What socionics is
Some people are easy. Some people are work. Socionics is a theory about why.
Aušra Augustinavičiūtė spent the 1970s in Soviet Lithuania watching which pairings ran easily and which ground themselves down, looking for the pattern underneath. What she built was a theory of pairs. Who gets along easily? Who doesn’t?
It treats a mind as something that digests information.
From Jung she took psychological types. From the Polish psychiatrist Antoni Kępiński, information metabolism — a mind ingests and produces information the way a body does food. Every mind eats the same world. Types differ in which parts they digest easily.
A type is a seating plan.
A type is an arrangement.
The same eight elements, dealt into the same eight seats — one arrangement per type, sixteen in all. Everyone runs all eight. What differs is where each one sits. Each type is named for its two strongest seats — ILE is Ne leading, Ti assisting.
Everyone perceives everything. No type is blind to logic or deaf to feeling.
A type describes structure, not ability — where attention goes cheaply, what a person wants from other people, and where pressure hurts.
Two seating plans meet, and the fit is already decided.
Each type is defined by what it supplies and what it seeks. So socionics reads any two types as standing in one of sixteen fixed intertype relations — read off the two seating plans, not off history or effort.
One of the sixteen is the easiest relation there is. Another is the hardest. Same picture, wired differently.
Read the seat numbers. In duality each lead lands on 5 or 6 — the seats the other is asking to have covered. In conflict the same leads land on 4 and 3 — the sorest seat, and the one that is only performed under pressure. Nothing else has changed.
There are eight duality pairs, and they have been behind every page you have read here.
Every pair falls inside one quadra — four families of four, which is part 4.
Sixteen types, sixteen fits. One of each, and nothing left over.
Each row is a quadra. An ILE’s own row holds nothing hard, and one row is hard the whole way across — every type has exactly one of those. Do this for all sixteen and you get 256 ordered pairs. Every one has its own page ▸
Two of the sixteen only run one way.
Supervision and benefit have a direction. A supervisor leads with the element sitting in the supervisee’s sorest seat, and presses on it without noticing. Follow supervision from any type and it closes into a ring of four.
MODEL A
The classical architecture. Reads a person as information: what they process easily, what they seek, what wears them down.
MODEL G
Gulenko’s rework. Reads the same eight seats as a budget of energy — what a person visibly spends themselves on.
Questions people ask.
What is socionics?
Socionics is a theory about how minds handle information, and about what happens when two of them meet. It sorts people into sixteen types. Each type is one arrangement of the same eight information elements in the same eight seats. Any two types then stand in one of sixteen fixed relations, read off the two arrangements rather than off history.
Is socionics the same as MBTI?
No. The two share Jung as an ancestor and both end with sixteen types, but they are built differently. MBTI reads four letter preferences. Socionics deals eight information elements into eight seats, then asks what two of those arrangements do to each other. The four-letter codes here are socionics codes, not MBTI ones, and every equivalence on this site carries a ≈ and an asterisk — the conversion runs type by type.
Is socionics a pseudoscience?
Nothing in fifty years of literature amounts to the consensus validation the Big Five has. Socionics’ own schools also disagree about how to type the same person. That is why every result here is scored under both Model A and Model G, with the margins shown and the gap named.
Who invented socionics?
Aušra Augustinavičiūtė, in Soviet Lithuania in the 1970s. She was after a pattern: why some pairs run easily and others wear each other out. Jung gave her psychological types. The Polish psychiatrist Antoni Kępiński gave her information metabolism, the idea that a mind takes in and puts out information the way a body handles food. The sixteen relations are what she built from the two.
Next section
2The information elements▸All sections
- 1What socionics is
- 2The information elements
- 3The eight functions
- 4The four quadras
- 5Model A vs Model G