Complete Psychological Portrait of the Sensory Ethical Extrovert (SEE) — 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 the 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 with preliminarily determined socionic psychotypes.

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. 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 standardizing diagnosis, this tradition yielded undeniable scientific advantages. The “advantages” in this case consist in the fact that, within the developing 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 newly formed property 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, decisiveness-judiciousness, which is not reducible to the four basic traits; accordingly, the same sensing can behave differently in “decisive” and “judicious” psychotypes — in one case as aggressive “force sensing”, and in the other as “sensing of sensations”, which differs very substantially in semantic content. Differences were similarly identified between manifestations of black and white intuition, black and white ethics, and black and white logic. The theoretical models of socionics developed accordingly, incorporating new concepts. This development did not occur in type theory, where rigid restrictions at the diagnostic “input” prevented fundamentally new conclusions from being found 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 truth it formed optimal boundaries between sectors in psychological space, without shying away from taking into account, when drawing these boundaries, newly discovered properties of types that 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 was never “God-given”, but represented a preliminary result of the same empirical observations by the founding researchers of the diversity of human manifestations. It does not follow from anywhere, for example, that intuition must manifest identically in all types of the so-called “intuitive” pole (today we know that these manifestations are very distinctive in each of the eight types), but the founders’ initial “rough hypothesis”, especially beginning with Briggs and Myers, prescribed within this initial “rough hypothesis” that intuition 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 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 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 somewhat differently from that of sensing types, and that of extraverts somewhat differently from that of introverts (for example, if improvisation is the key feature of extraverted irrationality, then passivity and laziness are the key features for introverts, although by and large 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 incorrectly drawn boundaries between types on the basis of purely voluntaristically selected “diagnostic” properties arbitrarily chosen and fixed in questionnaires. In this way, any potentially new properties of psychotypes and their groups that were not reducible to the diagnostic questions initially built into the Myers-Briggs questionnaire were blurred and remained undetected 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 best 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 that are generated nonlinearly at the intersection of several “basic” traits (on physiological grounds, precisely such generation should be expected from “correct” models of the structure 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 deficiency that casts doubt on the achievements of socionics as a science. For when reading the numerous descriptions of psychotypes by different socionic authors, it is not difficult to see that, for each type, the authors mostly note the same characteristic manifestations. This knowledge and these observations are undoubted scientific truths; they coincide among different authors and arise from their observation of numerous strongly 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 type-diagnose a subject who is not so strongly expressed. It should be noted that agreement of 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, the dispersion of diagnoses is not so much a difference in the views of different schools regarding the boundaries between types as a consequence of the fundamental limitation of any expert’s ability simultaneously to 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 any property “characteristic” of a psychotype, function, or pole of a socionic trait is purely probabilistic. 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 based only on simultaneously taking into account 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, whereas human thinking is incapable of this — no matter how experienced or 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 strongly contrasting 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 purpose 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 built 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 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 subtle psychological nuances, will it be possible in the future 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 higher than 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 (and sometimes is forced to) tolerate expert typing “by eye”, reliable and modern diagnostic questionnaires are simply essential for scientific research. Without them, socionics researchers have already spent a decade in a scientific dead end, engaging at worst in openly unscientific myth-making and at best — 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 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 accepted within the socionic paradigm (or, more broadly — the neo-Jungian typology of personality, which divides the diversity of psychological space into 16 independent and comparatively symmetrically located sectors called psychotypes). The properties of functions and traits are derived from the properties of psychotypes, because the properties of particular functions in different positions and the poles of socionic traits are ultimately calculated by averaging the properties of particular groups of psychological types (for example, to identify the properties of program force sensing, the properties of the SLE and SEE psychotypes are averaged, 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 from 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). All 16 correlations together formed the respondent’s complete individual psychological profile, characterizing his individual distinctiveness as fully as possible. Thus, if the maximum correlation assigned a person to the LII type, the second-highest correlation could assign him to one of several other types (EII, LSI, LIE, ILE, even SLI or IEI). Accordingly, the height of the other profile peaks, 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 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 types (the basis of diagnosis) were understood as the averaged responses of respondents in the training sample who had declared their type with sufficient competence on the basis of self-typing or repeated external typing (primarily by experts from professional socionic schools in Moscow and Kyiv). The competence of the declared diagnosis was evaluated by the number of discrepancies in the basic dichotomies between the declared type and the initial provisional questionnaire-based type diagnosis. Declared diagnoses with three or more dichotomy mismatches were rejected from the training sample as clearly false or erroneous. Other tools for quality control of incoming questionnaires and declared diagnoses were also used; these were unrelated to their socionic content and therefore incapable of negatively affecting the analysis results through partial rejection of material. 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 on the boundaries between types were averaged. This achieved a reflection of the view of the boundaries between types averaged across the general “socionic culture” of Russia and Ukraine. Additional correction of the types’ reference responses, 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 response of any type to a particular question can be predicted with fairly high accuracy – by decomposition in terms of Reinin traits - on the basis of the reference responses 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 enlarged psychological properties that describe fairly evenly the full diversity of possible manifestations of a hypothetical complete psychological space. The latter procedure is based on the assumption that, in psychological space, the difference (that is, the mathematical distance in the space of properties) between the LIE and LII psychotypes should be the same as between EIE and EII, SLE and SLI, etc., while between ILI and SLI it 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 partially corrected by additional rotation of the necessary axes in multidimensional space, which produces a small correction of the diagnostic coefficients initially obtained empirically for each questionnaire item and each of the 16 psychological types. At the first stages of obtaining and refining the diagnostic coefficients of questionnaire items, two further 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 substantive content generated in the three quadral traits while varying the rotation of the four basic axes under the condition that their mutual orthogonality be preserved. At the final stages of refining the diagnostic coefficients, the declared psychotypes were no longer used, because all the information they could provide had already been used. Diagnoses in this case were made exclusively on the basis of the questionnaire itself using the diagnostic coefficients from the previous approximation, while further refinements were introduced only through the procedure of symmetrizing the diagnostic-coefficient array (also taking into account the requirement of the maximum possible orthogonalization of all socionic axes). The same truncated procedure was also applied 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 items), 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 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 responses for each questionnaire item (when calculating the mean, 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 lie at equal distances from one another, forming a symmetric 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 at one time typed too many subjects as “Hamlets”, and also by the fact that some TIMs are preferred over others in self-typing). At the final stages, the diagnostic coefficients obtained using the training samples were already used to diagnose directly from questionnaires, ignoring the previously declared TIMs. Diagnostic coefficients were recalculated on the expanded sample and checks were again performed - symmetry of TIM placement in psychological space, correspondence of the identified most characteristic TIM properties to their “canonical” descriptions by the majority of authors, and analysis of the resulting properties of the 8 functions and 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, an almost ideal system of diagnostic coefficients was obtained for more than 5500 questionnaire statements, making it possible subsequently to form 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 completely different questions and administered repeatedly 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 items 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 satisfy 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 coincide, while the systems of diagnostic coefficients derived from them for diagnosing the 15 traits must be orthogonal to one another (which is equivalent to their scalar products being equal to zero). Selecting questions for a questionnaire while satisfying these conditions is readily accomplished using simple mathematical control procedures.

Thus, the method of socionic questionnaire type diagnosis that we developed, subsequently used in a large series of studies to obtain detailed “psychological portraits” of psychotypes and mental functions, is distinguished by high accuracy and reliability of type diagnosis (above 90%); it proves more accurate than any expert typing and is free of experts’ subjective systematic errors. The method also differs fundamentally for the better from previously known socionic diagnostic questionnaires. It is characterized by:

1. complete absence of authorial subjectivity in selecting questions and assigning them particular diagnostic values;
2. use of questions with maximum discriminatory ability, which has been confirmed mathematically;
3. absence of distortions - for example, where manifestations of irrationality that were characteristic mainly only of intuitive types had previously been used to diagnose irrationality in some other questionnaires;
4. absence of reliance on traits at all - TIMs are diagnosed holistically.

The psychotype diagnosis used by the method, based on their holistic characteristics and without targeted use of socionic traits during diagnosis, subsequently makes it possible to study the manifestations of any socionic traits in a genuinely valid way and to test whether they possess substantive content (regardless of whether this 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 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 various positions (program, creative, etc.).

Complete Psychological Portrait of SEE — Experimental Results

The more than five thousand questionnaire statements analyzed from the results of the multi-year experiment, which respondents evaluated by “trying them on” themselves, were manually grouped by us — on the basis of their semantic content and mutual correlation — 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 to be surveyed; on the other hand — averaging across several items further increases the accuracy of projections of psychological properties onto psychotypes. It should, however, be taken into account that in all the tables below, the stated indicator of how many times the probability of detecting a property in a representative of a psychotype exceeds the probability of detecting it in the population as a whole or in groups of other psychotypes was calculated and reported by us not for the averaged properties (clusters), but, as before, for individual single members of the cluster, that is, for specific questionnaire statements. In reality, this indicator refers not to the probability that a particular property is actually present in representatives of a type, but to the probability that a respondent agrees that this property is present in him. When the statistical characteristics of several questionnaire statements within one cluster are averaged, this 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 less than 0,5, it will decrease even further, approaching zero. Accordingly, the indicators of how many times the probability is exceeded 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 application. When in practice we evaluate whether a person has some property and rely for this either on his self-assessment or on an outside view, we are in fact conducting an experiment on only one particular manifestation of that property, without averaging the results of several experiments testing for the property’s presence. Thus, in practical use, the reported values for the multiplicity by which probability is exceeded, 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 can be very useful both for obtaining a clearer idea 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 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 quite clear picture of the most characteristic properties of psychotypes.

Table 1. Psychological and psychophysiological properties (content clusters combining several questions similar in meaning) that are exclusive (that is, most and primarily characteristic) specifically of the SEE psychotype. The conventional exclusivity indicator is understood as a quantity equal to the amount by which the SEE type mean exceeds the population level, plus the distance from the SEE 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 similar in meaning) highly characteristic of the SEE psychotype, but only in second or third place after other psychotypes.

Table 3. Properties that maximally distinguish SEE from ESI

Table 4. Properties that maximally distinguish SEE from SEI

Table 5. Properties that maximally distinguish SEE from ESE

Table 6. Properties that maximally distinguish SEE from SLE

Table 7. Properties that maximally distinguish SEE from IEE

Table 8. Properties that maximally distinguish SEE from LSE