Anyone want to help make socionics scientific?

[Singu]

All of this stuff has been done before already.

If you actually study and research psychology, then you'll realize that psychologists have already gone through and tested most of these kinds of theories, including psychoanalysis and typologies, and found that they had little to no predictive power, let alone explanatory power.

For example in the book Social Foundations of Thought & Action: A Social Cognitive Theory by Albert Bandura (the most cited psychologist alive today), it goes through all of them comprehensively:


Ch 1. MODELS OF HUMAN NATURE AND CAUSALITY
Social Foundations of Thought & Action, Albert Bandura

Many theories have been proposed over the years to explain human behavior. The basic conceptions of human nature that they embrace and the causal processes that they posit require careful examination for several reasons.

PSYCHODYNAMIC THEORY

Human behavior is commonly viewed as motivated from within by various needs, drives, impulses, and instincts. In psychodynamic theory, for example, human behavior is the manifestation of the dynamic interplay of inner forces, most of which operate below the level of consciousness (Freud 1917, 1933). Since the proponents of this school of thought consider the principal causes of behavior to be drives within an individual, that is where they look for the explanations of why people behave as they do. Although this theory has gained widespread acceptance and is deeply entrenched in the public view of human behavior, it has not gone unchallenged.

Theories of this sort are criticized on both conceptual and empirical grounds. The inner determinants are often inferred from the very behavior they supposedly caused, creating interpretive circularities in which the description becomes the causal explanation. A hostile impulse, for example is deduced from a person's irascible behavior, which is then attributed to the action of an underlying hostile impulse.

Similarly, the existence of achievement motives is deduced from achievement behavior; dependency motives from dependent behavior; curiosity motives from inquisitive behavior; power motives from domineering behavior, and so on. There is no limit to the number of drives one can find by inferring them from behavior. Indeed, different theories propose diverse lists of motivators, some containing a few all-purpose drives, others encompassing an assortment of specific drives. If causal propositions concerning drives are to be empirically testable, then drives must be specified by the antecedent conditions that activate them and govern their strength, rather than being inferred from the behavior they supposedly produce.

The conceptual structure of theories that invoke drives or impulses as the principal motivators of behavior has been further criticized for disregarding the complex and changeable patterning of human action. An internal motivator cannot adequately account for marked shifts in a given behavior under differing situational circumstances. When varying social conditions produce predictable changes in behavior, the postulated cause cannot reside mainly in a drive in the organism, nor can the cause be less complex than its diverse effects.

Psychodynamic theory assumes a thorough psychic determinism, but it does not as a rule, postulate definite relationships between the unconscious inner life and human thought and action. In fact, the inner dynamics are said to produce any variety of effects, even opposite forms of behavior. Such formulations are, therefore, not easily testable nor refutable by empirical evidence. While the conceptual adequacy of psychodynamic drive theories could be debated at length, their empirical limitations cannot be ignored indefinitely. They provide ready interpretations of behavior that has already happened, but, as we shall see shortly, they are deficient in predicting future behavior. Almost any theory can explain things after the fact. Findings from research conducted is from other perspectives have underscored the need to shift the focus of causal analysis from internal dynamics to reciprocal causation between personal and environmental factors. Behavior patterns commonly attributed to unconscious inner causes can be in stated, eliminated, and reinstated by varying appropriate social influences and by altering people's ways of thinking. Such findings indicate that the major determinants of behavior arise from transactional dynamics, rather than flow unidirectionally from inner dynamics of unconscious mental functions.

The explanatory power of a psychological theory is gauged in several ways. First, theories must demonstrate predictive theories power. Second, the methods the theories yield must be capable of effecting significant changes in human affect, thought, and action. Weaknesses in theories become readily apparent when they are put to work and can be judged by the results they produce. One can predict and change events without knowing the basis for the successes. So third, theories must identify the determinants of human behavior and the intervening mechanisms by which they produce their effects. But explanations that have no predictive value will be pseudo-explanations. The adequacy of explanation is, therefore, judged largely in terms of predictive accuracy. Psychodynamic formulations have been found wanting on all these counts.

CLASSIFYING PEOPLE AND INDIVIDUALIZING TRAIT DIMENSIONS

Bem and Allen (1974) have advanced the view that some people are highly consistent in some behaviors, but evidence of cross-situational generality is obscured when data from consistent and variable responders are combined and researchers, rather than the respondents, select which traits are relevant and which types of behavior represent them. From this perspective, a psychological theory which seeks to predict actions from traits must settle for the modest goal of predicting only some of the actions of only consistent people, provided one can identify beforehand who is likely to be consistent in what realm of behavior.

Bem and Allen use people's judgments of themselves as either consistent or changeable for the traits in question as the identifier. To demonstrate that self-reported consistency foretells uniformity, students were measured for their friendly and conscientious behavior and rated by their parents, by a peer, and by themselves for friendliness and conscientiousness on a questionnaire describing many different situations. The ratings for each of the two traits were summed for each judge across the situations described in a global score, and then the degree of agreement between judges was computed. Students who viewed themselves as consistent were rated by others with higher agreement than those who judged themselves highly variable in behavior.

Correlating verbal reports of behavior averaged across specific situations does little to illuminate the central issue of whether trait measures predict how people will actually behave under different conditions. Scores pooled across situations may embody high, moderate or low behavioral variability. In testing for behavioral generality, one must measure directly how individuals vary in their behavior under different circumstances, rather than how, on the average, they stand in relation to others, or how well judges agree among themselves in their over-all impressions of the individuals selected to study.

In the few behaviors that Bem and Allen actually measured, the self-described unchangeables were found to be more consistent for talkativeness but not for conscientious actions, thus revealing an inconsistency in the predictor of behavioral consistency.

In a more comprehensive study examining different measures of self-reported consistency and many personality dimensions, Chaplin and Goldberg (1983) found that self-reported consistency is uniformly unpredictive. Not only do different indexes of consistency disagree but, however it is measured, the self-reported consistent types are no more uniform in their behavior than the changeable types on any personality dimension.

That sorting people into consistency types gains little predictive power, as far as behavior is concerned, has been further confirmed by Peake and Lutsky (1981). Others agree more closely in their over-all impression of persons who see themselves as changeable than for those who characterize themselves as variable, but both groups show little uniformity in their actual trait behavior in different settings. The different social impressions probably arise because others often cannot observe how those they are rating act in various milieus and must either guess how they are likely to behave or rely on what they tell them. Presenting one-self as a highly consistent person may thus foster social impressions of consistency, but it does not improve the predictability of trait measures.

The source of this erroneous impression about behavioral generality has itself become the subject of study. Mischel and Peake (1982) have found that people's perceptions of others' self-consistency is related to how uniform the latters' behavior is in key features of the trait over time in similar situations but is unrelated to how they actually behave in different situations. People thus misread cross-situational generality in behavior from temporal stability in similar situations. Observers, whose information is limited about how others conduct themselves in diverse situations, would be especially prone to mistake behaving similarly in the same setting over time as indicative of behaving similarly in different settings. If the eyes do not behold a wide range of transactional situations, then behavior will appear consistent in the eyes of those beholders.

Studies of situational generality of behavior devote much attention to what trait behaviors should be assessed but give little consideration to the kinds of environments that should be sampled. It is perhaps not entirely surprising that approaches attributing behavior to traits would neglect the properties of the social environment. The most informative methodology for studying cross-situational generality would be to record how much people vary their behavior across situations which differ measurably in the functional value of the behavior being examined in those settings. Situations chosen for study should be scaled and selected in terms of the incentives and sanctions they customarily provide for the particular behavior, rather than chosen arbitrarily. Such studies would undoubtedly reveal that all people behave discriminatively most of the time, being more prone to express a given form of behavior when it is advantageous to do so than when it serves no useful purpose or brings detrimental results. It is only by including a range of environmental dispositions that the transsituational fixedness, or nonfixedness, of behavior can be adequately evaluated.

Psychological knowledge is better advanced by exploring the sources of variability of behavior than by searching for subtypes of people who behave invariantly, regardless of circumstances. It would be a misleading truncated theory that called on persons to choose which of their actions are predictable but viewed persons as unpredictable in areas of functioning in which they very sensibly vary their actions to suit the changing circumstances.

Progress in gaining predictive knowledge requires research that systematically varies factor that contribute to behavioral variability as well as examines correlations among behaviors in naturally occurring settings. The number of persons who act invariantly would fluctuate depending upon the behavior selected for study, the extent to which the situations sampled differ in their likely consequences for the given conduct, how much variability is tolerated in the criterion of consistency, and whether one measures verbal reports of behavior or the behavior itself. Behaviors that are highly functional in diverse settings, as, for example, acting intelligently, would be more consistent than behaviors that have different effects under dissimilar circumstances. It would be difficult to find adolescents who are consistently aggressive toward parents, teaches, peers, and police officers, because the consequences for the same conduct vary markedly (Bandura & Walters, 1959). Even in the case of a widely acceptable behavior such as friendliness, the ranks of the consistent responders would shrink simply by including some situations in which friendliness is an unlikely response, as, for example, when individuals are being exploited or discriminated against. Only those who are grossly undiscerning or who have a poor sense of reality would remain steadfastly amiable.