Virtually every single inquiring mind who engages with this question approaches the topic incorrectly. The answer to the question of whether a type 4 in the enneagram can be a seemingly dissimilar type such as the SLE is yes, by definition since these systems are independent of one another.
A more clearheaded, useful question is: How common is it for a type 4 to be an SLE? Or, addressing the question of seemingly dissimilar combinations' existence in practice, as opposed to in principle: Have you ever seen an SLE 4? If you have, how confident were you about both types? And, if you have can you show me about them so that I can judge the types for myself?
If nobody has any examples of the combination, that speaks for itself about its frequency. And if people do have candidate examples to share, even candidates that they are not very sure of, then the discussion and debate can proceed in earnest. As with anything else in typology, the proof is in the examples and the case work.
Instead of asking questions based on examples, discussions in the pop typology community usually proceed to argue about definitions and descriptions, with such comments as "A 4 cannot be an extroverted type since it is in the withdrawn triad", or "The type 4 is described as being in touch with their emotions according to description X by author Y, and the SLE is described as the opposite by author Z, so they must be incompatible." Of course, such arguments depend on descriptions and author interpretations, and abstractions of categories into language. The interpretations of different authors are not in absolute concordance, just as the typings of different practitioners are not absolute concordance. More importantly, descriptions in text are maybe interesting to examine and interesting for beginners to get a foothold in a system, but they are not as effective a way of conveying understanding of types as examples in the flesh that can be seen, heard, and tasted. Which, is the kind of content that this blog was created to disseminate and will still disseminate after this theoretical interlude regarding issues in practice.
Hey, Roan -- what are your thoughts on correlations between Socionics and the Big 5?
ReplyDeleteAs far as I'm aware Big 5 is sort of a "ground-up" system that came about by looking at the words people used to describe each other, such as "that person is messy" (low conscientious) or "that person is tidy" (high conscientious). Socionics is the opposite: as far as I understand, Ausra Augusta theorized 8 different types of information that represented a complete and individually exclusive representation of the physical universe that we, as individuals, through our personalities, register in 16 specific ways. Additionally this leads to differences in personality that manifest to the outside observer.
In other words Socionics is a top-down hypothesis of personality, however with that in mind, shouldn't it then be representable with statistical analysis, the only current statistical model of personality being the Big 5? Lot of food for thought but figured I'd turn to you for your ideas since you're by far the most reasonable person in the community I'm aware of.
Thanks,
Patrick
Supposing that socionics typings are at least internally valid, the loading with factors like the big five is a testable question in principle. This type of work has not been credibly done. My current project includes a big 5 test in its scales -- it would be better if I had picked a different big 5 test than the one I picked, but I picked one at the time and have distributed it to hundreds of clients that I interviewed so it's a little late for regrets. At some point, I will get enough data to describe some relationships or the lack of relationships in that dataset.
ReplyDeleteAs a partial aside, I don't put any stock in Augusta's hypotheses about information aspects existing as forces in physics.
Thanks for your response. Yeah, I'll be curious to see what you publish: I want to know which aspects of Socionics have the most convincing scientific basis and which aspects do not. And to your point it's not necessarily clear that Socionics is internally valid, as evident by the fact that people can sometimes ascribe personality qualities to certain Socionics phenomena that is questionable. I agree: Augusta's hypotheses are silly, but then what, at its core, is exactly "Socionics"?
Delete