Visualizing-Socionics-Article-Section
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1 Created by Andrew Joynton and Distributed under the Following License Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 0. Introduction The greatest problem in modern socionics is that it is not scientific. In its current form, socionics is difficult to falsifiable, there are no experiments that can be replicated on a mass scale and there is no standardized methodology. This is evident in the inconsistent typing of celebrities by professional socionists. If socionics is true, every person has a single type their whole lives. The fact that professionals regularly disagree means that either the theory of socionics is wrong, or that many professionals are mistaken. On some level, the socionics community needs an objective standard, which outlines the minimum sufficient evidence required to make a diagnosis and which also gives a degree of confidence. However, due to the complexity of socionics, there are many different paths to determining type. Even if clear standards are developed, the diversity of methods would make it hard to debate and come to a consensus. This is compounded by the fact that there are different schools of socionics that agree they are defining the same sixteen types but use completely different models to do so. The solution is to reduce the different theories and approaches into simple traits that everyone can agree on. There may be many ways to accomplish this, but the most obvious is to use the existing dichotomy structure that reduces everything into binary traits which is already fully integrated in the theory of socionics. Dichotomies have two aspects: structural and empirical. Structurally, dichotomies show how concepts relate to each other. Even if dichotomies lack a useful definition, they can be used as simple groups and mathematically keep track of how complex ideas relate to each other. Since model A was created in a logical and consistent way, every part can be represented as combinations of dichotomies. This also allows two models to be broken down and compared piece by piece, acting as a bridge between different schools of thought in socionics. Accepting socionics requires accepting the structural nature of dichotomies, but not their current empirical definitions. This paper will not focus much on this debate, but it will show how each Reinin dichotomy is related to a combination of information elements and functions in model A and how more accurate and robust definitions could be created with this in mind. If dichotomies can be defined in terms of information metabolism, it will be the first step in making model A testible. Unlike most psychology theories, socionics does not just rate individuals on a set of scales, but predicts additional traits. A huge potential for this property is to use it as a self-correcting system. It is possible to analyze a set of partially correct traits and determine what information is most likely wrong. In a clinical 2 setting, the practitioner can then double check those traits to try to resolve the error. In the case of inconsistent celebrity typings, the aggregate data from many people can be compared to reveal the most consistent and controversial traits and then focus energy on resolving the controversy: the more information that supports a type, the more confident the diagnosis. Limiting research to individuals who score highly consistent will normalize socionics experiments and make them replicable. This property of interdependent traits can additionally make socionics falsifiable. Until research can be conducted into a more objective measurement of information metabolism, such as Dario Nardi’s brain imaging of Myers Briggs types, socionics can only be proved indirectly. From the fifteen Reinin dichotomies, there are about thirty three thousand possible combinations but only sixteen possible types. If it can be proved that these dichotomies appear in clusters predicted by the sixteen types and are not random, this is a good step toward statistically validating correlations predicted by socionics. The internal consistency of dichotomy measurements can also validate or falsify a specific test. Even if good reliable definitions for each dichotomy are created, there still needs to be a way for a subject to fail the evaluation. There are many reasons that may lead to a person to not being in the right state of mind to be evaluated and there must be a way to test for these errors and measure how conclusive the test is. Assuming such a method can be established and tested, this would create a tool that will greatly increase the accuracy of type diagnosis among all who practice socionics. As it stands, there are a lot of very promising hypotheses in socionics that are only waiting to be rigorously tested, such as the current definitions of the Reinin dichotomies and the small groups pioneered by both Reinin and Gulenko. Unfortunately, few people understand how this structure works, leaving the dichotomies and small groups confusing and unrelatable. In the English socionics community, almost no one understand how the Reinin dichotomies are generated, how model A relates to dichotomies, how small groups work, or really anything outside of the basic rules for positioning information elements within model A. This isn’t their fault. To formally understand the structure requires knowing abstract algebra and group theory. Not many psychologists are also mathematicians. A few years ago, in my own attempt to teach myself the theory of small groups; I created a diagram that made understanding the relationship easy. With more experimenting, I found that every aspect in socionics can be understood with these diagrams. Anyone can learn the basic rules for operating them, and once they do, the entire structure of socionics will make sense. The diagrams take the structural properties of socionics and convert them into a physical object which works by nature of spatial relationships and requiring no knowledge of math to use correctly. If these diagrams are adopted and taught by the establishment, it will have the effect of making everyone who understands them completely literate in the structure of socionics. This is the first step in realizing the potential use of the systematic approach of socionics and making a scientific methodology. This paper is dedicated to explaining how this diagram method works, using it to understand the structural relationships that already exist in classical socionics and then applying their properties to experiment design. This paper will first illustrate how this diagram method works by examining the Reinin Dichotomies, next show how the Reinin dichotomies are connected to Model A, then reduce the entire theory into structural components and create a master map of all of socionics and finaly conclude by applying all this knowledge to experiment and test design. 3 Table of Contents 0. Introduction .............................................................................................................................................. 1 1. Diagram Method ....................................................................................................................................... 4 Basic Theory .......................................................................................................................................... 4 Dichotomies and Tetrachotomies......................................................................................................... 4 Generating Reinin Dichotomies from Jungian Dichotomies ............................................................ 5 Falsifying Claims with the Identity Element ..................................................................................... 6 Notating the Sixteen Type Dichotomies .......................................................................................... 6 Properties of Tetrachotomies and Small Groups ............................................................................. 7 Fano Plane Diagrams ............................................................................................................................ 9 Constructing a Fano Plane ............................................................................................................. 10 Properties of a Fano Plane ............................................................................................................. 10 A Fano Plane with Type Dichotomies ............................................................................................ 11 Solving for Additional Traits ........................................................................................................... 11 Groups in Socionics with Eight Elements ....................................................................................... 13 The Eight Functions and Information Elements Represented with Fano Planes ........................... 13 Summary of Fano Planes................................................................................................................ 15 Pyramid Diagrams ..............................................................................................................................