Full Psychological Portrait of the Logical-Intuitive Introvert (LII) — 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 derived 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 in advance.

Psychological types (in essence, independent non-overlapping sectors of a multidimensional psychological space) gradually became the primary, fundamental concept in empirical socionics. In socionics they are most often diagnosed as wholes. In American typology, which is very close to socionics in terms of the resulting structuring of psychological space, this is not at all the case; instead, the four basic traits, rather than psychotypes, are invariably taken as the foundation. 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. 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. For all its obvious disadvantages from the standpoint of diagnostic standardization, this tradition yielded unquestionable scientific advantages. The “advantages” in this case consist in the fact that, within the emerging socionic culture, it was easier to note the most diverse characteristic properties of psychotypes that arise at the intersection of four dichotomies. These properties were studied rather than ignored, although they often constituted a kind of new formation in relation 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 in a new property of decisiveness-judiciousness that cannot be reduced to the four basic traits; accordingly, the same sensing can behave differently in “decisive” and “judicious” psychotypes — in one case as aggressive “force sensing,” in the other as “sensing of sensations,” which differs very substantially in semantic content. Analogously, differences were identified between the manifestations of black and white intuition, black and white ethics, and black and white logic. Theoretical models of socionics developed accordingly, incorporating new concepts. This development did not occur in typology, where rigid restrictions at the diagnostic “input” prevented fundamentally new conclusions from being felt out at the “output.” Unlike typology, socionics for a long time followed the path of empirically “feeling out” the most objective boundaries between psychological types, that is, in constant direct contact with natural truth it formed optimal boundaries between sectors in psychological space, without hesitating to take into account, when drawing these boundaries, newly discovered properties of types that were not directly reducible 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 traits originally used in diagnosis had never been “God-given”; rather, it represented a rough result of the same empirical observations by the founding researchers of the diversity of human manifestations. Nothing, for example, implies 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 within this initial “rough hypothesis” that intuition should manifest itself identically in different types, and Briggs-Myers diagnosis was likewise directed exclusively toward identifying features common to the types belonging to the same 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 rationality-irrationality axis, which likewise, having 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 intuitive types manifests itself somewhat differently from that of sensing types, and that of extraverts somewhat differently from that of introverts (for example, if the key point for the irrationality of extraverts is improvisation, for introverts the key point is passivity and laziness, although in the broadest sense both manifestations arise from a deficit of evaluative functions and the resulting deficiency of planning). Nevertheless, such nuances were ignored in typology, leading to boundaries between types being drawn incorrectly on the basis of arbitrarily selected “diagnostic” properties chosen in a purely voluntaristic manner and fixed in questionnaires. As a result, any potentially new properties of psychotypes and their groups that were not reducible 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 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, 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 shortcoming that calls into question the achievements of socionics as a science. For when one reads the numerous descriptions of psychotypes by different socionic authors, it is not difficult to see that, for each type, authors mostly notice the same characteristic manifestations. This knowledge and these observations are unquestionable scientific truths; they coincide across different authors and arise from their observation of numerous strongly contrasted cases that are “obvious” from the standpoint of type diagnosis. Yet this knowledge cannot always, in fact, be transmitted in the reverse direction, from the general to the particular, when it is necessary to diagnose the type of some subject whose type is not so strongly expressed. It should be noted that agreement between expert diagnoses is low even among representatives of the same socionic school. If one sets 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 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 on any expert’s ability to simultaneously take into account and weight the diagnostic contribution of the numerous manifestations of a subject that are significant for type diagnosis. Our studies, which will be discussed below, directly imply that every property “characteristic” of a psychotype, function, or pole of a socionic trait is only 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, some specific property manifests among its representatives with greater probability than in the population as a whole. Thus, reliable type diagnosis 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 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 diagnosis is especially unreliable in cases where, by objective psychological characteristics, the person being typed 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 diagnosis cannot in principle exceed 60%, and only with special selection of the most strongly contrasted persons being typed can it approach 90%. Formalized procedures (for example, well-constructed large questionnaires) do not have these limitations on accuracy, but for this to be the case 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 outdated Briggs-Myers questionnaire recipes.

By the present day, socionics has already exhausted all the advantages that it could derive from the “non-formalized” development of its scientific culture. The characteristic properties of psychotypes and mental functions 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, exact 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 standardized 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 that was available to the creators of the first Briggs-Myers typological 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,” then reliable and modern diagnostic questionnaires are simply indispensable for scientific research. Without them, socionics has for a decade remained in a scientific dead end, engaged, in the worst case, in openly unscientific myth-making and, in the best case, in chewing over old theoretical cud. This 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 adopted 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?

In our studies, psychotypes were determined by means of questionnaires from the correlations between respondents’ answer vectors and the “reference” (averaged) answers to the same questions given by the “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 heights of the other peaks in the profile, apart from the highest peak, indicate the individual nature of 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 convergence of diagnoses in a retest check 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) 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 a declared diagnosis was assessed by the number of discrepancies in the basic dichotomies between the declared type and the initial rough questionnaire-based diagnosis of type. Declared diagnoses with three or more dichotomy mismatches were rejected from the training sample as obviously false or erroneous. Other tools were also used to control the quality of incoming questionnaires and declared diagnoses; these were unrelated to their socionic content and therefore could not, through partial rejection of the 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 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 correction of the types’ reference answers, increasing the accuracy and reliability of the diagnostic coefficients, was introduced by means of 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 given 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 fairly evenly describe the entire 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 property space) between the LIE and LII psychotypes should be the same as between EIE and EII, SLE and SLI, etc., while the distance between ILI and SLI should be approximately the same as between LSI and LII, etc., and so on. If the aforementioned equality of distances is not achieved, the inequality is partially corrected by additional rotation of the necessary 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 kurtosis at the boundary between poles in probability-density graphs describing the distribution of the magnitude of the four basic socionic traits; the other controlled the maximization of the substantive content generated by 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, 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, while further refinements were introduced only by means of the procedure for symmetrizing the array of diagnostic coefficients (which also took into account the requirement for the greatest possible orthogonalization of all socionic axes). The same truncated procedure was also used when the database was supplemented with new, additional questionnaire items.

Thus, first (at the very first stage of developing the system of diagnostic coefficients for questionnaire questions), for each TIM a “training sample” was formed 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. It is clear that 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 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 carried out to control negative kurtosis, maximize the 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 equally distant 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,” as well as by the fact that in self-typing some TIMs turn out to be preferable to others). At the final stages, the diagnostic coefficients obtained using the training samples were already used to diagnose directly from the questionnaires, ignoring the previously declared TIMs. Diagnostic coefficients were recalculated on the expanded sample and checks were again performed: the symmetry of the arrangement of TIMs in psychological space; the correspondence of the most characteristic properties identified for the 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 roughnesses were identified, additional source material was collected for refinement. As a result, after many approximations and 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 the very high correlation between the diagnostic results of pairs of questionnaires containing completely different questions and 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 the majority of authors.

Obtaining valid diagnostic coefficients for more than 5500 original questionnaire questions characterizing more than 2000 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 of preserving diagnostic symmetry of the coefficients (roughly speaking, the sums of squares of the diagnostic coefficients for all 16 psychotypes over the selected questions must coincide, while the systems of diagnostic coefficients obtained on their basis 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 easily carried out by means of simple mathematical control procedures.

Thus, the method of socionic questionnaire-based type diagnosis developed by us, subsequently used in a large series of studies to obtain detailed “psychological portraits” of psychotypes and mental functions, is characterized 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 subjectivism in selecting questions and assigning them particular diagnostic values;
2. the use of questions with maximum discriminating ability, which has been confirmed mathematically;
3. the absence of distortions - for example, when in some other questionnaires manifestations of irrationality characteristic mainly only of intuitive types had previously been used to diagnose irrationality;
4. the absence of reliance on traits in general - TIMs are diagnosed holistically.

The diagnosis of psychotypes used by the method on the basis of their holistic characteristics, without the purposeful application of socionic traits in the course of diagnosis, 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 before this diagnostic method all traits are equal, and none of them has any 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 mental functions in their different positions (program, creative, etc.).

Full Psychological Portrait of the LII — Experimental Results

The more than five thousand questionnaire statements analyzed following the multi-year experiment, which respondents rated 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 containing 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, since 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 the projections of psychological properties onto psychotypes. It should, however, be taken into account that in all the tables presented 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 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 among representatives of the type, but to the probability of a respondent agreeing that he or she possesses 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 the 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 probability-excess ratios 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 has a particular property and rely for this either on his or her self-assessment or on an outside observer’s view, we are in effect conducting an experiment only on some one specific manifestation of that property, without averaging the results of several experiments checking for the presence of the property. Thus, in practical use, the presented probability-excess ratios calculated for individual specific questionnaire statements will provide a reasonably 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 checked.

The tables can be highly useful both for obtaining a clearer conception 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 abridgments. For example, certain properties whose analysis is continuing have been excluded; in addition, table columns reflecting the complete system of diagnostic coefficients (reference answers) suitable for use in diagnostic questionnaires have been temporarily omitted. 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 (substantive clusters combining several questions close in meaning) exclusively (that is, most strongly and primarily) characteristic specifically of the LII psychotype. The conditional exclusivity index is defined as the amount by which the LII type mean exceeds the population level, plus the distance from the LII 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 close in meaning) highly characteristic of the LII psychotype, but only in second or third place after other psychotypes.

Table 3. Properties that most strongly distinguish LII from ILE

Table 4. Properties that most strongly distinguish LII from LIE

Table 5. Properties that most strongly distinguish LII from ILI

Table 6. Properties that most strongly distinguish LII from LSI

Table 7. Properties that most strongly distinguish LII from EII

Table 8. Properties that most strongly distinguish LII from SLI