Complete Psychological Portrait of the Logical-Sensory Introvert (LSI) — 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 multidimensional psychological space) gradually became the primary, basic concept in empirical socionics. In socionics they are most often diagnosed as wholes. In American psychological 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 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 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 produced undeniable scientific advantages. The “advantages” in this case consisted in the fact that, within the developing socionic culture, a wide variety of characteristic properties of psychotypes arising at the intersection of four dichotomies were more readily noticed. These properties were studied rather than ignored, although they often represented a kind of newly formed property 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,” in the other — as “sensing of sensations,” which differs very substantially in 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 psychological type theory, where rigid restrictions at the diagnostic “input” did not permit fundamentally new conclusions to be felt out at the “output.” Unlike psychological 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 live contact with natural truth it formed optimal boundaries of sectors in psychological space, not hesitating to take into account, when drawing those boundaries, newly discovered properties of types that could not be directly reduced to their differences in extraversion-introversion, rationality-irrationality, logic-ethics, and intuition-sensing. Was it good that this was so? Yes, very good. The point is that the substantive content of the four basic 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. Nothing implies, for example, that intuition must manifest identically in all types of the so-called “intuitive” pole (today we know that these manifestations are highly distinctive in each of the eight types), yet the founders’ initial “rough hypothesis,” especially beginning with Briggs and Myers, prescribed that intuition, within this initially “rough hypothesis,” should manifest identically in different types, and Briggs-Myers diagnosis was likewise directed toward identifying in types exclusively the common features of their dichotomous pole. Accordingly, in psychological type theory 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 being unambiguously fixed in the initial Briggs-Myers diagnostic questionnaires, prescribed identical behavioral manifestations of rationality or irrationality to all types — although today we already know well that irrationality in intuitive types manifests not quite as it does in sensing types, and in extraverts — not quite as it does in introverts (for example, if improvisation is the key point for extraverted irrationality, then passivity and laziness are the key point for introverts, although broadly speaking both manifestations derive from a deficit of evaluative functions and the resulting insufficiency of planning). Nevertheless, such nuances were ignored in psychological type theory, which led to incorrect drawing of 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 originally built into the Myers-Briggs questionnaire were blurred and failed to be identified 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 appear to correspond better than any others to the real physiological factors of brain activity that objectively underlie the division of psychological diversity into psychotypes. The adequacy of the socionic classification is also emphasized by the fact that it is precisely within the type boundaries 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 convergence of expert type diagnosis 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. Indeed, when reading numerous descriptions of psychotypes by different socionic authors, it is not difficult to see that for each type the authors for the most part notice the same characteristic manifestations. This knowledge and these observations are unquestionable scientific truths; they coincide among different authors and arise from their observation of numerous sharply expressed 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 sharply expressed subject. It should be noted that convergence of 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 pass themselves off as experts, then the dispersion of diagnoses is due not so much to differences in the views of different schools regarding boundaries between types as to the fundamental limitation of any expert’s capacity simultaneously to take into account and weigh the diagnostic contribution of the many manifestations of a subject that are important for type diagnosis. Our studies, which will be discussed below, directly show that any property “characteristic” of a psychotype, function, or pole of a socionic trait has only a purely probabilistic character. 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 occurring among representatives within a type with greater probability than in the population as a whole. Thus, reliable type diagnosis can be built 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 this — however experienced and socionically “advanced” the expert may be. Socionic expert type diagnosis is especially unreliable in cases where, by psychological characteristics, the person being typed objectively 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 sharply expressed 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 so 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 today, 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 mental functions have been described; their further refinement within expert diagnosis is impossible. The time has come to fix and formalize the present achievements of socionics in the language of more exact sciences. Only with the language of mathematical statistics, which is precise and sensitive even to 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 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 psychological type questionnaire) can current socionic type diagnosis be standardized and its accuracy sharply increased. If applied type diagnosis can still tolerate (and is sometimes forced to tolerate) expert typing “by eye,” reliable and modern diagnostic questionnaires are simply indispensable for scientific research. Without them, socionics has for a decade remained in a scientific dead end, engaging in the worst case in openly unscientific myth-making, and in the 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 the 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 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-position Se, the properties of the SLE and SEE psychotypes are averaged, etc.). Therefore, the key potential question concerning studies of this kind is — how are the psychotypes whose properties are subsequently analyzed diagnosed?

Psychotypes in our studies were determined by questionnaires on the basis of 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 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 additional to the basic type. As calculations showed, the reliability of determining respondents’ leading type by this procedure in our study averaged at least 90% correct diagnoses (the percentage was checked by convergence of diagnoses in a retest using a questionnaire with entirely 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 diagnosis) meant the averaged answers of respondents in the training sample who had stated their type with sufficient competence on the basis of self-typing or repeated external typing (predominantly by experts from professional socionic schools in Moscow and Kyiv). The competence of the stated diagnosis was assessed by the number of discrepancies in 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 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, adversely affect the analysis results. Ultimately, within each type in the training sample, all honestly given answers of respondents previously typed by different experts with partly divergent views on boundaries between types were averaged. This achieved a reflection of the view of boundaries between types averaged across the common “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 given question can be predicted with fairly high accuracy – using decomposition by Reinin traits - from the reference answers given to that question by the other 15 types). The third and most important refining procedure — symmetrization of the diagnostic coefficients in an array of two thousand aggregated psychological properties that describe fairly evenly 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, 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 should be approximately the same as between LSI and LII, etc., and so on. If the stated equality of distances is not achieved, the inequality is partly corrected by additionally rotating 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 early 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 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. Diagnoses in this case were made exclusively on the basis of the questionnaire itself using diagnostic coefficients from the previous approximation, and further refinements were introduced only through the procedure of symmetrizing the diagnostic-coefficient array (also taking into account the requirement for the maximum possible orthogonalization of all socionic axes). The same reduced 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 while possessing sufficient socionic experience or had been typed by DIFFERENT experts from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Ukraine and who stated that TIM. It is clear that no more than 45-55% of the stated diagnoses in it were correct, but this is sufficient to obtain a sufficiently reliable mean value of quantitatively graded answers for each questionnaire question (when the mean is calculated, errors in opposite directions cancel one another in most cases - the statistical law of large numbers). At the next stage, statistical procedures were performed to control negative 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 should be equally distant 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 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 diagnosis directly from questionnaires, with previously stated TIMs ignored. Diagnostic coefficients were recalculated on the expanded sample and checks were again performed - of the symmetry of TIM placement in psychological space, of correspondence between the most characteristic properties identified for TIMs and their “canonical” descriptions by most authors, and of the resulting properties of the 8 functions and poles of the basic traits - again, whether the obtained results corresponded to most descriptions. All checks were passed. In individual cases where apparent roughness was detected, 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 assemble 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 containing entirely different questions and 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 most 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 any number of different diagnostic questionnaires, each of which is immediately 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 of preserving diagnostic symmetry of the coefficients (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). Selection of questions for a questionnaire while observing these conditions is easily carried out using simple mathematical control procedures.

Thus, the method of socionic questionnaire-based type diagnosis that we developed, subsequently used in a large series of studies to obtain detailed “psychological portraits” of psychotypes and 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 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 particular diagnostic values to them;
2. Use of questions with maximum discriminative ability, which is mathematically confirmed;
3. Absence of distortions - when, for example, in some other questionnaires irrationality had previously been diagnosed using manifestations of irrationality that were characteristic mainly only of intuitive types;
4. Absence of reliance on traits at all - TIMs are diagnosed holistically.

The diagnosis of psychotypes used by the method on the basis of their holistic characteristics, without targeted use of socionic traits in the diagnostic process, makes it possible subsequently to study the manifestations of any socionic traits in a genuinely valid manner and test whether they possess substantive content (regardless of whether the matter concerns extraversion-introversion and rationality-irrationality or, for example, Questimity and Positivism - because before this diagnostic method all traits are equal, and none has an advantage initially built into it by the questionnaire’s construction). The same applies to the purity, guaranteed by the method, of constructing “psychological portraits” of mental functions in their various positions (program, creative, etc.).

Complete Psychological Portrait of the LSI — Experimental Results

The more than five thousand questionnaire statements analyzed from the results of a multiyear 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 containing from one to several dozen questionnaire items similar in meaning and generally characterizing more generalized psychological properties. On the one hand, replacing 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 across several items, it further increases the accuracy of projections of psychological properties onto psychotypes. It should, however, be taken into account that in all tables below the indicated ratio 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 indicated by us not for averaged properties (clusters), but still for individual single members of the cluster, that is, for specific questionnaire statements. In reality, this index refers not to the probability that a particular property is actually present in representatives of a type, but to the probability that the respondent agrees that this property is present in him or her. When the statistical characteristics of several questionnaire statements within one cluster are averaged, the stated 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, whereas where it is initially below 0,5, it will decrease still further, approaching zero. Accordingly, for clusters consisting of several statements, the probability-excess ratios should increase substantially (increasing two- or 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 some property and rely for this either on that person’s self-assessment or on an outside view, we are in fact conducting an experiment only on one specific manifestation of that property, without averaging the results of several experiments testing for the presence of the property. Thus, in practical use, the presented probability-excess ratios calculated for individual specific questionnaire statements will provide a sufficiently accurate minimum approximate estimate also when 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 conception of the characteristic properties of the psychotype and for purposes of expert socionic type diagnosis.

All tables in the article are presented in a “newspaper version,” that is, with some omissions and abridgments. For example, some properties whose analysis is continuing have been excluded, and, in addition, table columns reflecting the complete system of diagnostic coefficients (reference answers) suitable for use in diagnostic questionnaires have been temporarily excluded. The indices retained in the tables provide a quite clear picture of the most characteristic properties of the psychotypes.

Table 1. Psychological and psychophysiological properties (content clusters combining several questions similar in meaning), exclusively (that is, most strongly and primarily) characteristic specifically of the LSI psychotype. The conditional exclusivity index is understood as a quantity equal to the excess of the LSI mean type value over the population level, to which is added the distance from the LSI 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 similar in meaning), highly characteristic of the LSI psychotype, but only in second or third place after other psychotypes

Table 3. Properties that distinguish LSI from SLE most strongly

Table 4. Properties that distinguish LSI from LSE most strongly

Table 5. Properties that distinguish LSI from SLI most strongly

Table 6. Properties that distinguish LSI from LII most strongly

Table 7. Properties that distinguish LSI from ESI most strongly