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On Possibility of Falsification of TIM in Verbal Typing
¶
Published by
I. M. Eglit
, H. G. Eremeeva,
G. V. Tenetilov, N. N. Floman in
“Socionics, Mentology, and
Personality
Psychology”
,
2008,  1.
Original
article.
Introduction
¶
Keywords:
Socionics, TIM models, communicative models, masks, TIM
identification, typing.
Abstract: The paper presents results of an experiment conducted by a
group of socionists, who work at the internet site of the School of
System Socionics (http//www.socionicasys.org), who have set a task of
checking the possibility of falsification by interviewees of their IM
functions dimensionality and hence deceiving typing experts in the
course of a verbal TIM identification.
The need to investigate the possibility of falsification by an
interviewee of his/her TIM and the need for an identification expert to
be able to detect such a falsification exists because of vide spread
phenomenon of communicative models (masks) which people are inevitably
forced to use in conditions of contemporary social reality [1].
By falsification we understand the following:
1) Intentional misleading of the typing experts by an interviewee in
regard to his TIM (intentional creation of a communicative model or
mask corresponding to another TIM.
1) Unintentional actions of an interviewee aimed at presenting
information which corresponds to a communicative model (mask)
produced by interviewees attempt to correspond to some social
approved pattern or correspond to some good TIM (according to the
interviewees own opinion).
This experiment was prompted by the current situation with socionics
Internet forums. The number of such forums is growing. Many forums are
used for TIM identification. However the level of experts leaves to
desire. Many experts are self-teach amateurs who did their studies on
the same forums. As a consequence, many people wander from forum to
forum, get identified as different TIMs, try on these TIMs.
Consequently many of those who wishes to undergo a TIM identification at
our Internet site (http//www.socionicasys.org) are people who have
already got their TIM identified (and sometimes just imposed!). They
have some notion about TIMs (mostly based on descriptive features) and
they often wear a mask of a certain TIM. This influences their
interviews responses and most probably creates additional difficulties
for experts, and we have set out to investigate it.
Reasons for unintentional TIM falsification could be a desire to provide
better conditions for communication, to present oneself in a better
light or an involuntary move to “cover up” one’s weak IM functions.
Even if a person has never been typed before, he/she has general human
tendency to keep some of his/her mind private. Thus arises the problem
of distinguishing between the communicative model (mask) and the true
TIM. This problem has especial acuteness in the following two cases:
1) The interviewees information metabolism functions have ample
acquired experience (he/she has wide erudition, has read a lot, and
has rich experience of verbal communication).
2) The person for some reason considers some TIM to be “his or her”
TIM and deliberately or unknowingly manipulates the low dimensional
functions of his/her true TIM so that they appear as high dimensional
ones.
Interviewee responses in such cases can mislead the experts because the
interviewee talks a lot and with confidence when using his low
dimensional functions and often can be over-confident in respect to his
low dimensional functions. [2,3]
The theoretical premises of this experiment were as follows: a person’s
TIM is stable and does not change throughout the course of one’s life,
thus the dimensionality of functions does not change with acquired
experience or age. Consequently, determining dimension of an information
function could serve as a key for distinguishing between cases of good
acquired experience and high dimensionality of the function.
How could possibly be designed an experiment aimed to investigate
influence of falsification on the outcome of identification? We saw two
possibilities:
1. It can be assumed that intentional falsification could be
performed the best by those who are well familiar with the
functioning of the A-Model (including the dimension theory) and who
are aware of the TIM identification methods. TIM identification
experts with well verified TIMs could be used as intentional
deceivers with a task to make appear their low dimensional functions
as high dimensional ones.
2. An interviewee could be provoked for an unintentional
falsification. Taking into consideration that the real goal of the
experiment is unknown to the participants, the task could be set in
order to make participants talk on behalf of another TIM
(communicative model). This presumes that the TIMs of the
participants should be identified and verified beforehand by
experienced experts and in accordance with the System Socionics
paradigm.
Part 1: Experiment on intentional falsification of TIMs
¶
The experiment had the following set up.
Participants in this experiment were persons who:
know the A-model well (the System Sosionics paradigm)
are well experienced in TIM identification
are well-versed with the TIM that they need to falsify
their true TIMs have been identified and verified through prior extensive communication.
Essentially they have “all cards” on hands to be able to deceive the
experts.
Among the fake interviewees 4 belonged to the TIM EII (PS) and 5
belonged to the TIM LSE (RI).
They were given 1 question each with information element semantics
respectively of their functions 1 and 5 (i.e. Te and Fi).
The questions:
Te:
What tools/instruments do you use in your daily life? What
makes for a convenient tool/instrument? How do you select a tool for
specific task, give examples? How would you rate your ability to pick
the right tool? How others rate your ability in this?
Fi:
What are the ways of establishing relationships? Which of
these is the most elegant? Which you prefer to follow, and why? What
constitutes mastery in relationships?
The tasks given to respondents:
Answer as fully as possible to the question, to demonstrate yourself a “real expert” in this domain.
In your response regarding the function 5 try to demonstrate the “mask” of your dual.
Track your reactions, thoughts, states, which were caused by the procedure itself, and the question of the experiment.
What was evaluated:
how well the respondents could emulate
multi-dimensional response using his low-dimensional (5th) function.
Responses from multidimensional (1st) function were used as a reference.
The result:
None of the participants has managed to answer a
question related to their 1-dimensional function and go beyond the
dimension of Ex, i.e. the answer still sounded “one-dimensional”.
Observations of responses to questions concerning the Te element:
EII (RI):
When answering to the P element question, they sought to reply using
L (and possibly I), i.e. trying to engage the mental track
superblock.
In responses requiring P, they recollected their “experience.”
In their responses regarding P there were present indicators of vital
track quality, as well as some of the individual (“original”) ideas
regarding this element.
They tried to be convincing by demonstrating large knowledge; however
they didnt succeed in showing the St parameter in their thinking.
They could show their knowledge of the “norms”.
Self-assessment related to this element showed low dimensionality of
this function. Respondents either attempted to leave it out, or
admitted that it is hard to rate their performance related to the
low-dimensional function.
LSE (PS):
They are confident in self-assessment, but do not emphasize it,
calmly accept mistakes related to this element.
Concretize their answers, demonstrating the plus sign of P.
The Tm parameter was clearly visible: their answers were given in
relation to Tm and St, showing awareness of the processes duration.
There were present indicators of mentality.
No transfer of thinking to other functions.
Observations of responses to questions concerning the Fi element:
EII (RI):
The dimension of the parametric time manifested itself in regarding
the development of relationships as a multi stage process.
The “plus” sign of R was clearly demonstrated: RIs were taking in
consideration mostly positive relations.
R is the function that sets values: RIs did not think in terms of
manipulating with relationships.
The block of R and I has clearly manifested itself.
There were generalizations, statements of global nature, when RI
participants made comments concerning people (possible manifestation
of the minus sign).
Sometimes there were oppositions of R and I.
LSE (PS):
Attempts to imitate the RI TIM, for the most part, failed.
PS participants interpreted “making relationships” as “becoming
acquainted”.
Indicators of vital track nature of the function and low-dimensional
traits were present.
Responses distinctly sounded one-dimensional.
Responses showed the minus R.
This is how indicators of individual one-dimensional vital track
function have manifested themselves in the responses: … for me this
is more convenient…
… I am satisfied with …
… one simply needs to get used to…
… it’s somehow more familiar/habitual…
… I am most vexed with my habit to buy a thing, regardless of the
defects, out of fear that I wont be able to find anything better and
eventually will have to return to this shop again.
… I feel confused…
… it is difficult to make a choice…
… I get very angry in such situations…
… I wish somebody made the choice for me…
… often it just happens …
Examples of difficulties when answering using one-dimensional
functions:
EII (RI)
: “When I was responding to the question about P it became
apparent to me that I simply did not know where to start. The feeling
was as if that there was a lump of information in my head, and I didnt
not know how to structure it, what to begin with, what important points
must not be missed, what precisely should be included.”
LSE (PS)
: “Frankly speaking, this text made me sweat. Hawing written
two starting sentences, I suddenly fell into a stupor, because the
phrase “establish relationships” did not translate into any images,
words or ideas. Then I went to drink coffee and think about how to get
through it. The biggest problem when writing using your low-dimensional
function is to find even a slight idea what to write. You struggle to
find a thought that you could somehow develop. The subject seems to be
something you know and understand, but it’s something that is very
difficult to put into words. One is grasping for words. In the end I
realized that I could not squeeze out of myself anything at all.”
Conclusions from all responses:
Attempts to imitate extra dimensions in the responses related to the one-dimensional information function did not succeed.
Respondents could not falsify the signs of functions;
Even after having been living with duals, having constantly communicated with them, knowing their values, knowing the signs and indicators of multidimensionality, the participants have not been able to translate this knowledge in their “own” language.
Part 2: Experiment on unintentional falsification of TIMs
¶
We investigated possibility to falsify dimensions of information
functions (hence, the possibility to falsify TIM) and convergence of the
TIM identification experts. To this effect, served a question composed
in semantics of the I element and which was not used in identification
practice before (not familiar to the participants):
The question:
What is probability? What place in your life does
it have? Which common, obvious probabilities do you know of? Which
ones are not obvious to you? Give examples. Assess your ability to
see the probabilities and compare it with the abilities of others.
What is “obvious-improbable”? Give examples.
The respondents (18 people in total) which TIMs have been previously
identified by the experts of the System School of Socionics and verified
in the course of more or less lengthy period of communication on the
internet forum:
The TIM distribution has been as follows: LII-4, ESE-1, SLE-1, EIE-1,
SEE-1, ILI-2, EII-4, LSE-2, SLI-1, IEE-1.
There were 4 experts with the following TIMs: LII-2, LSE-1, EII-1.
The experiment was conducted in the following manner.
The names and gender on verbs were concealed from the experts.
Experts did not know who takes part in the experiment. [since they
are all from the same socionics school they all know each other and
each other’s types]
Experts made their analysis independently of each other.
Any cases where an expert was able to guess the identity of the
respondent through content of what was written were discarded.
The tasks set for the experts:
determine the dimension of respondents function processing the I element;
mark other indicators: sign, vital/mental track;
possibly advance a hypothesis regarding the TIM of the respondent.
Tasks assigned to the respondents:
to answer as fully as possible to the question, to prove oneself a “real expert” in the field;
no cheating! .. (It was assumed that a respondent is not going to lie intentionally - in the worst case, he/she may unconsciously hide some information.)
The results of the experiment demonstrated correspondence of analysis
results to previously determined TIMs on the following parameters:
Dimensionality of functions - 81%
Vital/mental elements - 78.5%
Sign of functions - 87.5%
Block - 80%
Average convergence - 81.5%
Thus, the error in determining the dimensions of the functions,
provided that the experts were working independently, was 19%. In case
of working together - 11% (2 person out of 18). Convergence of experts
on estimation of high/low dimensionality of a function was 82%.
The obtained experimental results (19% error in determining the
dimensionality of functions) reflect not only effect of possible
falsification, In the authors opinion, it deems very difficult to
conduct a “pure” experiment on falsification of information functions
dimensions.
However, the results of the experiment convincingly demonstrate that a
tool such as dimensionality of the functions is sufficiently precise to
obtain good convergence of the experts and can be used to detect
communicative models (“masks”) of the TIM. Additional findings answer
the question of whether it is possible to correctly pick up on the
dimension of the function of another person if one’s own relative
function is low dimensional. In our case, it turned out that one can do
it! Expert #2 with low-dimensional intuition showed results no worse
than his peers.
We are fully aware of the fact that the number of respondents who
participated in the experiment is very small for statistically valid
conclusions, and assume that these experiments will continue.
References
¶
Ermak V.D.
How to learn to understand people.
Moscow: Astrel, 2003.
Bukalov A.V.
Structure and dimensions of IM functions.
SMiPL,
ISI,1995,  2.
Eglit I.M.
Dimensions of a function.
SMiPL, ISI, 2007,  2.