Without them, socionics has already spent a decade in a scientific dead end, engaging at worst in openly unscientific myth-making, and at best in re-chewing 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 traits are derivatives of psychotype properties, 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, etc.). 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 using questionnaires by correlations between respondents’ response vectors and the “reference” (averaged) responses to the same questions given by “average representatives” of all 16 sociotypes. Thus, to determine a particular person’s type, 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 height of the other profile peaks, besides the highest peak, indicates the individual character of an accentuation additional 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 responses), the “reference responses” of the types (the basis of diagnosis) were understood as the averaged responses 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 on the basic dichotomies between the stated type and the initial preliminary type diagnosis based on the questionnaire. Stated diagnoses with three or more dichotomy mismatches were rejected from the training sample as clearly false or erroneous. Other quality-control tools were also used for incoming questionnaires and stated diagnoses; these were unrelated to their socionic content and therefore could not, through partial rejection of material, negatively 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 of the boundaries between types were averaged. This made it possible to reflect the view of type boundaries averaged across the general “socionic culture” of Russia and Ukraine. Additional corrections to the types’ reference responses, increasing the accuracy and reliability of the diagnostic coefficients, were 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 response of any type to a particular question can be predicted with fairly high accuracy – by decomposition into Reinin traits - from the reference responses 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 evenly, 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 property space) between the LIE and LII psychotypes should be the same as between EIE and EII, SLE and SLI, etc., while between ILI and SLI it should be approximately the same as between LSI and LII, etc., and so on. If the mentioned equality of distances is not achieved, the inequality is partly 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 question and each of the 16 psychological types. At the first stages of obtaining and refining the diagnostic coefficients of questionnaire questions, two more refinement procedures were used. One monitored the presence of negative kurtosis at the boundary between poles in probability-density plots describing the distribution of the magnitude of the four basic socionic traits; the other monitored maximization of the substantive content generated for the three quadral traits while varying the four basic axes by rotation 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, while further refinements were introduced only using the procedure for symmetrizing the array of diagnostic coefficients (which also took into account the requirement of the maximum possible orthogonalization of all socionic axes). The same truncated procedure was also performed 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 while possessing sufficient socionic experience or who had been typed by DIFFERENT experts in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Ukraine and had stated that TIM. Clearly, 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 responses for each questionnaire question (when the mean is calculated, errors in opposite directions in most cases cancel one another out - the statistical law of large numbers). At the next stage, statistical procedures were conducted to control negative kurtosis, maximize the substantive content of the quadral traits under the condition of their maximum orthogonality to the basic traits, and finally to symmetrize the results (TIMs in multidimensional psychological space should be equidistant from one another, forming a symmetrical structure). As a rule, these procedures introduced minor corrections, which nevertheless helped eliminate systematic errors (caused, for example, by the fact that at one time some socionic schools typed too many subjects as “Hamlets,” and also by the fact that in self-typing some TIMs prove more preferable than others). At the final stages, the diagnostic coefficients obtained using the training samples were already used directly for questionnaire-based diagnosis, ignoring the previously stated TIMs. Diagnostic coefficients were recalculated on the expanded sample and checks were again performed - for the symmetry of TIM placement in psychological space, for correspondence between the most characteristic identified properties of TIMs and their “canonical” descriptions by the majority of authors, and for the properties obtained for the 8 functions and the poles of the basic traits - again, whether the obtained results 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 5000 different subjects in total, a practically ideal system of diagnostic coefficients was obtained for more than 5500 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 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 maximal correspondence of the experimentally obtained “psychological portraits” of psychotypes and functions to descriptions of their characteristic properties by the majority of authors.

Obtaining valid diagnostic coefficients for more than 5500 original questionnaire questions characterizing more than 2000 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 the diagnostic symmetry of the coefficients be preserved (roughly speaking, the sums of squared diagnostic coefficients for all 16 psychotypes across the selected questions must coincide, and the systems of diagnostic coefficients obtained from them for diagnosing the 15 traits must be mutually orthogonal (which is equivalent to their scalar products being equal to zero). Selecting questions for a questionnaire while observing these conditions is easily carried out using simple mathematical control procedures.

Thus, the method of socionic questionnaire type diagnosis developed by us, subsequently used in a large series of studies to obtain detailed “psychological portraits” of psychotypes and psychic functions, is characterized 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. complete absence of authorial subjectivity in selecting questions and assigning them particular diagnostic values;
2. use of questions with maximum discriminative ability, confirmed mathematically;
3. absence of biases - for example, where manifestations of irrationality characteristic mainly only of intuitives had previously been used to diagnose irrationality in some other questionnaires;
4. no reliance on traits at all - TIMs are diagnosed holistically.

The method’s diagnosis of psychotypes 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 extraversion-introversion and rationality-irrationality or, for example, Questimity and Positivism - because all traits are equal before this diagnostic method; none has an advantage that would be built into it from the outset 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, etc.).

Complete Psychological Portrait of the IEE — Experimental Results

The more than five thousand questionnaire statements analyzed on the basis of a 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 2300 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 — through averaging over several items — it further increases the accuracy of projecting psychological properties onto psychotypes. It should, however, be borne in mind that in all the tables below, the indicated factor by which the probability of finding a property in a representative of a psychotype exceeds the probability of finding it in the entire population or in groups of other psychotypes was calculated and is reported by us not for the averaged properties (clusters), but still for individual single members of a cluster, that is, for specific questionnaire statements. In reality, this indicator pertains not to the probability of the actual presence of a particular property in representatives of the type, but to the probability that a respondent agrees that they possess this property. When the statistical characteristics of several questionnaire statements within a single cluster are averaged, the indicated probability should become more contrasted due to the leveling out of random errors in subjects’ self-assessments. 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 below 0,5, it will decrease still further, approaching zero. Accordingly, the factors by which the probability is exceeded should increase substantially for clusters consisting of several statements (increasing 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 possesses some property and for this purpose resort either to their self-assessment or to an outside observer’s view, we are in fact conducting an experiment on only one specific manifestation of this property, without averaging the results of several experiments testing for the property’s presence. Thus, in practical use, the reported factors by which probability is exceeded, calculated for individual specific questionnaire statements, will provide a sufficiently accurate minimum approximate estimate also in the case where 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 obtaining a clearer understanding of the characteristic properties of a 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 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 responses) suitable for use in diagnostic questionnaires have temporarily been excluded. 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 (content clusters combining several questions close in meaning) exclusively (that is, most strongly and primarily) characteristic specifically of the IEE psychotype. The conditional exclusivity index is understood as a value equal to the amount by which the IEE type mean exceeds the population level, plus the distance from the IEE type mean to the type mean of the psychotype ranking second (in expression of the property).

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

Table 3. Properties that most strongly distinguish IEE from EII

Table 4. Properties that most strongly distinguish IEE from IEI

Table 5. Properties that most strongly distinguish IEE from EIE

Table 6. Properties that most strongly distinguish IEE from ILE

Table 7. Properties that most strongly distinguish IEE from SEE

Table 8. Properties that most strongly distinguish IEE from LIE