Socionics vs MBTI revisited

There's a big problem with what I wrote back in 2011, so let me clear something up:

If you're caught between Socionics and MBTI and are wondering which is "right," stop.  Both are simply models, drawing binary boundaries to more easily organize one's understanding of the wide spectrum of human variability. People who are somewhere in the middle may be categorized in very different ways depending on which aspect each theory considers to be central.


With that out of the way, I have some criticisms of both theories I'd like to add.

MBTI: I still see Judging/Perceiving as unrelated to cognitive functions, although I think calling it "false" is a bit misleading.  By itself, Judging/Perceiving is arguably a better metric of human differences than is rationality/irrationality.  The issue is that Myers-Briggs introversion/extroversion is more related to a person's cortical arousal than to the Jungian cognitive function-attitude, leaving the MBTI function-attitude to be defined by the Judging/Perceiving dichotomy.

For example, Jung defined Te as thinking which primarily references external sources, while Ti works in a circumambulatory way, as a person's reaction to information.  But in MBTI, Te is defined as organizing things in the external world while Ti in is defined in terms of making sense of a body of information.  The original meaning was discarded in favor of the dichotomies, as measured by the test.

This change isn't a bad thing -- it's easier to discern what type a person is because of this -- but it's less clear why these would be fundamental psychic functions.  Rather, it seems to describe basic skillsets a person with a given focus and temperament tends to have.  Not surprisingly, MBTI is popular in career prediction, in a way that Socionics (or Enneagram for that matter) isn't.


Socionics: Perhaps because the Socionics rationality/irrationality is less immediately salient than the MBTI Judging/Perceiving attitude, I find there's usually much less agreement among Socionists about what type a person is than in MBTI.  It's often argued that this is because Socionics goes deeper and is more faithful to Jungian theory than MBTI, but I'm not so sure about that.  The introduction of information metabolism makes Socionics's "information elements" also rather different from Jung's cognitive functions.  Rather than describing a purely psychic orientation, the information elements describe specific domains of interest, with each type being defined by how they relate to these domains.

Socionics is meant to describe relationships, and, in my experience, it can predict how two people will relate, although it also seems this will drift, quite commonly, when someone experiences a major change in their life.  For example, a person who seeks prompts for action (Se) can shift to being unwelcoming of such once their life path becomes more clear.  One who likes fun environments where people don't have to watch too much what anyone says (Fe) may be turned off when their personal experiences cause their values to diverge from their culture's values.

For this reason, I generally recommend people try not to force a person into a given type for a while, instead observing their reaction to the elements individually.  Socionics makes a lot of predictions about what traits a person of a given type will have, and these traits change in a sharply categorical fashion when changing only one dichotomy.  The difference between an INFP and an INFJ is much smaller than between an EII and IEI, causing the move from observation to type to have much bigger implications when there's an error.  On the other hand, there's also more alternative dichotomies to consider that can reveal surprising aspects of personality one otherwise might not consider.



Overall, my opinion is that MBTI is more reliable if you want to use it for casual discussion.  It's more immediately obvious what's being referred to, and it lends itself better to being taken in an impressionistic way.  Once you start focusing on the cognitive functions though, it becomes increasingly more problematic. There was one theorist under the pen-name of "simulatedworld" who tried writing MBTI descriptions in a Socionics-fashion -- I got the impression reading them that the judging/perceiving aspect did not follow from the rest of his descriptions, especially when describing the differences between INFJ and INFP.  They also invoked a motivational component which I feel, while often-to-sometimes is associated with each type, didn't really follow from his otherwise thorough, categorical approach.  But his descriptions are easily searchable online to draw your own conclusions.

In contrast, Socionics requires a lot more time to be handled and discussed properly, and impressionistic descriptions (such as on socionics.com) tend to be quite misleading.  Some major surface traits, e.g. Conscientiousness from Big5 or Judging/Perceiving from MBTI, aren't directly covered, so it can appear at first to be less descriptive.  Once you dig into it though, it can explain a great deal more about a person's nature, especially when meshed with other depth typologies like the Enneagram of Personality, as one is already putting in a great deal of time to tease out the underlying mechanisms.  In this way, you can start answering questions such as why a person has a controlling or laid-back attitude, making it more clear how to avoid (or not) people's trigger points and so on.

While the way I think about people is something like a combination of Socionics and Enneagram, I rarely draw conclusions about what type a person is unless I plan on discussing it, in which case I find it much easier to describe them in MBTI terms.  For the most part, I kinda see Socionics as overkill, although in the several years I studied type personally I got a lot more out of studying Socionics than I did MBTI.