In psychology and sociology, socionics is a pseudoscientific theory of information processing and personality types. It incorporates Carl Jung's work on Psychological Types with Antoni Kępiński's theory of information metabolism. In contrast to the generally accepted views in personality psychology on age-related variability of the human psyche, socionics distinguishes 16 psychophysiological types (sociotypes) which it claims go unchanged throughout a person's life. The existence of personality types is extremely controversial in modern personality psychology. Socionics was developed in the 1970s and 1980s, primarily by the Lithuanian researcher Aušra Augustinavičiūtė. The name "socionics" is derived from the word "society", because Augustinavičiūtė believed that each sociotype has a distinct purpose in society. The central idea of socionics is that information is intuitively divisible into eight categories, called information elements, which a person's psyche processes using eight psychological functions. Each sociotype has a different correspondence between functions and information elements, which it posits results in different ways of handling information and distinct thinking patterns. One prevalent idea in socionics is the theory of intertype relations, which is based on the interaction of these functions between types. Independent authors point to the insufficient empirical validity of socionics both in its basis and in its further development, as well as the practical absence of studies on socionics outside the former USSR. The Commission on Pseudoscience of the Russian Academy of Sciences has placed socionics among such well-known pseudosciences as astrology and homeopathy.
Purpose Socionics provides a means of predicting the character of relations and degree of business compatibility, information sharing and psychological compatibility of people before their joining in one collective group, i.e. to solve the "inverse task" of sociometry. According to Aleksandr Bukalov and Betty Lou Leaver, socionics uses Jungian typology, informational model of psyche, and theory of information metabolism for political and sociological analysis. According to J. Horwood, and A. Maw, socionics is a science developed by Augustinavičiūtė in the 1970s. Augustinavičiūtė and her colleagues worked with Carl Jung's personality typologies to develop personality-based relationship profiles. It was found that the nature and development of interpersonal relationships (both professional and personal) are far from random. Instead, they are based on how well suited each individual's psychological profiles are to one another, allowing Augustinavičiūtė to develop 16 'socionic types' predicting and describing the interpersonal relationships between any combination of Jung's personality types. According to R. Blutner and E. Hochnadel, "socionics is not so much a theory of personalities per se, but much more a theory of type relations providing an analysis of the relationships that arise as a consequence of the interaction of people with different personalities." Philosopher E. Pletuhina defines socionics as the study about the information interaction of the human psyche with the outside world, between people. She also defines it as the doctrine of psychological types of people and the relationships between them, as well as notes that the particular quality of socionics is that it considers the innate qualities of the human psyche, including the personality type, which cannot be arbitrarily changed without prejudice to the mental and physical health. Philosopher L. Monastyrsky treats socionics as a pre-science. In his view, the main problem with socionics is the lack of objective criteria for determining a person’s socionic type. The socionic categories were not derived empirically, but speculatively, and have not undergone proper scientific validation.
History The basic structure of socionics was established in the 1960s and 1970s by Augustinavičiūtė, along with a group of enthusiasts who met in Vilnius, Lithuania. What resulted from their discussions and Augustinavičiūtė's personal investigations was an information model of the psyche and of interpersonal interaction based on Jung's typology but with eight psychic functions rather than four. Augustinavičiūtė's first works on socionics were published between 1978 and 1980.
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