"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.

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 Model and Associations

Here's most of a letter I wrote recently regarding my typing of person that was discussed at the Polish socionics forum:

---

The fact is, all socionists type by association, even those who claim otherwise. And all socionists apply some type of "model thinking" — even those who seem to type by association alone. I used to make more of an effort to present my thoughts and conclusions in "model language," but I don't care enough anymore. It's a kind of intellectual laziness that comes from feeling that the socionics model as it is is doomed anyway. Associations with people of known types are actually a good way of typing (and again, every socionist relies on them heavily) inasmuch as the types of the people being associated with were properly identified and analyzed by the typer.

People would like to think that socionists have some strict algorithm they apply, because this would make socionics easier to understand, apply, and develop further. However, I don't believe I've ever met such a socionist. As soon as a person begins taking responsibility for his typings of others, he finds that "model thinking" alone is insufficient to produce a result. It's like listening to a technical debate between two experts and trying to determine who is right using your emotional reactions alone with no intellectual knowledge of the subject. Emotional reactions can be honed and cleansed of outside influences to the point that they become a fine tool for understanding many things, but they are clearly inadequate to deal with primarily intellectual matters. Likewise, socionics is primarily about how we respond to different types of people on a mostly unconscious level. Using "model thinking" alone (if that were even possible) can get you quite far, but it's not the ultimate arbiter. The ultimate arbiter is the network of invisible psychological-emotional connections between people, which are hard to put into "model language." Once this invisible network becomes evident, you can use that to correct your understanding of the model.

At least that's the way I see things. Many socionists who emphasize a model-heavy approach would disagree with me, particularly those who are unable to feel the nuances of interpersonal interaction on an emotional level. But actually the whole reason of socionics' existence is to explain relationships, and the better it does that, the more useful it becomes. The model is a semi-decent approximation at best.

Why the Reinin Dichotomies Are Trivial

The Reinin Dichotomies (more from Wikisocion.org) are a set of 15 symmetrical dichotomies -- or breakdowns -- of the 16 socionic types. They include the original four dichotomies (sensing/intuition, etc.), which are commonly called the "Jungian Foundation." Now there are 11 more, and more is better, right? More dichotomies = more accuracy?...

When I was first studying socionics, I came across two Reinin dichotomies -- "Positivism/Negativism" and "Questioning/Declaring" -- in the works of Augusta. They were mentioned as basically "additional traits that we have observed" -- a sort of afterthought to the main dichotomies, which she discussed in depth. They seemed to fit me, but they did not offer a whole lot of descriptive power beyond a narrow set of situations such as talking about ideas ("questioning/declaring") or giving evaluations ("positivism/negativism"), so I didn't pay much attention to them. Moreover, they had no theoretical explanation within socionics, so they seemed little different than observations that many extraverted sensing males have a similar balding pattern, etc.

Later I got ahold of Augusta's article The Theory of Reinin's Traits (dichotomies), which offered some prospects, but the descriptions once again were too narrow to be very interesting or useful, and many were simply too obscure to understand. I realized that most of the dichotomies came from applying formal logic to the socionics model to "see what it could do." I read through the descriptions several times, made note for a while of things that seemed to apply to various dichotomies, and gradually paid less and less attention to them.

When I got more involved with the socionics community, I noticed that many, many people were using the Reinin dichotomies in incompetent ways. By incompetent I mean that they took Augusta's or others' hypothetical descriptions at face value and were applying them to online and in-person diagnosis without demonstrating a clear understanding of the Reinin dichotomies or even the original four Jungian dichotomies. There was nothing to suggest that they were achieving greater accuracy; on the contrary, there was even more confusion due to the fact that the Reinin dichotomies -- poorly described as they are -- were being given the same weight as the Jungian dichotomies. Plus, the difficulty of using 15 dichotomies is that only four are needed to determine a type, and using more than that greatly increases the likelihood of contradictory results.

Now I view the Reinin dichotomies as an example of excess ("let's see what other structures result if we apply all possible postulates inherent in the original structure"). A sign of this is that it takes a great deal of preparation and thought to understand and begin to apply the Reinin dichotomies, and the "return on investment" is positively miniscule. By comparison, I guarantee that if you invest the same amount of time into studying comparative psychology (the psychology of animals), neuropsychology, or brain chemistry, you will gain a much greater amount of useful knowledge and insight than from the Reinin dichotomies.

But do the Reinin dichotomies "exist?" In other words, are there common traits among the types that are grouped in such a manner? I would say -- possibly, to some extent, but the commonalities are trivial -- basically not worth paying attention to. For instance, take any of the Jungian dichotomies. These dichotomies affect all areas of a person's life and operate whether a person is speaking or not, in a good or bad mood, etc. In addition, when a person must use the opposite axis of a dichotomy, he conveys a sense of 1) displeasure, 2) strain, 3) incompetence and/or inconfidence, 4) indifference, or 5) submissiveness and willingness to agree -- depending on the specific situation. Can the same be said about the Reinin dichotomies? Also, Model A and the basic four dichotomies describe ways of processing information. Is this true of the Reinin dichotomies -- for example, of questioning/declaring or aristocrat/democrat? I would argue that it isn't.

Suppose the Reinin dichotomies really were just as significant as the Jungian dichotomies. Then we would recognize a questioner even when he's not speaking. When forced to give answers to questions rather than ask questions, we would see signs of strain, etc. Or we would recognize strain when a negativist gives positive evaluations of things. However, this is not the case.

Newcomers to socionics are bombarded with excessive categories, and many or most do not recognize right off that not all the categories have equal value. Some are the product of empirical processes (lengthy observation undertaken by many people) and are the bread and butter of both lifestyle and interpersonal interaction. Others are mainly the product of logical thought, are the source of constant debate, have an imperceptible influence on lifestyle, and may or may not have an influence on interpersonal interaction. I can guarantee that if a newcomer to socionics never heard about the Reinin dichotomies, this would not hurt his ability to apply socionics one bit.

Experimental Text

At the recent socionics seminar in Düsseldorf, Germany I tried out an idea I had had about reading people a story containing all information aspects and then asking them questions to see which of the aspects they were better able to catch from the story. I was skeptical about the idea in the first place but decided to try it for fun. I composed the story myself and have been changing a few words here and there to improve it. It is meant to be read aloud just once:


A Story
A bizarre incident happened just last week which overturned by perception of reality and still has me puzzled to this day. I was chomping greedily on a thick, juicy hamburger -- the kind where the grease drips onto your plate with each bite and the lettuce keeps getting up your nose. By the way, by far the best ground beef for homemade burgers can be bought right across the street for just 3 Euros a kilogram and is supplied fresh daily. So I was blissfully biting into my burger when my cat gave a heart-rending screech and began hissing violently and grimacing at me like a maniac. Normally, my cat -- which is a pure-bred Siamese -- lies all day on its Persian rug, getting up just 4 or 5 times daily to take a walk around the house. He's such a lazy bum that I sometimes can barely control my urge to fling his fat, furry ass out the window or at least have my mother haul him away. My sweet mum has a tender spot in her heart for cats and other soft, furry creatures and is able to make even the most embittered pets feel welcome and at home. Ever since this mysterious occurence, I have had the strange sense that my cat is moving in a different direction in life, and our future together seems ever more uncertain.

(while not perfectly done, each sentence was intended to focus on a particular information aspect in the following order:
, , , , , , , )


Questions:
Participants were asked to write their answers to the following questions without consulting anyone else:

• (general question): What is this story about (your own interpretation)?
• () When did this take place and why?
• () Describe the hamburger.
• () Where and for how much does the author recommend getting ground beef, and why?
• () What did the cat do, and how?
• () What kind of cat is it and what is its usual behavior?
• () What does the author want to do with the cat, and why?
• () What does the author's mum do and why?
• () What does the author feel as a result of this event?

Analysis
There were a number of interesting answers from listeners that showed that they had ignored certain aspects of the story or had added something that wasn't there, but for the most part answers were not very differentiated and thus not very informative.

Criticism
One participant noted a possible hidden perspective that theoretically shouldn't have been there; the story is about a realization concerning a relationship. Another participant noted that he wasn't able to focus on all the details in the story because they seemed to have no point in the plot.

Conclusion
This type of test is interesting because it aims to get at differences in the perception of information that make types different in the first place. However, new approaches need to be tried to find something that will effectively differentiate between types.

How I Look for Extraverted Intuition

This topic goes back to the post on tacit knowledge in socionics. I wrote that I would try to explain the things that usually go unsaid when I am typing people. Up till now the only thing I had written on the subject was a short chart called "Overall Type Moods."

Here is what I expect to see in people with base :
(theoretical backing provided below each point in red)

Relaxed, nonjudgmental, non-aggressive look and demeanor. Person is easily intrigued, starts new things very easily, and always has energy for new beginnings. Relaxed posture and open and easy-going look most of the time. Very often enthusiastic, but rarely physically robust or vigorous. Occasionally "drop out" of situations and look spaced out because they have been distracted by some thought that is unrelated to the situation at hand. Like to have photos reflect spontaneous moments rather than posed situations or "proper" behavior.
Base implies a rejection of in one's behavior. Therefore, base types try to interest others with thoughts, insights, and a particular vision of things rather than through material means or by exerting a direct physical or visual impact on others. types "drop out" of situations (and their eyes glaze over and stop "seeing") because they generally are abstracted from physical stimuli and are thinking about intangible characteristics of the situations they are in. The eyes remain open, but the visual stimuli is not reaching the conscious mind. implies an ability to recognize and develop high-potential situations, people, and ideas - hence the innate enthusiasm and openness and the ability to become intrigued and intrigue others. implies attentiveness to the unseen essence of things, and types want to have their essence come through to others; spontaneous behavior and the absence of social masks serves to convey one's "true" self to others. A concern with "proper" behavior only serves to mask the true self.

ILE: Tend to smile the same way most of the time, and don't use all the muscles of their face. This shows that they are little concerned with being agreeable or emotionally involving others. Have a more distant and detached look than IEEs.
With weak ethics, ILEs give less attention to people's feelings and are less able to discern and understand their own sentiments than IEEs. They are more focused on thinking about things that require logic to understand, not the ability to understand other people's sentiments.

IEE: Tend to have a wide, "sincere," likeable smile and to show a wide range of facial expressions. IEEs have softer expressions than ILEs, often tilt their head a bit to the side to show their interest in people. Reflect their mood on their face more than ILEs. At the same time, they are usually somewhat emotionally subdued and do not show powerful passions in their face or movements.
With strong ethics (particularly ), IEEs are attuned to other people's feelings and sentiments and are generally aware of people's emotional response to them. They feel responsibility for the emotional climate of situations they are in and soften these situations by being emotionally open and showing their feelings on their face.

Tacit Knowledge in Socionics

Tacit knowledge - or poorly verbalizable, experience-based knowledge - is an essential part of socionics and other fields that do not fully qualify as "sciences." For better or for worse, this is the way things are, and it does not look like they are going to change any time soon.

Often in my typings of famous people I make what appears to be an unexplained leap from direct observations to type identification. Why, for example, is a "cold, logical stare" related to being a Logical Intuitive Introtim (LII)?

I am well aware that I have not laid out all the links in the logical chain of thought that leads me from observation to type identification. Some links in the chain may be difficult at first to substantiate, yet it is the job of the conscientious socionist to explain himself as much as possible. I plan to attempt to do this in upcoming posts.

The importance of experience and proper perspective is one of the inherent limitations of socionics and contrasts sharply with the exact sciences, where a much higher percentage of information can be conveyed using the exact, unambiguous language of numbers, quantities, and mathematics. However, if we limited ourselves to the language of exact science when studying human phenomena, today we would know extremely little about people, relationships, and society.

Discerning the Obvious

For me socionics typing is about discovering the obvious - giving a name to traits that lie on the surface of a person's life and overall behavior style. I am not a proponent of the "crystal ball" typing approach where people analyze some small-scale, often insignificant aspect of a person's behavior, functioning, or appearance and then make a deduction about the whole - without looking at the whole!

Who knows - maybe there is some bizarre correlation between palm shape and socionic type. However, even if this were the case, it's not enough to look at the palm alone and not examine the much more obvious aspects of a person's life and behavior.

Traits of any nature can potentially serve as clues for recognizing types, but that is all they are: clues. Valid arguments for or against a certain socionic type must be framed in socionic terms.

If you look at the "Types of Famous People" section on my website, you will see that I often do not provide valid arguments for my typings as I define above. That is not because they do not exist, but because I usually don't have the patience to write them. I usually wait till a discussion arises to produce arguments other than just a few basic observations and notes about what the person is like.

Unfortunately, my site - with its often nonexistent argumentation - has the most informative celebrity section of any socionics site, whether in English or Russian.

Do Socionists Diagnose Type Using Photos Alone?

Recently a newcomer to socionics posted at the16types forum asking for "VI help" (i.e. visual identification):

Hi, I'm new here. Can you guys help me identify the type of my classmates at my university? Because if she is what I think she is, then it's very good for both of us. Her picture is my avatar.

The avatar was small, black and white, and had a nondescript picture of a girl smiling playfully. Forum members quickly responded by saying that it didn't provide enough information:

It really is not easy to know or even have a good guess at a person's type without actually meeting them in person. You should actually know or have a better [idea] than we could about her type.

V.I. is helpful, but that alone is not enough. Maybe if you give us a little bit of information about her choice of words, physical gestures, or other habits.

After other forum members also asked for additional information, the poster replied:

Please excuse my ignorance, but why must you need more information? Shouldn't the photograph alone be sufficient? After all, isn't VI "the fastest and most reliable method of Type identification of today"? What about the "brick in the sack" analogy on Socionics.com?

I'm not writing this to make fun of the poster's ignorance, but rather to address the common misconceptions about socionics typing that come from Socionics.com and a number of other sources on the Internet. At these sites you get the impression that facial features are decisive factors in identifying socionic type, and that a few photos are enough to accurately diagnose type. Naturally, many readers scoff at the idea and write elsewhere that socionics is "crackpot typology," "a bunch of baloney," "phrenology resurrected," etc.

The sites speak authoritatively, as if they are speaking for the entire field of socionics. In fact, they are on the periphery of socionics and have little interaction with the world of mainstream socionics (follow link to understand what I mean by this term). Mainstream socionists reject exclusively appearance-based approaches to typing, and, while many if not most do look for physical and external clues, this is only part of their typing process. Let me provide a few anecdotes.

1. When I attended Viktor Gulenko's socionics classes in 2001/02, sometimes class members would bring pictures of friends and family members and showed them to Gulenko to get his opinion. He would look at them rather superficially and say "maybe," "could be," or "probably not" when they asked if the person might be a certain type. Photo typing was clearly not his specialty, and while Gulenko clearly had a mental data base of different types, he did not make photo typing a priority. During his course he never spoke on the subject explicitly, but talked extensively about determining type through his interviewing method or through other indirect means (e.g. how different types respond to different tasks).

2. Aleksandr Bukalov and his wife Olga Karpenko, who head the International Institute of Socionics, show more interest in photos than Gulenko. I have seen them privately make guesses about people's types based on a photo alone. However, in their professional activities they use an interview and observation method and do not rely on photographs.

3. A friend of mine in Kiev once approached a number of well-known socionists by e-mail asking them to type him based on photos. These socionists included Ekaterina Filatova, whose popular books on socionics have included numerous portraits of people of each type that she had met personally in her teaching career and elsewhere. All these socionists declined to type my friend based on photos alone, explaining that this method could not produce authoritative results.

4. All the people I am aware of who claim to be able to type accurately using photos alone are marginal socionists. None of these (that I am aware of, at least) have published articles in recognized socionics publications or spoken at socionics conferences in Kiev, Moscow, or elsewhere.

Further resources:
Socionics and Visual Identification of Types
My Typing Process (of Famous People)

Type Identification in Socionics

In socionics, results of written tests are not considered an authoritative assessment of type. In fact, since the field is decentralized and do-it-yourself, there is no single recognized instrument for determining socionic type. In contrast, in Myers-Briggs typology the MBTI test enjoys a relative monopoly and thus has, at least, the "feeling" of authority.

By turning the typing process into a dichotomy-based written test, test authors have eliminated subjective factors. However, at the same time, test accuracy is based on the assumption that test-takers 1) understand what exactly is meant by each question, and 2) have accurate self-knowledge. If this is not the case, there is no one around to help address the situation.

The problem of self-knowledge

The question of accurate self-knowledge is a complex one that involves philosophy, linguistics, and physiology. The words and formulates we use only contain shreds of the truth and are always subject to incorrect interpretation. What do we mean when we say, for example, "I am an outgoing person"? At best this is a generalization based on a comparison to a specific set of people in specific situations that the listener has no knowledge of. In saying "I am an outgoing person," the person may actually mean something slightly different:

• I am a sufficiently outgoing person
• I am proud of being more outgoing than I used to be
• I am more outgoing than most of my friends
• Many people in different situations have told me I was outgoing
• I am always so obviously outgoing that there is no question of my outgoingness

The same problems exist for nearly every other question.

Self-typing and professional typing assistance

In socionics, self-identification is the responsibility of each individual. Since socionics assumes the existence of functions of the psyche, and these functions have not been proven scientifically to be a physical reality, there is always a bit of uncertainty regarding type diagnostics. There is always the chance of misinterpretation. This is the case for other branches of Jungian typology as well - not just socionics.

Socionics' advantage is that it postulates the existence of stable interaction patterns between types that potentially serve as tests of accurate type diagnosis. However, this requires some knowledge about the person's interaction with others, as well as the probable types of these people.

There are quite a few socionists (mainly in the Russian-speaking world) who can offer qualified typing services and substantiate their conclusions. In addition, some "hobbyists" are sufficiently experienced to offer real help. I would suggest a couple criteria for deciding to listen to someone's type diagnosis or turn to a professional's services:

• the person is able to make accurate observations about you as a person without using socionics terminology
• the person can substantiate their opinion using an understanding of the socionic functions, aspects, and model that seems to be consistent with classic socionic theory

The only potential disadvantage in relying on professional socionists is that some people begin to accept their chosen socionist's typings without personal mental effort and questioning. This spoils both the socionist as well as his followers; if he is not careful, the socionist begins to believe in his own infallibility since those around him accept his typings unequivocally. To avoid these sect-like phenomena, do your own thinking and try to learn from experienced socionists rather than to simply align your own thinking with theirs.