On sex differences in socionic indicators

(Sex differences between women and men in a sample of 365 mixed-sex pairs of people connected by romantic or friendly relationships)

Comparing the average values of socionic indicators of women and men is usually methodologically complicated by the fact that the motivations to participate in socionic testing can differ significantly between men and women. This, in principle, can explain many sex differences that appear in such comparisons. In other words, the method of comparing average socionic indicators in combined samples of individual women and men who resort to questionnaire-based socionic testing does not allow one to separate the factors of truly physiological and temperament-psychological differences from the role and influence of the socio-psychological factor. However, if one compares men and women in a sample in which subjects undergo typing simultaneously as mixed-sex pairs (connected by friendly or romantic relationships), then the role of the socio-psychological factor in influencing the resulting differences is minimized. This is due to the fact that the member of the pair who is less inclined toward typing from the socio-psychological standpoint is “pushed” toward typing by the other member of the pair who is more interested in socionic diagnostics. And conversely—the activity of those psychotypes that are particularly inclined toward sociodiagnostics in each sex is restrained by the other member of the pair, who in this case also has to fill out the questionnaire. Below we present tables of sex differences for a number of socionic indicators obtained by comparing 365 women and 365 men who jointly (as pairs) filled out sociodiagnostic questionnaires. We believe that these results are maximally indicative of the true (i.e., physiologically and temperamentally conditioned) differences between women and men. In other words, we believe that the influence on these differences of heterogeneities in the type composition of male and female samples—caused by the specifics of the motivations of men and women of different psychotypes to undergo testing—is quite minimal. The colored bars in all the tables show the difference between women and men in fractions of a standard deviation (standard scatter) of the corresponding indicator.

RESULTS: Among the 15 socionic traits, women, compared to men, show (on average) substantial shifts toward ethics and dynamics (these shifts almost reach the size of one standard deviation), as well as weaker shifts toward carefreeness, intuition, constructivism, questimity, and aristocracy. By functions, the most pronounced shifts in women are toward strengthening Fe, Fi, and Qe, as well as weakening Ti, Te, and Se. For additional indicators accompanying socionic questionnaire diagnostics, noticeable shifts are revealed in women toward higher scores for their level of familiarity with socionics and toward lower indicators of social dissimulation (that is, women's self-assessment turns out to be lower than men's, while the sincerity of their answers is, on the contrary, higher). Conditionally, the most “masculine” psychotype is SLE, and the most “feminine” is EIE (see Table 1). This, incidentally, can explain why among same-sex romantic couples (see another publication vk.com/wall-168821911_14595), among which lesbian couples predominated in the previously examined statistics, the pair of psychotypes SLE+EIE is represented at a frequency significantly higher than expected—because of which, in these couples, activation relations rise to first place statistically (instead of dual), and the trait of nullity in same-sex romantic couples becomes complementary (instead of matching, as is statistically typical in opposite-sex romantic couples).