Socionics in the US

[Suomea]

Hey,

So basically right now I'm in the middle of the application process to get my PhD in Social/Personality Psychology and was just wondering whether anyone knew of any professors/research faculty/or even grad students who are up to date on socionics in the US or other English speaking country. It would just be positive in my mind to have someone at a facility I was at who at least had some interest in it. This is probably a long shot that anyone has any info, but just was wondering. Feel free to PM me.

Suomea

[Blaze]

i wish i could say i knew of someone, but actually socionics is rather new to the western academic mind and that is even if it has made it into any consideration in academia. good luck with your Phd, though....maybe you will be the one to popularize socionics in the West!

[misutii]

when i was at university i brought it up with my personality psych prof. I was hoping he'd have heard of it but it was completely new to him. that being said he was open to learning about it and said that he believed in 'type theories'. He was familiar with Eyesenk's theory and the enneagram and knew a little about mbti but nothing of socionics...
He agreed though that north american personality psychology seems to centre around 'little experiments' so to speak. publish or perish syndrome pretty much guarantees that something like socionics will be glanced over, not because psychologists here don't find it interesting but because it would require them to work together over a long period of time to validate and they're just not given that much time. also while for many of us the immediate similarity between socionics and mbti was helpful, for actual psychologists it seems like the opposite. mbti has pretty much been judged to be more akin to a consumer product than a topic for academic research and so seems to be more popular in business/hr classes than in psychology ones.

that being said it doesn't mean you shouldn't try. your best bet would be to talk to psychology profs that specialize in personality theory and so are already familiar and accept the basics behind well known type theories like the Big 5 and Eysenck's.

[Blaze]

well said misutii. psychology people have basically heaped MBTI in with chinese astrology and other "parlour games." the chances of that happening to socionics are great because of the apparant similarity to MBTI.

but you know what? all personality psychology is very difficulty to quantify because you are basically trying to make predictions about someone's future behavior while at the same time trying to account for the factors which influence people to change. i just think it's really hard to study, and so there is not much which would push psychologists to work together on it. i guess what misutii said applies here, too. it's just not that politically or financially attractive.