Complete Psychological Portrait of the Sensing Ethical Introvert (SEI) — 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, 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, 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, this is not at all the case; there, by contrast, 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 yielded indisputable scientific advantages. The “advantages” in this case consist in the fact that, within the emerging 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 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 in a new property, Decisiveness-Judiciousness, which 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” (Se), and in the other — as “sensing of sensations” (Si), which differs very substantially in semantic content. Analogously, differences were identified between manifestations of Ne and Ni, Fe and Fi, and Te and Ti. 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 discovered at the “output.” Unlike type theory, socionics for a long time proceeded by 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, not shrinking from taking into account, when drawing these boundaries, newly discovered properties of types that could not be directly reduced to their differences in Extraversion-Introversion, Rationality-Irrationality, Logic-Ethics, and Intuition-Sensing. Was it good that this 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 rather 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 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 aimed at identifying exclusively the traits common to the types belonging to their dichotomous pole. Accordingly, in type theory the boundaries between types were distorted and shifted away from the locations toward which they naturally gravitated. Another example is the Rationality-Irrationality axis, which, likewise having been unambiguously fixed in the original Briggs-Myers diagnostic questionnaires, prescribed the same behavioral manifestations of rationality or irrationality for all types — although today we already know well that the irrationality of intuitive types does not manifest itself quite as it does in sensing types, and in extraverts it does not manifest itself quite as it does in introverts (for example, whereas improvisation is the key feature of extraverted irrationality, for introverts the key features are passivity and laziness, although in broad terms both manifestations arise from a deficit of evaluative functions and the resulting deficiency of planning). Nevertheless, such nuances were ignored in type theory, which led to incorrectly drawing the boundaries between types on the basis of purely voluntaristically selected and arbitrarily chosen “diagnostic” properties fixed in questionnaires. As a result, any potentially new properties of psychotypes and their groups that could not be reduced to the diagnostic questions initially built into the Myers-Briggs questionnaire were blurred and remained 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 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 underscored by the fact that it is precisely within the boundaries between types 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 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 deficiency that casts doubt on 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 mostly note the same characteristic manifestations. This knowledge and these observations are indisputable scientific truths; they coincide across different authors and emerge from their observation of numerous strongly contrasting cases that are “obvious” from the standpoint of type diagnosis. Yet this knowledge cannot always be transmitted in the reverse direction, from the general to the particular, when it is necessary to type-diagnose a subject whose type is not so strongly expressed. It should be noted that agreement among expert diagnoses is low even among representatives of the same socionic school. If one sets aside a number of obvious para-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 on any expert’s ability to simultaneously take into account and weight the diagnostic contribution of the subject’s numerous manifestations 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 is purely probabilistic in nature. There are no properties or manifestations that can be called necessary or sufficient for diagnosing any type. One can say only that, within a type, a particular property occurs 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 this — no matter how experienced and socionically “advanced” the expert may be. Socionic expert type diagnosis is especially unreliable in cases where, by his psychological characteristics, the person being typed is objectively located in a problematic zone near the boundary between sectors of psychological space (and there are plenty of such cases). In our experience-based opinion, the reliability of expert type diagnosis cannot in principle exceed 60%, and only with special selection of the most strongly contrasting people being typed can it approach 90%. Formalized procedures (for example, well-constructed large questionnaires) do not have these accuracy limitations, but for this to be the case 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 obsolete formulas of the Briggs-Myers questionnaires.

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 current achievements of socionics in the language of more exact sciences. Only with the language of mathematical statistics, which is precise and sensitive even to fine psychological nuances, will it later be possible to build interdisciplinary bridges from socionics to brain physiology. Only by formalizing in standard questionnaires the current level of socionic knowledge about the characteristic properties of types and functions (and this current level exceeds by an order of magnitude the level of knowledge available to the creators of the first Briggs-Myers typological questionnaire) can present-day socionic type diagnosis be standardized and its accuracy sharply increased. If applied type diagnosis can still tolerate (and at times is forced to tolerate) expert typing “by eye,” reliable and modern diagnostic questionnaires are simply indispensable for scientific research. Without them, socionists have already spent a decade at a scientific dead end, engaged at worst in openly unscientific myth-making and at best — in 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 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 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 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 Se, the properties of the SLE and SEE psychotypes are averaged, etc.). Therefore, the key potential question for studies of this kind is — how are the psychotypes whose properties are subsequently analyzed diagnosed?

In our studies, psychotypes were determined using questionnaires by correlations between respondents’ response vectors and the “reference” (averaged) responses to the same questions given by 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 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, apart from the highest peak, indicates the individual nature of an accentuation additional to the basic type. The reliability of determining respondents’ leading type by this procedure was, as calculations showed, on average at least 90% correct diagnoses in our study (the percentage was verified by agreement of diagnoses in retesting with a questionnaire containing completely different diagnostic questions). At the initial 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 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 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 the material, negatively affect the analysis results. Ultimately, within each type in the training sample, all honestly given responses of respondents who had previously been typed by different experts with partially differing views of the boundaries between types were averaged. This produced a representation 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 carried out using three special mathematical procedures. The first of these coefficient-refining procedures - 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 over the Reinin traits - from 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 uniformly 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 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 forth. If this equality of distances is not achieved, the inequality is partially corrected by additionally rotating the required axes in multidimensional space, which leads to a slight correction of the diagnostic coefficients initially obtained empirically for each questionnaire item and each of the 16 psychological types. At the initial stages of obtaining and refining the diagnostic coefficients of questionnaire items, two additional refining procedures were used. One controlled for the presence of negative excess kurtosis at the boundary between the poles in probability-density plots describing the distribution of the values of the four basic socionic traits; the other controlled the maximization of the generated substantive content of the three quadra 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 the diagnostic coefficients from the preceding approximation, and further refinements were introduced only through the procedure of symmetrizing the diagnostic-coefficient array (which also takes 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 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 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 responses for each questionnaire item (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 performed to control negative excess kurtosis, maximize the substantive content of the quadra 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 to diagnose directly from questionnaires, while the previously stated TIMs were ignored. Diagnostic coefficients were recalculated in the expanded sample, and checks were again performed - of the symmetry of the placement of TIMs in psychological space, of whether the most characteristic properties identified for TIMs corresponded to their “canonical” descriptions by most authors, and 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 identified, 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 construct 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 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 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 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 obtained from them for diagnosing the 15 traits must be mutually orthogonal (which is equivalent to their scalar products being equal to zero). Selecting questions for a questionnaire while observing these conditions is easily accomplished using simple mathematical control procedures.

Thus, the socionic questionnaire type-diagnostic method 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 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 subjectivism in selecting questions and assigning them particular diagnostic values;
2. use of questions with maximum discriminative ability, which has been mathematically confirmed;
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 certain other questionnaires;
4. absence of reliance on traits altogether - TIMs are diagnosed holistically.

The method’s diagnosis of psychotypes on the basis of their holistic characteristics, without targeted use of 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 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 construction of the questionnaire). 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 SEI — Experimental Results

The more than five thousand questionnaire statements analyzed as a result 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 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 primary questionnaire statements with their generalized clusters simplifies the presentation of results because it reduces the number of primary properties to be reviewed; on the other hand — by averaging across several items — it further increases the accuracy of the projections of psychological properties onto psychotypes. It should be borne in mind, however, that in all the tables presented below, the reported 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 reported by us not for the averaged properties (clusters), but, as before, for individual single members of a 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 the type, but to the probability that a respondent agrees that he possesses this property. 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-evaluations are leveled out. Where the probability is greater than 0,5, for the generalized cluster of several statements it should become still closer to one, whereas where it is initially less than 0,5, it should decrease still further, approaching zero. Accordingly, the factors by which the probability is exceeded should also increase substantially for clusters consisting of several statements (increasing twofold 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 for this purpose rely either on his self-evaluation or on an outside observer’s 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 factors by which probability is exceeded, calculated for individual specific questionnaire statements, will provide a sufficiently accurate minimum approximate estimate even when a cluster property previously derived by averaging several questionnaire items is being tested on the basis of a single experiment.

The tables can be very useful both for forming a clearer conception of the characteristic properties of the psychotype and for expert socionic type-diagnostic purposes.

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 responses) suitable for use in diagnostic questionnaires have temporarily been excluded. The indicators retained in the tables provide a sufficiently clear representation of the most characteristic properties of the psychotypes.

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

Table 3. Properties that maximally distinguish SEI from ESE

Table 4. Properties that maximally distinguish SEI from SEE

Table 5. Properties that maximally distinguish SEI from ESI

Table 6. Properties that maximally distinguish SEI from SLI

Table 7. Properties that maximally distinguish SEI from IEI

Table 8. Properties that maximally distinguish SEI from LSI

Table 9. Properties that maximally distinguish SEI from EII