# Is it possible to differ so much?



## Devrim (Jan 26, 2013)

I am Typed as an INFJ,
Type 8w7 5w4 3w4,
And now as ILI(INTp).

How can I verify that the socionic fits me?
I've taken about a thousands several Socionics test, 
And INTp has been my stnadard result.

As you might realize I'm an absolute newb with socionics,
So baby steps in explaining would be the best course of action,
And if anyone is willing,
Hit me and can we discuss this!


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## JWC3 (Jun 4, 2012)

The simple answer is; yes. An individual's type in MBTI can be radically different than their Socionics type. Moreover a MBTI INFJ is radically different than a Socionics EII. The two theories are fairly dissimilar and it's best to view them as functioning completely independently of each other.


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## Devrim (Jan 26, 2013)

JWC3 said:


> The simple answer is; yes. An individual's type in MBTI can be radically different than their Socionics type. Moreover a MBTI INFJ is radically different than a Socionics EII. The two theories are fairly dissimilar and it's best to view them as functioning completely independently of each other.



Okay sounds good,
But why do they correlate the types on the tests themselves?


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## JWC3 (Jun 4, 2012)

Mzansi said:


> Okay sounds good,
> But why do they correlate the types on the tests themselves?


*shrugs* Idiocy mostly. Test are highly trivial to begin with, I'd have even less faith in a test that attempted to gauge your personality type in two dissimilar theories at the same time. People often make the false assumption that there is some translation to be made between socionics and MBTI. Such efforts are essentially futile. For one to translate an MBTI type into Socionics, they'd have to expand the four MBTI dichotomies in to the eight socionic dichotomies which is as problematic as the reverse necessitating that they reinvent whichever theory they are trying to convert into.

The 4-letter code in socionics is more an attempt to make it palatable to those who are used to a 4-letter code, it's not a comment on where someone rests in regards to their JCF dichotomies.


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## Abraxas (May 28, 2011)

Because Socionics is nonsense.

It's based on the idea that there are discreet "cognitive functions" that make up a personality type, when decades of research has revealed this is most likely false. The current dominant point of view among personality psychologists is that personality is multi-dimensional.

Back before this entire sub-forum was started up there was a big discussion about it here on PerC in various threads under each of the other sub-forums, and one of the main concerns was that if a sub-forum like this were to get started here on PerC, it would create the misconception in a lot of people's minds that Socionics was a legitimate and popular theory of personality. In reality, it is not even very popular in Russia, where it is from.


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## Rodrigo Blanco (May 28, 2013)

Abraxas said:


> Because Socionics is nonsense.
> 
> It's based on the idea that there are discreet "cognitive functions" that make up a personality type, when decades of research has revealed this is most likely false. The current dominant point of view among personality psychologists is that personality is multi-dimensional.
> 
> Back before this entire sub-forum was started up there was a big discussion about it here on PerC in various threads under each of the other sub-forums, and one of the main concerns was that if a sub-forum like this were to get started here on PerC, it would create the misconception in a lot of people's minds that Socionics was a legitimate and popular theory of personality. In reality, it is not even very popular in Russia, where it is from.


Are you stating that socionics is nonsense but MBTI and Enneagram and Keirsey are not??


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## Abraxas (May 28, 2011)

Rodrigo Blanco said:


> Are you stating that socionics is nonsense but MBTI and Enneagram and Keirsey are not??


I'm of the opinion those are nonsense as well.


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## Rodrigo Blanco (May 28, 2013)

Abraxas said:


> I'm of the opinion those are nonsense as well.


Define nonsense. Because plenty of people obviously find meaning in them.


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## Abraxas (May 28, 2011)

Rodrigo Blanco said:


> Define nonsense. Because plenty of people obviously find meaning in them.


It doesn't matter how people feel about them. MBTI and Socionics both fail to meet scientific standards of validity and reliability.


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## itsme45 (Jun 8, 2012)

Abraxas said:


> It doesn't matter how people feel about them. MBTI and Socionics both fail to meet scientific standards of validity and reliability.


you only ever touch stuff that's scientific then? not that I'm trying to defend any of these systems. I just see them as a basis for interaction to talk about people stuff.


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## tangosthenes (Oct 29, 2011)

itsme45 said:


> you only ever touch stuff that's scientific then? not that I'm trying to defend any of these systems. I just see them as a basis for interaction to talk about people stuff.


Placebo.


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## Rodrigo Blanco (May 28, 2013)

Abraxas said:


> It doesn't matter how people feel about them. MBTI and Socionics both fail to meet scientific standards of validity and reliability.


_"Scientific evaluation of MBTI has found its reliability to be “acceptable” with worse than 80% test-retest reproducibility occurring only in the T-F dimension for male test takers. [1] MBTI has also been systematically compared to the more modern and rigorous NEO-PI personality test used in psychology research and found to be fairly well correlated along several dimensions but less complete than NEO-PI. [2]"_

What Is The Current Thinking About Myers Briggs? - Forbes


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## Rodrigo Blanco (May 28, 2013)

The fact is the majority of what passes as social and psychological science today in general has shakey grounding. A fields usefulness derives from its predictive power. And insofar as enneagram, Mbti and socionics help us predict aspects of a persons personality or behavior it'll be of use to someone. Pissing on them because they're not "scientific" enough for you just seem kinda silly to me. The human mind is extremely complex, to get even a slight bit of insight because of these tools is far better than nothing. 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/how-reliable-are-the-social-sciences/?_r=0


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## itsme45 (Jun 8, 2012)

tangosthenes said:


> Placebo.


placebo for what exactly? 




Rodrigo Blanco said:


> The fact is the majority of what passes as social and psychological science today in general has shakey grounding. A fields usefulness derives from its predictive power. And insofar as enneagram, Mbti and socionics help us predict aspects of a persons personality or behavior it'll be of use to someone. Pissing on them because they're not "scientific" enough for you just seem kinda silly to me. The human mind is extremely complex, to get even a slight bit of insight because of these tools is far better than nothing.


pretty good points, actually let me ask @Abraxas why he's even willing to bother with social sciences


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## tangosthenes (Oct 29, 2011)

itsme45 said:


> placebo for what exactly?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Predictive power is the most important thing, yes. However I'm not convinced the "predictive power" of MBTI is anything more than any number of blanket rationales to be projected upon a situation at will... but that is a very interesting point that Rodrigo makes. I must rethink this. Woot rethinking.


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## itsme45 (Jun 8, 2012)

tangosthenes said:


> Predictive power is the most important thing, yes. However I'm not convinced the "predictive power" of MBTI is anything more than any number of blanket rationales to be projected upon a situation at will... but that is a very interesting point that Rodrigo makes. I must rethink this. Woot rethinking.


I'm not really trying to predict anything with MBTI etc.

so I didn't understand why you said placebo or what you meant by it... you tell me?


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## tangosthenes (Oct 29, 2011)

itsme45 said:


> I'm not really trying to predict anything with MBTI etc.
> 
> so I didn't understand why you said placebo or what you meant by it... you tell me?


I pretty much summed it up in the quoted post. It's got high potential as a placebo because people can project their rationale of choice on any action. MBTI as a model has blurry limits because it's taken out of context so much. It's almost impossible to tell what is true and what is not true about any given statement regarding MBTI. It's left up to "reason"(which oftentimes is not reason at all, just empty conjecture), not evidence.


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## Abraxas (May 28, 2011)

itsme45 said:


> you only ever touch stuff that's scientific then? not that I'm trying to defend any of these systems. I just see them as a basis for interaction to talk about people stuff.


I don't see what my personal interests have to do with what I said. I'm just stating facts, not telling people what to do.


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## Abraxas (May 28, 2011)

Rodrigo Blanco said:


> _"Scientific evaluation of MBTI has found its reliability to be “acceptable” with worse than 80% test-retest reproducibility occurring only in the T-F dimension for male test takers. [1] MBTI has also been systematically compared to the more modern and rigorous NEO-PI personality test used in psychology research and found to be fairly well correlated along several dimensions but less complete than NEO-PI. [2]"_
> 
> What Is The Current Thinking About Myers Briggs? - Forbes


First of all, Forbes is just an aggregate news source. You might as well be quoting a Wikipedia article. Notice those little numbers? Those indicate citations. Those are what matter, not the TL;DR Forbes summary.

Second, I happen to own a copy of the MBTI Manual Third Edition. The most recent format of the MBTI test, "Form M" is not as reliable as that article states. This is according to the handbook for MBTI itself. Clearly there is a conflict of opinions somewhere. I'm going to assume that the more valid one comes from the people who devised the instrument.

And third, there is powerful confirming evidence of the MBTI dichotomies, but not the cognitive functions that it proposes to explain them. Nobody, including me, is disputing the legitimacy of the four-dichotomies of MBTI. What I and most psychologists dispute is that these dimensions are best represented by _discreet binary types_ rather than by _multi-dimensional traits._

MBTI itself seems to agree. Recently, MBTI has developed what is called "Form Q" and the "Step II" model, which breaks each of the four dimensions down into 5 aspects each, similarly to how Big 5 breaks down each dimension further and further into sub-traits. MBTI continues to move away from cognitive functions every year and more in line with a trait-based approach. It does still adhere to a binary type model, however this is also in the process of being phased out.


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## Abraxas (May 28, 2011)

Rodrigo Blanco said:


> The fact is the majority of what passes as social and psychological science today in general has shakey grounding. A fields usefulness derives from its predictive power. And insofar as enneagram, Mbti and socionics help us predict aspects of a persons personality or behavior it'll be of use to someone. Pissing on them because they're not "scientific" enough for you just seem kinda silly to me. The human mind is extremely complex, to get even a slight bit of insight because of these tools is far better than nothing.
> 
> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/how-reliable-are-the-social-sciences/?_r=0



The notion of personality types is fundamentally different from personality traits. According to trait theory, people display traits, such as introversion/extraversion, to varying degrees. If you took the 16PF or the CPI, your score would place you somewhere along a continuum from low (very introverted) to high (very extraverted). However, most people would fall in the middle or average range on this trait dimension. But according to type theory, a person is _either_ an extrovert _or_ an introvert - that is, one of two distinct categories that don't overlap (Arnau & others, 2003; Wilde, 2011).

Despite the MBTI's widespread use in business, counseling, and career guidance settings, research has pointed to several problems with the MBTI. One problem is _*reliability*_ - people can receive different MBTI results on different test-taking occasions. Equally significant is the problem of _*validity*_. For example, research does not support the claim of a relationship between MBTI personality types and occupational success (Pittenger, 2005). More troubling is the lack of evidence supporting the existence of 16 distinctly different personality types (Hunsley & others, 2003). Thus, most researchers in the field of psychological testing advise that caution be exercised in interpreting MBTI results, especially in applying them to vocational choices or predictions of occupational success. (see Pittenger, 2005).

Of late, my objections to MBTI and other typological theories is pretty straight-forward. There is no evidence to suggest that the discreet types described by MBTI really exist. There is pretty strong evidence of the dichotomies, but not for the discreet MBTI types based on them. Statistical data points show that the majority of people fall into the middle on each dichotomy, which is entirely consistent with what one would expect from statistics that score people on a dimension in general. There should be a very identifiable bell-curve with extreme results tapering off to both sides, so that very few people come up extreme either way. The problem with this is that it is not conducive to a typological model based on discreet binary types because most people are going to fall into the middle as predicted. This means that the test will be generally unreliable, because most people will retest and possibly get a different result each time. MBTI has struggled with this problem for decades and it still plagues it.

This is not to say that MBTI is worthless or totally wrong. Just that it is extremely theoretical and highly speculative in it's current form. Whatever "type" people get is probably not very reliable or valid. Thus, any result from an MBTI test or predictions based on the assumptions of MBTI ought to be taken with a large grain of salt.

For instance, unless you score way off the chart on a particular dichotomy in favor of one extreme or the other, you are very likely to share quite a few traits in common with whatever type makes up that one letter difference from your own. E.g., if you score "ISTP" on the Form M or Q, and you score very clearly on ever dichotomy except S, where you scored only marginally more P than J, it is highly likely that you share quite a lot in common with ISTJs. However, this necessarily contradicts _type dynamics_ which are based on the assumption that each type _discreetly_ prefers certain functions in a certain arrangement of preference. This is another problem for MBTI that many people have pointed out. (look for posts by @_reckful_ linking to useful articles that he has written as well as peer-reviewed articles he has cited repeatedly.)

On the other hand, contrasted with other models such as the Big 5 for instance, there are certain advantages to the typological MBTI approach versus the Big 5 trait theory. For one thing, trait theories don't really explain human personality (Pervin 1994; Epstein, 2010). Instead, they simply label general predispositions to behave in a certain way. So, although trait theories are useful in describing individual differences and predicting behavior, there are serious limitations to their usefulness beyond that.

MBTI actually attempts to give an explanation for human personality with _cognitive functions._ The problem is, there is little to no evidence for their existence. It's a damn good try though and it could potentially lead into something more concrete with some more research and modification of the basic assumptions underlying the definitions of cognitive functions and the roles they play in determining personality. But the problem of providing evidence of their existence would still remain.

Most of these objections also apply to Socionics for similar reasons. Similarly, it struggles - and similarly, it lacks reliability and validity. However, like MBTI, it would offer a great deal more predictive and explanatory power than current trait theories - if only it were valid and reliable. If it were, I personally am of the opinion that it would be even more useful and powerful than MBTI.


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