MBTI on SkepDic
http://skepdic.com/myersb.html
Quite a few of the writer's contentions with the Myers-Briggs instrument are admittedly inapplicable to Socionics, but I have to wonder what these people would say about Socionics?
Also of interest is their article on Enneagram: http://skepdic.com/enneagr.html
"How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
-- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
i think that most of this stuff applies far more cleanly to MBTI. everything that was said about MBTI in particular seems to be attacking the four MBTI scales as well as the total arbitrariness of the descriptions. with socionics, of course, you don't have these mechanisms; you do have dichotomies, and you do have descriptions, all of which are not very important and can be contradictory. socionics is really not a typology which exists solely as a typology, as MBTI might be; rather, socionics is fundamentally based around the concepts of information exchange. you could perhaps make some arguments about the legitimacy of this model and its applications in model A (although to be honest model A is far less important than information preference), but i think that finding different types of information is a far more observable characteristic than trying to make deductions from strange and inconsistent MBTI descriptions.
a couple of important things were said about jungian typology.
Jung also claimed that “there is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum. They are only terms to designate a certain penchant, a certain tendency...the tendency to be more influenced by environmental factors, or more influenced by the subjective factor, that’s all. There are people who are fairly well balanced and are just as much influenced from within as from without, or just as little” (304). Jung’s intuition turns out to be correct here and should be a red flag to those who have created a typology out of his preference categories. A typology should have a bimodal distribution, but the evidence shows that most people fall between the two extremes of introversion and extraversion.
here, agreed 100%, but the typology in question of socionics does NOT assume that somebody is a 100% extrovert or such. i don't know if MBTI does either, but, basically, socionics' assumptions about information transfer are very much in line with jung's reasoning of noncertitude and preference/tendency over absolute.
Jung seems to have realized the limitations of his work and may not have approved of the MBTI had he lived to see it developed in his name. “My scheme of typology,” he noted, “is only a scheme of orientation. There is such a factor as introversion, there is such a factor as extraversion. The classification of individuals means nothing, nothing at all. It is only the instrumentarium for the practical psychologist to explain for instance, the husband to a wife or vice versa” (305).
However, his typology seems to imply that science is just a point of view and that using intuition is just as valid a way of seeing and understanding the world and ourselves as is careful observation under controlled conditions. Never mind that that is the only way to systematically minimize self-deception or prevent identifying causes where there are none.
this is perhaps the most important point. but, frankly, the above fails to take into account what kind of use socionics is put to. as a fully-blown science with empirical experiments and reliable tests and such, socionics is probably not viable. however, it isn't really used for that. i'm a little bit confused at why subjectivity is so necessarily a bad thing. while objective data is a part of the scientific method, socionics is, as jung pointed out, a tool for individuals which has no absolute basis, but rather a practical one to explain the motivations of others. trying to explain psychological motivations as does socionics does not really fall into the realm of empirical science, in certain ways it more closely resembles philosophy and religion. does this make it wrong? it merely states that this is something that is mostly outside of what can be necessarily proven.
without question, it allows for a certain degree of uncertainty (and for the existence of a wide variety of dissent, a la phaedrus/hitta/ashton/etc.), but it definitely doesn't mean that there don't exist anecdotally observable trends for which people can find common ground.
yeah, I agree, which is why I think Jung is Ni INFp.
Last edited by glam; 04-07-2011 at 09:55 PM. Reason: removing my quote ;)
Ni ILI is more likely.Originally Posted by strrrng
how do you reconcile preferences/tendencies with Model A? What happens as a person's preference approaches 0?
i don't understand your question.
I mean as a person's preference for one IM element over another approaches 0, that is when neither element is preferred over the other - what happens to the placement of elements in Model A?
And how is the configuration of Model A different for a person who has a strong preference/tendency compared to someone who has a weak preference/tendency?
i don't know.
i don't know.And how is the configuration of Model A different for a person who has a strong preference/tendency compared to someone who has a weak preference/tendency?
i also don't see what either of these cases have to do with
the skeptic criticism.
wtfMBTI results is mostly about information preference. How it accumulates information is thru standardized testing and interview. Althrough there are many sites about MBTI, the full test/procedures is a little more comprehensive then what most people get. But how MBTI represents information preference is not as systematic as socionics.
Take INTp for example, its functional preference is
vs
for socionics ILI.
Augusta took the work of Jung and developed Model A. Which is the model of information exchange between Ego/Super-Ego/Super-ID/ID. She describes this information exchange in the aspects of reality as an object in motion, which starts from from rest as potential energywhich generates kinetic energy
and then is turned into "work"
For relations of objects in motion she refer to this as the fields which are represented by the introverted functions.
Introverted Intution:
Introverted Sensing:: Space
Introverted Thinking:
Introverted Feeling:: Attraction and repulsion between objects
So she relates these concepts of how reality is described in physics to the Jung psychological types which describes human personality. Which was a early description of information preference, with this information preference as a starting point, she hypothesized that we predominantly used a introverted information element together with a extroverted information element or vice versa. And this she deemed the ego block.
From this starting point she started to talk about love... And this is where we start discussing the other information blocks such as the Super-Ego(Persona),
Super-ID(Anima/Animus) and the ID(Shadow).
I will get more to the other block later, but Augusta basically proposed to us that we human beings prefer certain aspects(scientific even) of reality over others. And that this preference will shape our relationships with each other as hypothesized in Model A.
So the basic and main question of Socionics seeks to answer is....
Do human beings prefer certain aspects of reality versus others?
We can describe these aspect in newtonian terms or quantum physic terms, we can describe the psychological types in other terms perhaps memory or architecture, storage, processing speed.
I would say the question is worthy of our consideration even if the answer is not to our liking.
no, no it isn't. this is total and utter bullshit, as is everything you wrote.
it seems to me that Model A requires some 'absolute' choice between IM elements (because of its structure), so I was wondering how this could be reconciled with what you said about preferences/tendencies
Last edited by reyn_til_runa; 01-14-2008 at 02:18 AM.
whenever the dog and i see each other we both stop where we are. we regard each other with a mixture of sadness and suspicion and then we feign indifference.
Jerry, The Zoo Story by Edward Albee
oh, i see. i can only offer speculation on that. i have some ideas about why that might not be a real issue, but they're ultimately pure speculation with no real justification. this is not something that can be tested, and the truth is that it isn't a real issue anyway, as long as socionics is personally useful and personally what is observed.
i can almost see where your conclusion is almost close to the truth, but the entirety of your analysis is very very blatant bullshit that has nothing to do with augusta's work or ideas and does not remotely lead to your conclusion. more importantly, it somewhat misrepresents socionics' treatment of what information exchange is.
I'd like to hear them regardless
the answer to your rather bland question is yes, because all people are different. this should be obvious. there, i have solved your problem. now go away.
as i already alluded to, the answer is wormholes.
whenever the dog and i see each other we both stop where we are. we regard each other with a mixture of sadness and suspicion and then we feign indifference.
Jerry, The Zoo Story by Edward Albee
Sorry to dig up an old post, but I couldn't resist.
I think that Socionics would look suspect to most skeptics. For one thing, it is based on Jung's personality theory, which was one complaint in the article. Also, it is shares much similarity with the MBTI in terms of what the preferences are, etc. Finally, I am almost certain that something like visual identification would be brought into question. (That doesn't mean that it isn't accurate.)
However, what makes me question the objectivity of the site is that there is no skepticism towards the Big Five personality questionnaire, even though the Big Five is very similar to the MBTI and bases some of the scales on things that are suspect such as "openness" being associated with political preference. Perhaps the author of the site is not aware of the Big Five, but if the reason the MBTI is being questioned and the Big Five is not is simply because the Big Five is in fashion with most psychologists, then the author's credibility has to brought into question.
Jason
There are reasons for this though. The Big Five traits were empirically derived (through observing which traits moved together in various personality tests [factor analysis]), and plus there are no assumptions made about underlying theory - it is purely descriptive.
That might be true, but I've seen a lot of people on the web take the Big Five with known MBTI results. The results on the corresponding scales are almost always the same. Also, the underlying theory of the MBTI is not a necessary feature. I think that the MBTI type descriptions and test could be exactly the same without it. However, I've never read any official MBTI type descriptions. If, for example, elements of "introverted thinking" seep into an INTP description, then that would have to be called into question. On the other hand, the descriptions I've read on the web seem to be largely independent of the underlying theory. For example, calling INTJs "self-confidet" or saying that they have "specialized knowledge" doesn't seem to have much to do with the underlying theory.
Jason
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