Socionics was assembled in Soviet Lithuania in the 1970s by Aušra Augustinavičiūtė, a researcher who spent years watching how couples, families, and working groups actually got along — and looking for the pattern in why some pairings ran smoothly while others ground themselves down. She built on two borrowed ideas. From the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung came psychological types: the observation that people differ not randomly but in a small number of stable patterns of attention. From the Polish psychiatrist Antoni Kępiński came information metabolism: the image of a mind as something that ingests, digests, and produces information the way a body metabolizes food.

Put the two together and you get socionics' founding picture: every mind eats the same world, but different types digest different parts of it easily. What one person processes without effort, another finds exhausting; what one barely registers, another cannot stop noticing.

Socionics sorts these patterns into sixteen types. A type is not a score on a scale and not a mood; it is a fixed arrangement — the same eight kinds of information (the elements) dealt into the same eight seats (the functions), one arrangement per type.

Two consequences follow. First, everyone perceives everything: no type is blind to logic or deaf to feeling, only differently equipped for each. Second, a type describes structure, not ability — where your attention goes cheaply, what you want from other people, and where pressure genuinely hurts. Two people of the same type can differ in intelligence, taste, and character; the theory claims only that their attention is organized the same way.

Types are named with three-letter codes — ILE, SEI, IEI — built from the two strongest seats. You will also meet four-letter codes (ENTp) that look like MBTI and are not; the translation between the two systems is genuinely disputed, and method §1 explains why this site always marks MBTI equivalents with ≈ and an asterisk.

Descriptions of individuals exist in every typology. What socionics adds is a theory of pairs. Because each type is defined by the information it supplies and the information it seeks, any two types stand in a fixed intertype relation — sixteen kinds, from duality (each supplies exactly what the other seeks) to conflict (each leads with what the other defends). A few relations even have a direction: in supervision and benefit, the effect flows one way, which is why those pages come in ordered pairs here.

Every pairing of the sixteen types is worked out, function by function, in the 16×16 matrix. That claim — relationships as a computable consequence of two structures colliding — is the boldest thing in the theory, and the part most worth testing against your own life.

Honestly: as a sharp hypothesis, not settled science. Socionics has a half-century literature and passionate communities, mostly in Eastern Europe, and no consensus empirical validation of the kind the Big Five enjoys. Its schools disagree with each other about how to type the very same person — which is not a footnote; it is the disagreement this entire site was built to measure (Model A vs Model G).

The productive way to use it: treat every claim as a lens, hold it up against people you actually know, keep the parts that survive contact, and let the rest go. Every number on this site carries a margin for exactly that reason — a typing is a hypothesis, not a diagnosis.