4 Clues that Socionics Theory Is at Least Partly False

Major Theoretical Fallacy #1: According to Model A, information is conveyed from person to person via matching functions. In other words, an ESI conveys information about introverted ethics to an SLI via the 1st function of first and the 6th function of the second. It is this information that determines the nature of the relationship between them.

No, that's just not how things work. If the SLI and the ESI are sitting together, and neither of them talks, one or both might begin to feel tense. How do you explain that socionically? If one starts talking about something of little interest to the other and goes on and on without stopping, the other will become annoyed. Which information element is being affected? If the two types are in a relationship and the ESI has a prestigious and successful career while the SLI is struggling in their much more low-paying job, this will lead to tension and a feeling that the ESI could "do better." Which function is being affected? If the SLI is more physically attractive than the ESI, the ESI will struggle more with feelings of jealousy. Which function is "acting up?"

My point is, the objective and measurable reasons of relationship tension that have been, and are being discovered, have nothing at all to do with so-called information metabolism. 

Major Red Flag #2: Socionics has been around for 40 years, and the issues being debated among professionals in the field have not changed significantly in at least 15-25 years. What's the cause of this? Are socionists not smart enough to make a big breakthrough? Is lack of funding the problem? 

I invite you to try to make a case that the cause of the stagnation of the field is anything other than the fact that the entire field is based upon a set of unprovable axioms. 

My conviction is that real progress is only possible if researchers ignore the unprovable axioms themselves, but then it's simply psychology research, not socionics research. Socionics can only exist if it has its axioms. And having those axioms makes scientific research and thus real breakthroughs impossible. 

Obvious Red Flag #3: It is virtually impossible to get even a small group of socionists to come to a unanimous agreement on someone's type. Existing tests give conflicting results. Each test was created by a socionist who thought long and hard within the context of their own understanding of socionics, which differs from that of other socionists. 

At the very least, this tells us that socionic type is often far from obvious. How obvious does type need for socionics to be useful? What is the threshold of "nonobviousness" beyond which the application of socionics loses all practicality?

Hidden Red Flag #4: Among socionics enthusiasts, a certain percentage — perhaps 30-40% — are more or less widely recognized as belonging to a particular type. These are the people you think of when reading a type description. The rest are in a gray zone where they are either 1) never fully certain of their own type due to a plethora of opinions on the matter, or 2) unable to convince everyone else that their type is indeed X. What does it say about socionics if only 30-40% of people easily identify with a certain type and are recognized as such by their associates in the community? 

I'll answer that rhetorical question for you. It means one of two things. 1) (optimistic scenario) Socionics theory itself is correct or nearly correct, but type descriptions, tests, and socionists themselves are "not good enough." 2) (pessimistic scenario) Socionics theory itself is incorrect in some significant way, and the type identification problem is the natural result of fundamental errors in the theory.

I'm a pessimist. Even if we accept scenario #1 above, what does it say about socionics if the combined efforts of hundreds of high-IQ individuals is not enough to overcome the stated problem — at least locally, within a single socionics school, — assuming the theory itself is correct? 

In other words, any way you look at it, there is something wrong with the theory (see point #1). 

How to Forget about, or Unlearn Socionics

1. Either find a convincing intellectual explanation for why part or all of it is false. (e.g. this post)
2. Or find a system of ideas to replace it which explains the same domains of personality and relationships.

Added 10 years later, in 2026:

Nah, these aren't the only ways. Underneath one's interest in socionics and related theories is a need for order that can dissolve. If it dissolves (because the need is illusory—it doesn't actually do anything for you), then socionics does not need to be replaced by a competing theory in order to be forgotten.

In Gestalt Psychology this could be viewed as a movement from grounding oneself in ideas and stories to grounding oneself in direct experience. This is seen as one of the primary goals of therapy.

In the world of contemplative practices this would be a movement away from Mind towards Awakening to one's true nature.

In everyday language—"I just don't care about all those ideas anymore" along with a tangible growth in openness and curiosity about the world.

I still fully subscribe to the view outlined in my "Manifesto" here: https://socionist.blogspot.com/2019/02/why-this-blog-is-now-called-non-ex.html

Why Socionics is a Recipe for Strife

1. Socionics causes people to infringe upon each other's boundaries by inappropriately discussing the qualities of the other person (inappropriately from the perspective of normal etiquette). Once this behavior has begun, it permanently affects a relationship. It may never be the same as when there was a "safe" distance between the people.
2. If two people become close friends or lovers, this behavior is appropriate and generally does not get in the way.
3. However, if either person does not accept the self-typing of the other, then conflict ensues regardless of the "actual" types of the two people (if there even is such a thing as an "actual" type). 

Preview of My Changing Views on Personality and Relationships

(This post started out as a response to Jonathan's comment on my previous post, then grew to article length)

Part of why it may seem I'm going a little too far in turning away from socionics (I acknowledge that's possible) is that I haven't yet talked about the views that are taking the place of socionics in my mind. That's because I wanted to first do a methodical run-through of socionics before getting to my new perspectives, but it's going slow because I have almost no one to discuss it with these days. Hence this post, which is a kind of preview of my emerging ideas — "convictions," you might say — on phenomena previously described by socionics.

At this point, allowing myself to skip past some of the methodical stuff and cut to the chase will probably be useful to both me and my readers. Here are some of the main points in no particular order: 

1. Identifying people as "the same type" is useful only when they have significant obvious similarities. I'm done with sticking highly sensitive or highly intelligent/creative/refined/whatever individuals into the same type as people with a completely different background and sensitivity just because they share some esoteric "information preferences." If other people don't see obvious parallels between two people, then calling them the same type does more harm than good (this conviction comes from personal experience). 

2. This inevitably suggests a different set of types — either a similar number of types but with a much more uneven distribution, or a greater number of types. I personally don't care much anymore to name the types or create a consistent system such as socionics. However, identifying and describing the important common traits between two people I still find to be very worthwhile. 

3. The brain is not organized into socionic functions the way socionics suggests. The contents of our ongoing stream of conscious mental activity cannot be categorized by socionic function. In other words, the majority of the time, you will not be able to clearly relate what you're thinking about — or how you're thinking about it — to some socionic category. Rather than trying to force a socionics categorization, I'm more interested in just letting the information speak for itself and kind of self-categorize based on principles of pragmatism.

3.1. I would find it interesting to go through some of the music we once examined (back in 2007) using socionics terminology and allow different kinds of categories to emerge from that exercise. The questions I would start out with are, "what effect does this music have on the listener, and what does this music say about the composer's personality and state(s) of mind, and possibly the culture in which he/she grew up in?" Along the way we might discover that some music is just "better" than other, that level of sophistication is just as important a factor as the "states of mind" we were trying to describe using socionics functions, or that we come up with a number of states worth describing that does not equal 8.

3.1.1. I almost forgot to acknowledge, however, that Jung's and Augusta's idea of dividing up thought processes and basic traits into co-equal mental functions is a powerful and liberating idea that teaches one to see the other side of things and identify possible alternatives to nearly any approach to anything. That makes for a very useful mental tool, even if the details are not strictly correct. 

4. A result of point #3 is that interaction mostly does not occur on the basis of socionic functions. I believe that applying a general psychology/science perspective in examining specific cases brings one to different (simpler and better) conclusions than socionics about why people do or do not get along.

5.1. There is still something to functions and their impact on relationships. It's like they are bundles of values, but not actual mental processes or modules of information perception, processing, and output. 

5.2. There is still something mysterious about why people who are so different can sometimes get along so well. What socionics has done, however, is to put complementary differences on a pedestal. For the most part, people hang out with people of similar personalities who — perhaps — differ from them in some more subtle (and perhaps simpler and physiologically definable) way than being "a completely different type." 

6. Duality as described by Augusta is basically equivalent to falling in love. Remove the love, and duality is more mundane a phenomenon and barely preferable — on average — to other relationships. In modern culture, we expect and even require love for long-term relationships and generally prefer any relationship with love to one without it, regardless of the intertype relationship. There are good reasons for this coming from the logic of biological success.

6.1. Love does not obey the "laws" of intertype relations, and the idealizations that people project onto objects of passion do not necessarily come from the person's supposed Super-Id (dualizing) functions. That is, if you listen closely to what people want to have in an ideal partner — not just their conscious preferences but their emotional reactions to different people — I think you see that the preferences are 1) indeed significant and generally there for good reason; 2) not reducible to an "ideal dual"; and that 3) some people are [much] more universally desirable than others, and again, not because people are stupid and don't know what will make them happy, but because there are [nearly] universally positive and negative traits, habits, and life circumstances of great signifance to human interaction to which socionics is blind (see point #8).

6.1.1. It could be true that dual relations are more often magical than others. However, the fact that they tend to be described as magical feeds a tendency to see duals any time there is magic. Furthermore, a "magical" dual might have more in common with a "magical ___ type" than with a non-magical dual. 

7. There do exist particularly potent combinations of people that socionics is unable to predict (because its model of the psyche is not just incomplete, but fundamentally incorrect). The cause of the potency is unknown to socionics but can be discovered on a case-by-case basis and then, perhaps, generalized into a set of patterns and general rules. I would speculate that these combinations are highly symbiotic on grounds that are more or less permanent (constitutional) rather than situational (e.g. your specific current needs complement the other person's). Such pairings are consistently able to elicit symmetrical positive emotions in each other. Why? I don't know, but I'm now quite confident it is not socionics.

7.1. People with more extreme traits may have different patterns of interpersonal compatibility than those with traits closer to the norm. In particular, they may experience incompatibility much more often and have greater unmet needs for understanding and connection. The causes of this are fairly straightforward and obvious and probably have little or nothing to do with socionics.

8. There are many very important universals that socionics is blind to. For instance, that some people are almost universally annoying while others are almost universally liked/admired. There are not 16 strategies of success, but rather just a handful, plus variations. People achieve success not only by relying on unique strengths, but also by developing universal qualities common to most varieties of success. Trying to follow a somewhat contrived and esoteric type-specific path to success seems to me generally less useful than working on improving the universals.

8.1. For the most part, our lives are dominated by universals — standard situations that would elicit similar reactions in most people. Socionics suggests the opposite.

8.1.1. However, there are definitely times when a person needs to focus on discovering and enhancing the individual and specific. Socionics can give some broad hints, but nothing more. So can other typologies. So can non-typological empirical psychology.

8.2. There are "better" and "worse" states to be in that are remarkably universal, but these states are hard to describe from a socionics perspective. "Type development" is a clumsy and unparsimonious way to describe it. Modern science now has a ton to say about what contributes to happiness and well-being, and research results don't obviously suggest a typological approach.

9. The territory that we each stake out in life and build our self-identities upon is mostly based on unconscious calculations of our probability of biological success in the various roles/niches we have tested or know of given our existing investments and available energy and resources. These roles are often continually changing as different actors come and go and resource allocation patterns (i.e. the economy) evolve, since these things affect our personal prospects. While there may be patterns in which personalities gravitate towards which kinds of roles, situational and non-typical factors are generally more important. Since our connections with people are to a large extent determined by these roles, the things that bring people together and create a bond are best described using non-socionic language because socionics plays a small part in it.

9.1. I think lasting interpersonal conflicts can be parsimoniously described as reflecting threats to self-identities, current roles, and biological success. If you are a sadist and want to cause people psychological pain, don't nerdily attack their hypothetical "point of least resistance"; instead, doubt their self-identity, jeopardize their current roles, and question their biological success. 

- - - - - - - -

That's a glimpse of where my ideas are taking me.

Back to Augusta...

An important question I ask myself is, if things really are as I have suggested here, how can Augusta and so many followers have thought for so long that the system worked? I think that a key to the longevity of many not-quite-true (I don't mean that perjoratively) idea systems is their complexity. The structure and sophistication of systems of thought often have the effect of aweing their adherents. If the ideas are complex and extensive, they may take a very long time to prove or disprove. I, for one, only feel confident in calling socionics "inaccurate" as of the past 6 months.

A long-lived idea system must also be at least reasonably accurate at some level — or impossible to disprove. The fact that thinkers have been identifying types of people for millenia suggests that there is some basis for this approach. It is also plainly evident that different combinations of people are more or less compatible, and that once-established relationships and attitudes toward each other often last for a long time. However, our limited consciousness seems incapable of understanding why this is the case without the help of science. One of Augusta's errors (and mine too) was overstating the role of permanent, constitutional differences in personality. Her model treats people as essentially unchanging actors and isn't well suited for describing short- and long-term development. This error, as well as its opposite — that everything is situational — are easy to make if you are unaware of the last 30 years of psychology research.

Augusta attempted to explain phenomena which are still clouded in mystery — namely love and interpersonal attachment/rejection patterns — and did a half-decent job at it. Good enough to make a lot of people excited about the discovery. Because there are so many types and varieties of intertype relations, a place could be found for any person in the universe revolving around any particular person. To find points where the system breaks down requires comparing overlapping universes to see how the predicted relationships and perceived personalities play out. Like I said, this can take a lot of time — years and years — as one tries tweaking typings and one's understanding of socionics to see if things can be made to fit after all. 

"Fooled" by Socionics

This long and rambling post was inspired by this comment from Consentingadult.

I have a suggestion: instead of criticizing Augusta (which in itself is perfectly valid), why don't you actually criticize one or more of your own writings? E.g. the ILE description in the article, where you said, amongst other things: 

"I have known ILEs who were heads of research institutes, NGOs, language teaching schools, and consulting companies. Many more held various positions in all kinds of organizations where they had a great deal of independence. The common feature of all engaged ILEs seems to be that they are working on some far-reaching personal project that has yet to come to full fruition."

I would like to know: what was wrong about this, how did you fool yourself to arrive at such insights that you now claim cannot be true or valid?

I'll get to criticism of types eventually. I was hoping to start with information aspects, then move to functions and Model A, then to types and intertype relations.

If your question was not simply rhetorical (since I detect a bit of sarcasm), here is my response.

What's "wrong" about the ILE description

I described a subset of ILEs — those who are above-average, proactive, and highly engaged in the modern, growing economy. If I'd written something that described the under-average, reactive, and underengaged ILEs, or the subsistence farmer and hunter-gatherer ILEs equally as well as the more fortunate, modern ILEs, the resulting description would have been too abstract to "do any good."

One might argue that I've described the "greatest potential" that people of this type can attain to. I agree that that might be inspiring, and people want and need to be inspired. But it's not necessarily true that you can group people into 16 types and then expect that any of those people has the potential to achieve the level of success, fulfillment, or happiness of the most fortunate individuals of their type.

I described the ideal type, not the borderline, overly contradictory, or untypeable ILEs. This is a universal problem in socionics, and it comes from being unable to type all individuals in a population. If socionists can only type what they themselves can recognize, then they only describe the most recognizable types. Then other people will perpetuate the bias towards recognizable types and intertype relations.

I don't expect that socionics will ever overcome this problem because it is not sufficiently accurate to ever develop foolproof empirical tests. An "ILE" will always be "what I've defined as an ILE," and thus any description is as good as any other.

Why do I use the word "accurate?" Because I am convinced that no matter how you define and split the 16 types, the resulting intertype relations will not be close enough to those postulated by socionics to call the system "accurate." The reason socionics has a "lack of empiricism" problem is simply because it has an "accuracy" problem. If socionics were more accurate, the empirical data would be flowing in all around. For instance, the phenomenon of duality would be scrutinized and elucidated, and researchers would be studying it from multiple angles to learn more about how and why it happens.

The fact is, socionics duality as described by Augusta is a rare subset of dual relations, and when it happens between a man and a woman, there is a lot more going on that has nothing to do with socionics. And it doesn't necessarily happen just to duals. In my mind this is a fatal blow to the socionics model of the psyche, since duality was socionics' most powerful hypothesis.

How I managed to "fool myself" 

A bigger question to ask is, "how did Augusta manage to fool herself?" I'll speculate about this further down.

In my case, my initial insights were simple and promising enough that I continued my study of socionics. I had only really deeply processed a small number of my personal relationships, but my insights were promising enough that I was hopeful that socionics could be applied generally, and not just in these specific cases. Of course, I based my understanding on my experiences of the most easily recognizable types and relationships in my environment.

At the moment I wrote the ILE description, my arsenal of experience had grown from a handful to maybe a couple hundred people of different types. However, my deeply processed personal experiences relating to each of them lagged behind. Based on my experiences so far, I was willing to take the system on faith to a degree. When eventually forced to face major contradictions, I began to systematically consider the less easily definable types and relations that I had been discounting and give them an equal place in my mind alongside the recognizable ones. After a while, I concluded that socionics was not accurate enough as it should be, considering the large amount of mental storage space required to house it. Furthermore, the things it could tell a person (less than I used to think) were of little use to me at this stage of life. This process provided some new insights that I now feel obligated to share with my socionics audience.

Biases

When one begins to get into socionics, one recognizes only a tiny sliver of types and intertype relations — those that most obviously fit descriptions and can thus be interpreted thoroughly from a socionics perspective. These "obvious fits" then form the foundation of one's understanding of socionics, giving the person a bias from day one that they will be unable to correct until much later, if ever. If a socionics aficionado recognizes the limitations and inaccuracies of socionics from the outset due to a more methodical and less exciteable personality, you can be sure that they will never become socionics writers!

Socionics is, in a way, worse off than astrology. With astrology you at least know when a person was born, making disagreement on their astrological type impossible. Then you can read a description and say, "well, that doesn't fit!" In socionics, if a person doesn't match their type description, then you've probably mistyped them. Keep switching types until you find the "best fit!"

Changing times

Yes, this has been an absolutely normal way of thinking about psychological matters for eons, but the times are changing and this approach is losing popularity as science has more and more to say about things that people used to only be able to speculate about. More and more people are sensing this and jumping on the train of empirical psychology and neuroscience. This is one of the reasons socionics is, in my opinion, slowly dying out.

Speculation about Augusta

I am quite certain that if Augusta were born today, she would not create socionics. She would read everything currently available on individual differences and go into psychology research or neuroscience. But she grew up before most of the really interesting research started being done, and was stuck in the Soviet Union where there was a official slant on psychology that downplayed personality differences. Thanks in part to typology, personality differences are now taken for granted.

Augusta created a system that allowed for much more healthy psychological variability than was commonly accepted at the time, but she was quite absolutist in her views on the types. For instance, she published a paper explaining why ILE is the best type to run a scientific research institute, ignoring other significant factors other than type. It seemed that she was proposing a new way of staffing posts and organizing society that could be implemented within the Soviet system.

Obviously, the zeitgeist has changed dramatically since then, even in the former Soviet Union. As I understand from my interaction with the socionics community in Kiev, in the late 1980s Augusta's interests drifted to other areas, and she became a less and less active participant of the socionics community, while continuing to occasionally voice her views on the subject. I was also told that she was in a rather unhappy marriage with an LSE (she was ILE), which could have contributed to her idealization of duality.

Was Augusta "fooled" by her own ideas? I suppose you could say so. She would have had the same problems with confirmation bias that any later student of socionics would have, alleviated by the process of discussing ideas and hypotheses with a group of associates. They noticed some fascinating new patterns, broke new ground, and made some mistakes that are easier to recognize decades later.

Watering down socionics

If socionists were forced to type everyone and, particularly, to examine every single relationship among these people, and then to describe types and intertype relations using a strictly statistical method, I am certain that we would see a drastic watering-down of both type and relation descriptions.  Socionics would lose its "teeth."

However, the more watered-down one's views on a subject are, the less motivated one is to propogate one's views. This is why the people who have built up the experience to help water down socionics usually can't be bothered to do so. I personally view this as my duty to society, but my motivation is much weaker than it was to promulgate classical socionics, which engaged my need for recognition, connection with others, and mental discovery. Now, the inspiration is just not there. There's no "vision" to be found by picking apart someone else's somewhat erroneous theory to a dwindling and disinterested audience. In fact, the main reason I am writing this post is probably to avoid doing my taxes.

From a kind of esoteric psychology perspective, it may be good to keep socionics classical, albeit full of illusions. People come through the system, receive rigorous training that excites them and fills them with energy, and they move on to do other things. But it's already too late; socionics is dying a long, slow death. Successive generations of socionists are less and less inspired and inspiring, career momentum and entropy are taking over, and there is just too much new and exciting information on personality and human interaction coming from research that takes a fundamentally different (empirical) approach than socionics.

Reexamining Socionics: Information Aspects

This is a continuation of my effort to critically examine the foundations of socionics, which I began in January.

Information aspects (note: NOT "elements of information metabolism," i.e. "mental functions") are a not-terribly-productive construct introduced by Augusta as she developed her unique perspective on Jung's Typology. Instead of being merely "modes of processing information" as in Jung's Typology, the psychic functions became instruments for "perceiving, processing, and conveying" information. Augusta saw the functions as responding to different streams of information coming in from the outside world. A stream of information could then be labeled by the corresponding Jungian function that processed it. The -function processes -information, and so forth. One person's responds to -information and conveys -information to the outside world, and another person's picks up that -information and responds to it in a way defined by the position of in his socionic type. The response might tend to be confident and authoritative, it might be curious and accepting, helpless, narrow-minded and categorical, etc. depending on the person's type.

I say that information aspects have not been very productive as a construct because there is really not much to be said about them other than "-information is what the -function perceives and produces," etc. They can't be defined in isolation from psychic functions; something is only "information" if it is a message that is potentially perceivable by a human observer. Augusta gave the information aspects more abstract definitions (see here, for instance), almost suggesting she first divided up reality and types of information, then found that her division matched Jung's functions. I'm certain it was actually the other way around.

Augusta's descriptions have been revised and concreticized by subsequent authors to more closely match how people of different types perceive the world in practice. And, to be honest, nothing much has been said or done about information aspects (also called "information elements") since Augusta wrote about them. Usually, they are simply confused with IM elements (elements of information metabolism), which are another name for the Jungian functions. In fact, most professional socionists even confuse them (another symptom perhaps?).

So, is there any use in dividing up information into different types? I think yes, if the division is arrived at empirically — rather than off the top of one's head — and improves understanding of the real world. In the case of socionics it appears that neither is true. The kind of division Augusta suggested is far from obvious. If one were to attempt to categorize information coming from a general science perspective, one would probably take a different approach:

• By sensing organ/receptor: light and visual information, sounds, scents, tastes, tactile information, various bodily sensations, emotions and moods, etc.
• By relevance to the perceiver: important/unimportant/potentially important, pleasant/unpleasant/neutral, etc.

If you had to divide up information, how would you go about it?

Type Identification and Distance to Subject

Two posts back, I wrote:

On top of this, as I considered the types of other people close to me, I realized that, in many cases, I was no longer sure of their types. Rather than thinking that this was a temporary moment of reevaluation, I have come to see this as typical. When people are psychologically closer than a certain point, "contradictions" in their personalities become more and more apparent, making their types harder to identify. I see this is a big problem; it really shouldn't be this way if socionics is indeed accurate.

To follow up on this observation, here's a graphic portraying this "focusing, then blurring" effect as the person whose type is being identified becomes closer and closer to the socionist (typer).

One of the typical psychological effects of any typology is that once you place a person in "your" category (in the case of socionics this would be whichever types you consider favorable), you tend to open up more to that person. Conversely, if you have put someone in "not your" category (e.g. an unfavorable type), you tend to close up and distance yourself somewhat from the person. This effect is most evident among people at the first stage of views on typology, as illustrated in my previous post.

When someone's type is hazy — either because they are too close or too distant from the subject, a kind of mental discomfort might be felt. After all, they must have a type! I'm suggesting here that this can serve as an artificial barrier to experiencing close relationships with other people.

But this effect shouldn't be blown out of proportion. It happens with any sort of categorization, not just in typology. For instance, a woman who suddenly decides, "this man is not trustworthy" due to a single emotionally significant incident will naturally distance herself from the man in the same way that a socionics hobbyist might after deciding that someone belongs to an "unfavorable" type. And as long as the woman is trying to make up her mind as to whether the man is trustworthy or not (or any other important characteristic), she may keep interaction at a safe distance.

The questions I'd like to pose are:

1. How universal is this "type blurring at close distances?"

2. Are there other kinds of characterizations of people that don't blur at close distances — other than obvious physical characterizations? Or is this a uniform problem of perceiving other people?

The Eroding "Essence" of Socionic Types and Relationships

Not only is it basically impossible to fully calibrate one socionist's typings with another's, but an isolated socionist's clarity about types and relationships is fully capable of eroding by itself. This post illustrates how that happens.

In recent years my view of the central importance of socionic factors (types and intertype relations) in personality and relationships has been steadily eroding under the weight of life experience. The graphic below illustrates this process. Many readers will probably be able to recognize their own position somewhere along this timeline:

Taken separately, each of the circles in the boxes above represents the area of overlap between individuals of a particular type or between relationships of a particular type (e.g. a number of samples of "identity relations"). This can be graphically depicted as follows:

The overlapping area can be called the "essence" of the type or relationship. As more and more outlying circles are added to the picture, or changes take place in our perception of individuals or relationship samples, the area of commonality between them tends to shrink.

An example of how this happens is having experience with more than one intimate dual relationship that seemed to have a very different "energy" to them due to considerable temperamental or other differences between the people of the same type.

An experience like this can lead one to begin looking at relationships through a different lens, which, in turn, can lead to a reevaluation of other relationships as well. Other relationships belonging to a single intertype relation which previously appeared more or less similar "in essence" may suddenly appear to be more divergent than before.

This goes back to the idea that as one studies a subject and begins to think in new categories, one mentally puts things together in new groupings, bringing some phenomena closer together and others further apart — in one's mind. Later, as the subject of study loses its influence on mental processes, the person may find that previously grouped phenomena are drifting apart in his mind and that there is no longer any compelling reason to place them together in the same category. That is the process I've described here.

As the overlap shrinks from explaining a hefty share of personality or interaction to being a kind of "hidden essence" that requires increasing perceptiveness and training to perceive, eventually you have to ask: at what point is the commonality too small to be worth making a big deal about? 

Why this Blog is Now Called "The [Ex-]Socionist"

A major shift in my views on personality and relationships has been gathering steam over the past 6 months, with several years of prehistory coming before that. I am preparing a special article on the subject, but will lay out the main points and factors here.

Basically, what has changed is that I've gone from generally viewing personality and especially relationships within a socionics framework, with caveats, to viewing things from an entirely non-socionics perspective, with occasional mental exercises such as, "is there anything typically socionic about this situation?"

Compared to where I was coming from 8-11 years ago, this is a spectacular shift. But it has come on so gradually — except for the last part — that it's been barely noticeable. Earlier this year, I was still pretty sure I was interested in completing some socionics projects, such as making an online test and perhaps putting together some compilation of essays. But now I am almost certain that my work in socionics is done for good.

That said, my Socionics.us website will be preserved in its current entirety and moved to a sub-section of another of my websites, TryUkraine.com.

Problems with socionics

What made me stick with socionics up till earlier this year was the conviction that, despite an increasing number of caveats, the "core" of relationships was still determined by socionics. This conviction was based mostly upon my experience of a set of very meaningful relationships in my own life, which I attempted to extrapolate — carefully — to those of other people. This summer and fall, I realized that I could have been wrong about one of those key relationships. I had always typed this friend as SLI despite her self-typings of alternately IEE and ILE. Then a friend got to know this person as well and disagreed strongly with my SLI typing (which already didn't matter as much to me anymore). As I looked at things through his eyes and saw a fairly convincing case for another type, I could feel it was time to leave socionics behind.

If she was indeed ILE, then it was ridiculous that I had had my major "dualization" experience with her — upon which I had based my understanding and descriptions of the process that have helped other people looking for the same thing in their lives. If she was indeed SLI, then it was ridiculous that I was the only person out of a fairly diverse group who could see it. Either way, the situation was entirely ridiculous and discredited socionics.

Shortly before this, I had finished rereading Richard Feynmans book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! While reading, I had asked myself wryly, "what would Feynman have thought of socionics?" Feynman wasn't particularly perceptive when it came to psychology, but he had a very good B.S. meter. In one of his stories, he recalls his participation in a philosophical debate where the concept of an "essential object" was put forth, but none of the participants could produce a definition of what an "essential object" was, and so it could not be decided whether X was an "essential object" or not (read this short summary of Feynman's attitudes on philosophy). I couldn't help chuckling about this, since it is so reminiscent of socionics terminology (what does "inner statics of objects" mean? is X an example of extraverted or introverted logic? etc. etc.).

Granted, Feynman's attitudes on philosophy were no doubt rather extreme and misguided, since out of the mental exercise of philosophizing sometimes — occasionally — come ideas that flower into scientific fact and theory. However, there is no doubt that Feynman would have thrown socionics in the garbage heap of undefinable philosobabble after 3 or 4 questions posed to even the very brightest of socionists.

At the time I read this book, Feynman's invisible voice resonated powerfully with me. One of the reasons for this is that I had spent many months preceding it absorbed in modern research about the body and brain. The things science has taught us about ourselves over the past decade are truly amazing, and we are on the cusp of learning even greater things about where we come from, how we differ, and how our common neurophysiology operates.

Contrast that to the scientific output of socionics (none, basically). The main texts and premises were laid out in the 70s and early 80s and since then have been discussed to no end in a distinctly philosophical vein, with each socionist making tentative, non-confirmable, and non-transferrable conclusions based on personal experience alone. The "practical application" vector of socionics is following down the exact same path of Myers-Briggs Typology (whose influence, I believe, is already waning): personal counselling, forays into organizational management, courses for those who want to learn the typology, and of course numerous self-help books that all say roughly the same thing (and some splinter groups who mean slightly different things with the same terminology).

Meanwhile, a very large portion of mental energy in the socionics community is devoted to analyzing the community itself, which I view as a dangerous intellectual trap: such analysis appears promising, but ultimately is a waste of time and energy and actually stems not from the truth-seeking instinct, but from the "I'm right and everybody else is wrong" self-assertion reflex. It shouldn't be engaged in too much to avoid self-poisoning. A few years back I was gifted perhaps the fattest book on socionics ever written (in Russian, of course), titled, The Smile of the Cheshire Cat, or the Possible and the Impossible in Socionics, which was basically a study of how socionists think about socionics, and whether their views were substantiated or unsubstantiated, in the author's opinion. I wonder how many people got through this book.

I have been acquainted with the socionics community long enough (12 years) to see how people's socionics "careers" have taken shape. I have to admit that I would not want to be in their shoes. Those that are still with it seem (to me) to be at an intellectual dead-end, trying to continue extracting some kind of revenue and recognition from what they have invested their entire adult lives for, and still doing the same things they were doing 10 years ago with little discernable progress. And it's not as if you can easily "switch careers" from socionics to some other field — say, stand-up comedy or business management. Those socionists that have left seem (to me) to have wasted years of energy doing... what? It's hard to pinpoint any concrete benefits from "doing socionics," unless it directly enabled positive relationships or tangible personal growth. In contrast, in more practical fields you can learn something, apply it immediately, and experience the benefits or lack thereof. Most or all of the benefit of socionics, in my opinion, comes from a few broadly useful realizations about people and their interactions that one tends to pick up very early in the game.

I also used to think that socionics would take hold in the West or East and develop basically along the same lines as in the former USSR. I no longer think this is the case. It is now very clear to me that modern psychology and neuroscience are developing along a very different path than socionics, and there will be little or no convergence. The scientific research coming out now is exciting and promising enough that it is capturing people's attention and imagination, and they are becoming less and less prone to take interest in more theoretical, less research-friendly perspectives such as socionics. The further neuroscience progresses, the weaker pre-neuroscience theoretical approaches like personality typologies become.

Also, I see no hint that psychology is discovering the kinds of discrete categories of people that socionics talks about, or that research on human interaction is tending to see things in an "information metabolism" perspective. Rather, we're seeing more and more research into hormones, attraction, relationship building, genetic difference vs. similarity, concrete predictors of relationship success, etc. And individual differences are almost always proving to be points on a continuum rather than lightswitch-type categories (either on or off). At least for the moment, science is definitely not moving towards socionics. My nose for trends tells me that the future is not with abstract or philosophical approaches to psychology (e.g. typology), but with our rapidly advancing understanding of the actual physical processes that shape the nervous system and human behavior.

On top of this, as I considered the types of other people close to me, I realized that, in many cases, I was no longer sure of their types. Rather than thinking that this was a temporary moment of reevaluation, I have come to see this as typical. When people are psychologically closer than a certain point, "contradictions" in their personalities become more and more apparent, making their types harder to identify. I see this is a big problem; it really shouldn't be this way if socionics is indeed accurate.

On a final note, my research into physiology, health, and lifestyle has led me to see many traits increasingly on a "better/healthier — worse/unhealthier" scale rather than in an "all traits are created equal" vein, which was partly inspired by socionics and partly due to my own egalitarianism. "Weak T" or "weak sensing," for instance, really is probably best seen as a weakness, and not as "the flipside of your strengths," as I would have emphasized in the past. Improve nutrition and lifestyle, and many of these weaknesses can go away, at least in part. It's often not the best approach to assume — as socionics suggests — that such weaknesses can only be compensated for through other people (e.g. complementary types), though there is merit in that idea.

That covers most of what I wanted to say. I will write more on these subjects later, and this blog will continue to live on.

Socionics Antidotes or Transcendence

What are the things that can allow one to overcome supposed limitations imposed by socionics theory on self-expression, self-development and interpersonal interactions?

Given that socionics is an intellectual framework, it may not be surprising that its "antidotes" are emotional and experiential in nature and involve relying on other parts of the brain in situations where one might have previously engaged in analytical thought or normal mental activity.

Put simply, the antidotes to socionics are things like compassion and instinctive, "because it feels good" behavior.

The practice of compassion is perhaps best developed in Buddhism. A quick search led me to this introductory article. The Dalai Lama also has some good writings on the subject. While experiencing compassion, you may find yourself doing and experiencing things that are hard to explain or describe socionically, like connecting deeply and meaningfully with people of every possible type. If you're honest with yourself about the experience, you may come to realize that type and quadra-based chauvinism and exclusivity are delusions and that the thinking behind them is simply erronious, despite being superficially logical.

Doing things that feel good in a holistic way is another antitode to construct-laden thought. Have you ever rejoiced in the process of physical movement, just because your whole body was working together in an efficient and pleasuresome way? Have you ever taken a dip in an ice-cold stream or lake and emerged from the water euphoric? How about building something with your own hands? Providing the body with positive holistic experiences and giving it a more significant role in your life allows you to continually take part in things that have no socionic explanation and engage universal biological mechanisms.

Postscript
I have experience leaving a semi-authoritarian religious community that fostered a variety of feelings-based delusions. The antidote to that was science and rational thought.