Full Psychological Portrait of the Logical-Intuitive Extravert (LIE) — Results of an Experimental Study

V. L. Talanov

St. Petersburg, December 2011

Introduction

The present 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 the present article) were derived from a 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 in advance.

Psychological types (in essence, 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 type theory, which in the resulting structuring of psychological space is very close to socionics, matters are quite different: the basis invariably consists, by contrast, not of psychotypes, but of four basic traits. These traits — vertness, nality, Logic-Ethics, and Intuition-Sensing. Each trait constitutes 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 began to rely in psychological type diagnostics not on four-factor diagnostic questionnaires, but on live expert diagnosis of types in their «holistic» expression. For all its obvious disadvantages from the standpoint of diagnostic standardization, this tradition yielded unquestionable scientific advantages. The «advantages» in this case consisted in the fact that, within 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 were often something of a new 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; accordingly, one and 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. Analogously, differences were identified between manifestations of extraverted and introverted intuition, extraverted and introverted ethics, and extraverted and introverted logic. The theoretical models of socionics developed accordingly, incorporating new concepts. This development did not occur in type theory, where rigid constraints at the «input» of diagnostics did not allow fundamentally new conclusions to be felt out 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 boundaries between sectors of psychological space, without shying away from taking into account, when drawing those 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 so? Yes, very good. The point is that the substantive content of the four basic traits initially used in diagnostics was never «God-given»; it 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 should manifest identically in all types of the so-called «intuitive» pole (today we know that these manifestations are very distinctive in each of the eight types), yet the founders’ original «rough hypothesis», especially beginning with Briggs and Myers, prescribed that intuition, within this original «rough hypothesis», should manifest identically in different types, and Briggs-Myers diagnostics was likewise directed toward identifying in the types exclusively the common features of their dichotomous pole. Accordingly, in type theory the boundaries between types were distorted and shifted away from the places toward which they naturally gravitated. Another example is the nality axis, which, being unambiguously fixed in the original Briggs-Myers diagnostic questionnaires, likewise prescribed the same behavioral manifestations of rationality or irrationality for all types — although today we already know well that the irrationality of intuitive types manifests not quite as it does in sensing types, and in extraverts — not quite as it does in introverts (for example, if the key feature of extraverted irrationality is improvisation, then for introverts the corresponding key feature is passivity and laziness, although in broad terms both manifestations arise 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 and arbitrarily chosen «diagnostic» properties fixed in questionnaires. In this way, any potentially new properties of psychotypes and their groups that could not be reduced to the diagnostic questions initially embedded in the Myers-Briggs questionnaire were blurred and failed to be identified 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 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 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» traits (from physiological considerations, this is precisely the kind of generation one should expect from «correct» models of the organization of psychological space).

Socionics often criticizes itself for the low convergence of expert type diagnostics among different experts. It should be noted, however, that this is not a critical shortcoming calling into question the achievements of socionics as a science. When reading the 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 unquestionable scientific truths; they coincide across different authors and emerge as a result of their observation of numerous strongly contrasting cases that are «obvious» from the standpoint of type diagnosis. But, indeed, this knowledge cannot always be transmitted in the reverse direction, from the general to the particular, when it is necessary to diagnose the type of some less distinctly expressed subject. It should be noted that the convergence of expert diagnoses is low even among representatives of one and the same socionic school. If we set aside a number of obvious socionics-adjacent «reinventors of the wheel» and fraudulent dilettantes, inventors of their own socionics who present themselves as experts, then the dispersion of diagnoses reflects not so much differences in the views of different schools regarding the boundaries between types as it does the fundamental limitations on any expert’s ability to take into account and weigh simultaneously the diagnostic contribution of the many manifestations of a subject that are important 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 has only a strictly probabilistic character. 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 in its representatives with a higher 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 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 — no matter how experienced and socionically «advanced» the expert may be. Expert socionic type diagnostics is especially unreliable in cases where the person being typed, by objective psychological characteristics, lies 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 contrastively expressed persons being typed can it approach 90%. Formalized procedures (for example, well-constructed large questionnaires) do not have these accuracy limitations, but to achieve this, 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 the 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 diagnostics 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 small 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 type-theory questionnaire) can current socionic type diagnostics be standardized and its accuracy sharply increased. If applied type diagnostics 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, socionists have already spent a decade in a scientific dead end, engaging at worst in openly unscientific myth-making and at best — 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 traits are derived from the properties of psychotypes, 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 force 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?

Psychotypes in our studies were determined using 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). Taken together, all 16 correlations formed the respondent’s complete individual psychological profile, characterizing his or her individual distinctiveness as fully as possible. Thus, if the maximum correlation assigned a person to the LII type, the second-highest correlation could assign that person to one of several other types (EII, LSI, LIE, ILE, even SLI or IEI). Accordingly, the height of the other peaks in the profile, in addition to the highest peak, indicates the individual character of 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 checked by convergence of diagnoses in retest verification using a questionnaire with completely different diagnostic questions). At the initial stages of developing the system of diagnostic coefficients (identical to ideal reference answers), the «reference answers» of types (the basis of diagnostics) were understood as the averaged answers of respondents in a 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 evaluated by the number of discrepancies in the basic dichotomies between the stated type and an initial provisional type diagnosis based on the questionnaire. Stated diagnoses with three or more dichotomy mismatches were discarded from the training sample as clearly false or erroneous. Other tools were also used to control the quality of 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 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 correction of the types’ reference answers, increasing the accuracy and reliability of the diagnostic coefficients, was introduced using three special mathematical procedures. The first of these coefficient-refining procedures was stepwise recurrent refinement of respondents’ diagnoses. The second refining procedure — 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 - from the reference answers given to that question by the remaining 15 types). The third and most important refining procedure — symmetrization of the diagnostic coefficients in an array of two thousand enlarged psychological properties that rather evenly describe 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 the EIE and EII, SLE and SLI types, etc., while the distance between ILI and SLI — approximately the same as between LSI and LII, etc., and so forth. If the stated equality of distances is not achieved, the inequality is partially corrected by slightly 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 additional refining procedures were used. One controlled for the presence of negative excess kurtosis at the boundary between the poles in probability-density graphs 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 stated psychotypes were no longer used, because all the information they could provide had already been used. In this case, diagnoses were made exclusively on the basis of the questionnaire itself, using diagnostic coefficients from the previous approximation, while further refinements were introduced only through the procedure for symmetrizing the array of diagnostic coefficients (also taking into account the requirement for the maximum 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 provided they had sufficient socionic experience, or who had been typed by DIFFERENT experts from 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 reasonably reliable mean value of quantitatively graded answers for each questionnaire question (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 conducted to control negative excess kurtosis, maximize the substantive content of the quadral traits subject to 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 some socionic schools for a time 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 direct questionnaire-based diagnosis, ignoring previously stated TIMs. Diagnostic coefficients were recalculated on the expanded sample, and checks were performed on the symmetry of the placement of TIMs in psychological space, the correspondence of the most characteristic properties identified for TIMs to their «canonical» descriptions by the majority of authors, and the 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 found, additional source material was collected for clarification. As a result, after many approximations and using more than 5000 different subjects in total, an almost ideal system of diagnostic coefficients was obtained for more than 5500 questionnaire statements, making it possible subsequently to form any shorter diagnostic questionnaires from them 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 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 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 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 observe the condition of preserving the diagnostic symmetry of the coefficients (roughly speaking, the sums of squared diagnostic coefficients for all 16 psychotypes across the selected questions must coincide, while the systems of diagnostic coefficients obtained on their basis 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 readily accomplished by means of simple mathematical control procedures.

Thus, the socionic questionnaire-based type-diagnostic method developed by us, 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) 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, in some other questionnaires the manifestations of irrationality used to diagnose irrationality were those characteristic primarily only of intuitive types; 4) the absence of reliance on traits at all - TIMs are diagnosed holistically. The method’s diagnosis of psychotypes on the basis of their holistic characteristics, without deliberately applying socionic traits during diagnosis, subsequently makes it possible to study the manifestations of any socionic traits with genuine validity and to test whether they possess substantive content (regardless of whether one is speaking of vertness and nality or, for example, Questimity and Positivism - because all traits are equal before this diagnostic method, and none has an advantage initially built into it by the construction of the questionnaire). The same applies to the purity, guaranteed by the method, of constructing «psychological portraits» of psychic functions in their various positions (program, creative, etc.).

Full Psychological Portrait of the LIE — Experimental Results

The more than five thousand questionnaire statements analyzed on the basis of the multiyear 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 2300 enlarged 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 by reducing the number of primary properties that must 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 taken into account that in all tables below, the indicated multiplicative factor 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 is reported by us not for the averaged properties (clusters), but still for individual single members of the cluster, that is, for specific questionnaire statements. In reality, this indicator refers 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 he or she has this property. If the statistical characteristics of several questionnaire statements within a single 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 a generalized cluster of several statements it should become still closer to one; where it is initially less than 0,5, it should decrease still further, approaching zero. Accordingly, the multiplicative probability-excess indicators should 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 use. When in practice we assess whether a person has some property and for this purpose rely either on the person’s self-assessment or on an outside observer’s view, we are in fact conducting an experiment only on one particular manifestation of this property, without averaging the results of several experiments testing for the presence of the property. Thus, in practical use the reported multiplicative probability-excess values, calculated for individual specific questionnaire statements, will provide a sufficiently accurate minimum approximate estimate even when, on the basis of a single experiment, a cluster property previously derived by averaging several questionnaire items is being tested.

The tables may be highly useful both for gaining 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 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 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 (semantic clusters combining several questions similar in meaning) that are exclusive (that is, most strongly and primarily characteristic) specifically of the LIE psychotype. The conditional exclusivity index is defined as the amount by which the LIE type mean exceeds the population level, plus the distance from the LIE type mean to the type mean of the psychotype ranking second in expression of the property.

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

Table 3. Properties that most strongly distinguish LIE from ILI

Table 4. Properties that most strongly distinguish LIE from LII

Table 5. Properties that most strongly distinguish LIE from ILE

Table 6. Properties that most strongly distinguish LIE from LSE

Table 7. Properties that most strongly distinguish LIE from EIE

Table 8. Properties that most strongly distinguish LIE from SLE