Behavior vs. Self-Description

This is intended to be a sister site to my articles site, Whole Socionics, which lays out some of my theoretical views on socionics. It turns out that it's a nontrivial task to put information into article format, so I created this blog as a supplement. I will mostly focus on examples of socionics concepts in the news and online. Anyways, let's get started.

This post came up in a socionics group:

The question as always is, "what type is this?" The primary things we see here are Se and Fi valuing viewpoints. There is the "all or nothing" approach of Se valuing types (which is also related to Ni, in the sense of committing to one option and excluding others that are incompatible with it), and there is a dislike of superfluous emotional interaction that isn't meant to directly serve the relationship (or worse, is incongruous with the relationship) (Fi > Fe). So, the type this is most characteristic of would be ESI or possibly SEE and ILI.

However, there is actually a combination of things going on here. We have, not an observation of someone engaging in this behavior, but a person's description of their own values. Beta types may very well identify with certain parts of it, and it wouldn't be atypical of an LSI to engage in this kind of behavior. Even types whose values are farther removed from Fi and Se could, situationally, do things like this.

However, fewer types would actually describe themselves in this manner. This immediately shuts down many Forer-type arguments, like "well, I identify with this and I'm not that type!" People mostly use their valued functions to interpret the world, and are most comfortable verbalizing the strong functions. This is why I rely very strongly on verbal cues when typing people. In many cases you can get a sense of someone's type very quickly if they have an obvious preference for conveying information in terms of certain vocabulary and concepts. Understanding their behavior on a "macro" level gives more insight but is also a lot harder.

Looking a bit more into this person's type (he has a Twitter) there is still a lot of Fi and Ni, less so Se but likely still valued. IEI may actually be more likely. However, my point is not to actually come to a typing conclusion but to explain some of the information we can use to get there.