Think of how languages develop, gradually losing mutual intelligibility. The same thing happens to typologies. Jung's initial book fractured into mainstream MBTI, Socionics, and dozens of smaller guru-led systems, each claiming the original inheritance while slowly diverging.
Consider what "Ni-dominant" means across systems. In mainstream MBTI, the Ni-dom is often described as a single-minded visionary: strategic, purposeful, confident in their singular truth, ready to change the world. The archetype is the CEO with a ten-year plan. In Socionics, this is closer to Ni-creative, and the Ni-dom is something closer to Emily Dickinson's "I heard a fly buzz when I died..." more anticipating doom than engineering success (with leading Ni being quite a negativistic thing, overall). IEI drifts through life noticing beautiful atmospheric details; ILI critiques everyone's optimism from his chair. Partially, this is explained by the so-called "J-P" shift (also touched upon here), where MBTI Ni often becomes a de-facto Judging function.
Myers' original Gifts Differing is very "dichotomic" book, with the functions often being a bit of an afterthough. Most of the time, Myers references the four dichotomic preferences and their combinations ("SJ types"). The community, attracted by the mystique of cognitive functions, almost completely abandoned the dichotomies, despite there being one time a contingent of "dichotomists" on MBTI fora who defended that approach (one of them, Reckful, aka r/reddshoes, wrote this article). Gradually, these defenders left, leaving the field open for the "it's all about the cognitive functions" people. At least, Talanovite socinoics, I think, manages to balance the "functional" vs "dichotomic" side fairly well.
One of the most revealing fault lines is how MBTI communities handle the tertiary and inferior functions, because the choices made here often act as strategic design decisions about precision and marketability.
TypeInMind, a popular MBTI resource, treats the tertiary function as almost as strong as the auxiliary (some Socionics schools, like WSS, also lean in the direction of strengthening the activator, but not quite to this regard). This gives each type three strong functions instead of two, with the result that every type gets to be good at more things, which feels flattering but creates direct contradictions. Their FiSe type (ISFP, by MBTI J-P assignment) is told they "prefer the real and solid" (Se) while also having "a very abstract internal world" (Ni tertiary). Meanwhile, their NiTe type (INTJ) makes "quick executive decisions" (Te) but also "needs time to process values" (Fi tertiary). These are opposite claims about the same person, which may feel "subtle" but eventually just play into the Barnum effect ("sometimes you're very concrete, but sometimes, you're quite abstract, too!"). Even their interpretation of the inferior function is softened to "weak but usable, develops over time." Their system contains no Socionics-PoLR style "can't, don't want". This means you can never disqualify yourself from a type based on what you're bad at, because no type is really bad at anything.
Together, strong tertiary + soft inferior is a systematic Barnum strategy. It increases the chance that anyone reading a type description will see themselves in it (three strong and one potentially decent function = more positive traits to identify with, no clear weaknesses to reject). In general, often the attempt to avoid "stereotypical type descriptions" leads to these supposedly "sophisticated cognitive function analyses" that are actually Barnum on steroids (Ne is external pattern connection with Si memory integration processing... etc.)
The MBTI definitional war between Te and Ti deserves a brief detour because it reveals how function theory can operate as a tribal identity. The Ti-glorifying camp defines Ti as "real logic", deep understanding, and Te as shallow pragmatism, groupthink, following external authorities (the drill sergeant archetype). The Te-glorifying camp defines Te as evidence-based reasoning, insights about the real world, effective leadership, real-world results — and Ti as constucting castles in the sky, and general basement-dwelling impracticality.
The Te negative stereotypes are telling. They're not feminine-coded (as one might expect from a dichotomy with Fi) — they're masculine. The drill sergeant. The obedient bureaucrat. The soulless corporate machine. The Ti negatives are also gendered but differently: as the basement-dwelling overthinker. The real war isn't masculine vs. feminine but competing versions of masculinity: the intellectual (Ti) vs. the practical (Te). The same dynamic plays out with Fe ("caring" vs. "fake") and Fi ("authentic" vs. "selfish"), creating yet more and more tribal alliances. It also shows how arbitrary can these definitions be: what is the "real" Ti or Te? Who knows? There are, however, cases, where the descriptions become too unbalanced to be rejected by almost everyone. One example comes from Psychological Types itself.
(Forum thread with the image source)
Jung's original description of Introverted Sensing type sounds strange to adherents of most post-Jungian theories. For Jung, Si was about the subjective sensory impression, which bears little resemblance to the external stimulus. Jung described the Si type as an awkward eccentric who perceives the world through a subjective lens so thick that reality becomes hallucinatory and they constantly see benevolent angels and malevolent demons in everything. This is closer to a description of psychedelic experience, or to a permanent inhabitant of a mental institution than to any post-Jungian Si. In fact, Jung characterized both P-doms as "the most useless of men", but he was far more complimentary to the Introverted Intuitive — a potential prophetic artist — than to the Introverted Sensor who is genuinely useless (not once Jung suggested that his IS type can use his distinctiveness to help himself or others, save an exception case of producing bizzarre, surrealist art).
Both Myers and Augusta (the founder of Socionics) abandoned this description (while being quite coy about what they're doing), but in different directions. Myers stripped the mysticism and turned Si into a "SJ" preference for concrete facts, past experience, and established procedures — sensible, but bearing little resemblance to Jung. Augusta went a different direction entirely: Socionics Si became about physical comfort, internal bodily sensations, feeling of homeostasis. This is vivid and specific but also far from Jung's subjective hallucinatory distortion.
The Cognitive Type (CT) vultology-heavy system of Sandoval, another MBTI offshoot, took Si somewhere else entirely — into narrativism, historical consciousness, encyclopedic memory, nostalgia, and collecting. According to their website description, CT's Si user "lives and views life through narratives," enjoys history and anthropology, accumulates factual trivia, and feels personally connected to old objects as symbols of bygone eras. The problem: almost none of this is actually about Sensing. History is abstract. Narratology is conceptual. Context and backstory are matters of meaning, not sensation. CT Si is almost completely divorced from actual S as a dichotomy. Even mainstream MBTI theorists would say that Si is about your past sensory impressions, so abstract stuff like history or narratology shouldn't go there, not necessarily, at least.
One of Socionics' innovations (whether it's a good or bad innovation is up to you, but it's definitely striking) is its treatment of extraverted sensing (Se). In mainstream MBTI, Se is a perceiving function: present-moment awareness, noticing sensory details, experiencing reality directly. In this, it's fairly loyal to Jung, who described his Extraverted Sensor, as a pleasant, but shallow sensory sybarite (Jung, in general, considered extraverts to be shallower than introverts).
Augusta already linked Se to willpower, force, the capacity to impose your will on reality (on SLE: "He is a strong-willed, determined person... He has the personality of an untamed struggler, who must come out on top no matter what the cost"). Socionics Se isn't just perceiving the environment; it's about commanding it. The Se-dom in Socionics occupies physical space with authority and his interest in material objects leads to possessive character traits. Socionics' SLE (Se-Ti) is a commanding, forceful presence — contemptuous of weakness, fearless, a conqueror. MBTI's ESTP is an action-loving thrill-seeker who notices sensory details and lives in the moment. The SLE sounds like a warlord; the ESTP sounds like a surfer. Same supposed function, different species — although at least, both are adrenaline junkies.
The Russian early socionist Lytov identified a fundamental trade-off in personality description: brightness. Socionics characterizations are "brighter" than MBTI ones — more vivid, more specific, more memorable. This is double-edged. A bright description is impressive when it hits ("Oh my god, that's exactly my dad!"), but it narrows each type's applicability and creates false negatives when the specific details don't match. Talanov-socionics, for istance, deals with "peaceful ESTP's" with some difficulty.
Compare a typical description of MBTI-ESTJ ("values structure," "prefers planning in advance," "good at tracking time cost") with Talanov's LSE ("proud that his household is cleaner and more organized than others," "vegetable garden more efficient," "very attentive to health and well-being," "large amount of short-term visual memory — remembers details of image or location of objects on table"). The MBTI version is more general, hard to falsify but also hard to recognize anyone by. The Socionics version is vivid and specific: you either know this person or you don't. But you cannot simultaneously have vivid specificity and universal coverage.
At the far end of the brightness problem is the rarity obsession of pop-typologies. A funny advertisement for a personality quiz recently circulated online, organizing animal-personality results into tiers from "NPC Level (Majority)" at the bottom to "Elite Archetype (Extremely Rare)" at the top, the latter populated by dragons, swans, and unicorns. The quiz is transparently absurd (why does it treat "puppy" and "dog" as separate personality categories?), but is quite telling.
The entire framework is organized around a single question: how special are you? NPC Level is explicitly the unremarkable majority. Each tier above promises greater rarity, culminating in mythical creatures that don't exist. This isn't unique to bad quizzes. MBTI has its own rarity mystique: INFJ is obsessively promoted as "the rarest type," which guarantees that a disproportionate number of people self-type as INFJ. The whole appeal is being told you're uncommon. This leads to the avalanche of "No, you're not an INFJ, you're an INFP" and "10 Signs That You're An INFJ" content.
There is another fault line that cuts across all these systems, rarely discussed but fundamental: the question of whether a typology is static or dynamic — whether it describes what you are or what happens to you over time.
MBTI and Socionics are essentially static typologies. You have a type; it doesn't change. The advantage is stability: you can study the types, learn the system, and apply it consistently. The disadvantage is that static typologies struggle with growth, and can seem oddly fatalistic, especially ones that don't shy from negative characterizations. Talanov types clearly differ in mendacity and optimism/pessimism, but it's unclear what does this typology offer to an actual mendacious pessimist. Should they change their ways? If yes, how?
Purely dynamic typologies have the opposite problem. Stage theories (Erikson, Kegan, Loevinger) describe developmental trajectories beautifully but often lack the concrete specificity that makes typologies useful for recognizing actual people, and can devolve into Barnum: develop your Demon function into your Angel function! The result is, no matter whether you relate to a specific function as an "angel" or a "demon", it still fits you.
The Enneagram deserves credit here for being one of the few typologies that genuinely integrates both dimensions. Each Enneagram type has a static core (your basic number), but the system also specifies your levels of development, at least as the Enneagram Institute presents it.
While the language sounds new-agey (quite common for this typology), still, the result is a system that actually tracks a fairly distinctive pathway for each type. It's not empirically validated in the way Big Five is, but as a structural achievement in typological design, it handles the static-dynamic problem more gracefully than any Jungian-derived system manages to.
Furthemore, personality typology doesn't exist in a political vacuum, and the biases of researchers shape their instruments in many ways.
I've recently read an intriguing mainstream politology book (Political Psychology, editors: John T. Lost and Jim Sidanius) that opened a section (see Reading 2, p. 45) with a case study of a 1930'ies Nazi German psychologist, who posited two personality types — a liberal cosmopolitain one, and an equivalent of RWA — obedient, dutiful, hierarchical. Of course, he explicitly blasted the first type as "degenerate" and endorsed the RWA equivalent.
The researchers who developed the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) scales clearly disliked what they were researching. It's evident in the item construction, where high scores on these scales are designed to sound alarming. The items measuring authoritarianism practically beg the respondent to disagree with them ("Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us"). The researchers saw authoritarianism as a pathology to be diagnosed, and their instruments reflect that judgment. In this sense, even Talanov's attitude to his test items that clearly correspond to RWA and SDO — yes, it's quite notable that they exist — (Se for SDO, Di, anti-Qi, anti-Ne for RWA, maybe also Qe for SDO) are more balanced, for all his rhetorics, in that he occasionally acknowledges the positive side of these traits.
Jonathan Haidt's famous Moral Foundations Theory ("The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion") attempted a correction, arguing that conservative morality isn't deficient but broader — encompassing loyalty, authority, and purity/sanctity foundations that liberal morality neglects. The framing sounds even-handed: liberals have fewer moral foundations (care and fairness), conservatives have more (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity). But the construction is sympathetic to conservatives in that it presents more moral foundations as more "morally complete," implicitly casting liberals as morally impoverished. No wonder I noticed that it's a favorite of thoughtful conservatives, the same way RWA and SDO research is among the more liberal people.
The empirical picture may be more complicated than either camp suggests. Talanov's work with ex-USSR samples found that the relationship between disgust sensitivity and political conservatism is not linear (as Haidt claims) but U-shaped: both very low and very high disgust sensitivity correlate with conservatism, while liberals fall in the moderate range. This makes sense if you recognize two distinct conservative types: the "Qe" disgust-driven populist leader ("they are contaminating our pure nation") and the "Di" low-disgust foot soldier ("I follow orders, work with anyone assigned, and don't think I'm special"). It, however, may not hold for other times and places, like the USA. Mind you, it's possible that Haidt's Western samples, dominated by the first type, produced a linear relationship because low-disgust conservatives are quiet, obedient, and don't generate content for psychological studies.
This raises a broader problem. American founding mythology is built on rebellion: the Revolution is the national origin story, "Don't Tread on Me" is a cultural sacrament, "rugged individualist" is a compliment. This creates a cultural prohibition on admitting conformity. Everyone frames themselves as rebels ("drain the swamp," "question the mainstream"), producing questionnaire responses that code as individualist when the actual behavior may very well be deeply collectivist. Talanov's ex-Soviet respondents, raised in a culture where collective sacrifice was the national virtue, could honestly answer items about conformity and hierarchy acceptance. American respondents find it harder to do that, because rebellion is sacred. Maybe the sheer number of YA novels with young protagonists fighting generic dictatorships also contributed to it? An entire generation grew up consuming stories where the default assumption is that authorities are corrupt and rebellion is heroic, so even when someone supports the authorities, they imagine themselves as rebels against the other side's leadership (for Trumpists, woke professors or something similar). It does seem that nowadays, in American context, most people with any strongly held views actually like to imagine some generic grand poobah shrieking "how dare you think that!" or "how dare you contradict me!" at them.
This means that questionnaires developed in one cultural context may systematically mismeasure the same traits in another. Cross-cultural personality research isn't just a matter of translation, it also requires understanding the permission structures of each culture. What can people admit to wanting, being, or doing? The answer varies, and the instruments rarely account for it. This especially applies to Talanov's Questimity-Declatimity dimension, which is in large part about that.
The political-societal dimensions of Talanovite socionics somewhat glorify late Soviet intelligentsia (after all, not only Talanov, but Aushra herself also belonged to this strata). He clearly identifies with the Alpha NT researchers and idealists, resenting the authoritarian LSI/EIE/SLE ideologies of the Beta quadra and the Gamma extraverts in the shape of the demagogic politician SEE and pragmatic businessman LIE. ILI is a bit of a "dark shadow" of ILE/LII, also a cerebral type, but much more cynical in its worldview. The rest — IEI, ESI and the whole Delta — are a bit of a "Hufflepuff House", to use the TvTropes terminology: decent (IEI attraction to the authoritarians aside) people on the sidelines.
There's also mainstream MBTI, which tends to avoid politization and has a "every time can equally be the villain" motto, in itself a choice, although in some characterizations, "villainy" is associated with TJ.
As for me, I think that your political views are clearly correlated with sociotype, but they have plenty of non-socionic factors, as well (your social and material position, the general range allowed by the historical situation). Often, asking about the reason for a political stance is more enlightening than simply picking a dot on the Political Compass (note: another typology!), or whatever coordinate system you choose.
After cataloguing all these problems, what's left?
A few things, actually.
First, behavioral clusters are real. Even as people change in their lives, there really are systematic, efficiency-oriented practical managers, there exist philosophical, doubt-prone, socially awkward systematic thinkers, as well as melancholic, passive, aesthetically sensitive anticipators of doom. As Jung remarked once on extraverts and introverts, "we all know people like that". These aren't arbitrary groupings — they show up repeatedly across systems, across cultures, in the descriptions of people who have never heard of typology. The types exist, even if the names typologies give to them can be arbitrary (MBTI Si-lead overlaps with Socionics Se-creative, for instance, in particular, in descriptions that emphasise MBTI Si-lead's lack of Ne). The theories about why they exist are where things go wrong.
Second, specific behavioral predictions are useful even when the theoretical framework is wrong. Socionics' claim that LSE types are health-conscious, practically competent, and proud of their domestic efficiency is testable and, anecdotally, often correct. Even CT's observation that strong-Ti people tend to be silent for long periods, then speak after extensive reflection, is recognizable. These observations have value independent of whether "Ti" or "Si" are real cognitive entities.
Third, the precision-coverage trade-off identified by Lytov is genuinely useful as a meta-principle for evaluating any personality description. When someone offers you a personality framework, ask: is it bright or dim? If bright, it will be memorable and impressive when accurate but narrow in applicability. If dim, it will fit everyone but tell you nothing. The ideal is somewhere in between — specific enough to be falsifiable, general enough to capture a real cluster. Most popular systems err heavily toward dim (Barnum) because that maximizes customer satisfaction and minimizes complaints.
What doesn't survive the critique is the theoretical superstructure: the idea that there are exactly eight cognitive functions, arranged in a specific stack, producing specific types through a specific mechanism. This is unfalsifiable, leads to endless fragmentation (because unfalsifiable claims can be rearranged without consequence), and produces the tribal wars that consume most of the community's energy.
Essentially, we need a "typology of typologies", since personality typology is useful ethnography wrapped in bad theory. The observations are often good. The explanations are almost always wrong. And the community dynamics — the tribal wars, the rarity obsession, the Barnum strategies, the political biases — are themselves often more interesting, and more empirically tractable, than the personality types they fight about.
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