Socionics

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.