Totally wrong. (I really hate that people have been brainwashed to believe in this myth.) The basis of Socionics (and the basis of any typology) is observations. And what we observe are differences and similarities in people's
behaviours. Those differences and similarities form general patterns, and those patterns are put together to form what we call "types". The elements and functions, on the other hand, are merely attempts to explain the empirically observable types in a theoretical framework. The theoreitical framework is not necessarily true, because we can't observe the functions directly. What we can observe is outer behaviours. The functions are only theoretical postulates that we don't even know if they exist.