New Member with questions

[quixoticcrush]

Hi. I'm Jojo. I'm very new to all of this. I've recently just became interested MBTI and Jungian Functions. I'm a psychology major and I learned about the basics in my Theories of Personality class. Socionics was not mentioned in my class however and I am interested in knowing exactly how it works. My type in both MBTI and Jungian Functions is INFJ. I'm on another personality forum and when I posted my picture, I was told I look like an INFJ as well, which I'm curious how one "looks" like a type.

Can someone please point me in the right direction on your site so I can answer some of the questions I have about all of this. Please and thank you

PS My Enneagram is 9w1 with a sp/sx instinct type I think.....maybe.

[Beautiful sky]

where's your photo?

[Beautiful sky]

ESI???? bad pics

[tejing]

Socionics information is not terribly well centralized, so you need to do some digging and collating to get a reasonable picture of the subject as a whole. Some resources I recommend include socionics.us and wikisocion.org. As far as Visual Identification, it is sometimes hyped up into unreasonable versions of the original idea, but it's simply based on the idea that the information metabolism shows itself externally in certain ways, including choices of clothing, stance, facial muscle patterns, and even permanent aspects of appearence that come about as a result of habitually moving in certain ways. It hasn't been boiled down to a commonly agreed upon set of features that specific types have, (and it's not clear it ever will be) but an individual can definitely gain a skill over time of recognizing types visually as they gain more experience typing people (at first by purely non-visual means probably). Because of the nature of VI, posed photos are typically not terribly helpful, since in a posed photo one is specifically obfuscating one's internals and putting on a mask, metaphorically speaking.

If you're already familiar with MBTI, then you have a partial stepping stone into understanding socionics, since the T/F and N/S dichotomies correlate pretty strongly with the same dichotomies in socionics, however the I/E and J/P dichotomies from MBTI don't correlate so well. So if you're an MBTI NF, chances are you're in the socionics NF club as well, (though that's not completely certain) but the question is whether you're a , , , or . Based on the pictures you gave my best guess would be that you're introverted and rational, so aka EII aka INFj (I don't like using the MBTI-like names for socionic types, though. It encourages bad mental habits)

[Nowisthetime]

Socionics was not mentioned in my class however and I am interested in knowing exactly how it works.

MBTI is highly commercialized especially in the US and for many people it is the first and only introduction to Jungian types. Many psychology teachers are totally unaware of socionics. So that's why MBTI gets a lot of attention and (too much) credit, but Socionics is a better system, or THE system when it comes to types. So forget MBTI and learn Socionics. You don't need MBTI anymore if you have socionics.

[jet city woman]

MBTI is highly commercialized especially in the US and for many people it is the first and only introduction to Jungian types. Many psychology teachers are totally unaware of socionics. So that's why MBTI gets a lot of attention and (too much) credit, but Socionics is a better system, or THE system when it comes to types. So forget MBTI and learn Socionics. You don't need MBTI anymore if you have socionics.

I disagree. MBTI doesn't get a lot of attention because psychology teachers are unaware of socionics. Socionics is fucking insanity when translated to english. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. MBTI books are commercialized because they work. Socionics is a broken system from a US standpoint. The function definitions make socionics look like astrology. I'll prove it one of these days, when I get off my ass lol.

[jet city woman]

Socionics information is not terribly well centralized, so you need to do some digging and collating to get a reasonable picture of the subject as a whole. Some resources I recommend include socionics.us and wikisocion.org. As far as Visual Identification, it is sometimes hyped up into unreasonable versions of the original idea, but it's simply based on the idea that the information metabolism shows itself externally in certain ways, including choices of clothing, stance, facial muscle patterns, and even permanent aspects of appearence that come about as a result of habitually moving in certain ways. It hasn't been boiled down to a commonly agreed upon set of features that specific types have, (and it's not clear it ever will be) but an individual can definitely gain a skill over time of recognizing types visually as they gain more experience typing people (at first by purely non-visual means probably). Because of the nature of VI, posed photos are typically not terribly helpful, since in a posed photo one is specifically obfuscating one's internals and putting on a mask, metaphorically speaking.

If you're already familiar with MBTI, then you have a partial stepping stone into understanding socionics, since the T/F and N/S dichotomies correlate pretty strongly with the same dichotomies in socionics, however the I/E and J/P dichotomies from MBTI don't correlate so well. So if you're an MBTI NF, chances are you're in the socionics NF club as well, (though that's not completely certain) but the question is whether you're a , , , or . Based on the pictures you gave my best guess would be that you're introverted and rational, so aka EII aka INFj (I don't like using the MBTI-like names for socionic types, though. It encourages bad mental habits)

You seem to have an understanding, so I'm going to ask you my ongoing question (which I have too many fish in other seas to figure out for myself).

Why would you be a different type in socionics than you are in MBTI?

[tejing]

MBTI defines the personality in terms of 4 aspects/dimensions which are off of the center/average by some degree, assumes them to be orthogonal, and defines its 16 types in terms if which direction a personality is in each of these dimensions. This is essentially equivalent to defining axes for the plane, then splitting it up into quadrants using those axes, and calling each quadrant a "type", just using a 4d space instead of a 2d one. Now suppose personalities actually do tend to clump into specific groups in this space, but your axes weren't chosen to split between those clumps quite as well as they could have been. The result would be that the types wouldn't quite correspond to the natural clumps. Socionics goes at the entire problem quite differently, by studying both the traits of a large number of people, and the traits of relationships between those people, it attempts to identify the natural categories (without any assumption that there would be a continuum of personality) that those people's personalities and relationships fall into, and then find a structure that explains and predicts the observations. The fact that the result of this approach gives 16 types with notable correlation to MBTI is somewhat due to their common basis in Jung's work, but probably largely due to a real "clumping" phenomenon as described above. Since MBTI does not expect clear boundaries between types to exist, its definition of the axes could easily be sub-optimal for truly separating the clumps that actually exist, leading to a different typing in MBTI and socionics.

[jet city woman]

Since MBTI does not expect clear boundaries between types to exist,

I see very clear boundaries between types. I see what you are saying, as far as, I am kinda 5'ish, kinda 7'ish, kinda 9'ish, etc. (from enneagram terms); same with mbti - I'm kinda INTP'ish, kinda ISFP'ish, kinda ESTP'ish.....etc. But I have a main type and there are boundaries there, obviously. And it's pretty clear to me what type I am. Is it not?