Behavior

I believe that, when it comes to socionics, few questions are as important as the one I am going to address in this post. Your personal answer to this question will color everything else about the way you see the system and the way you practice it. The question is the following:

What is the relationship between socionics type and human behavior? 

Are certain behaviors inherent in certain types while being impossible for others? And if not, how come we can still use behavior as evidence in typing? Let me try to outline an answer. 

I will start by saying that the structure of socionics is actually very simple, with only two things being really integral to it:  

1. the nature of elements, i.e. what kind of information this element covers;
2. the nature of functions, i.e. what kind of relationship a person has with an element in this position (it should be noted that two blocked functions are intrinsically linked and therefore mutually influenced by one another). 

All other concepts in socionics are a consequence of this structure, and of these concepts the most fundamental is type. 

What is type? It is something we get when we map elements onto functions. The result of this synthesis is the nature of specific elements in specific positions, i.e. what kind of relationship a person has with specific kinds of information. Personality traits and behaviors are therefore not a part of any type's core definition - the only things that are integral to a type are parts of the socionic structure it is based on. 

But is behavior not a consequence of type? And if it is, would that not mean that behavioral tendencies are inherent in types, after all? It is fairly obvious that the way we perceive and interact with information has a huge influence on everything we do and everything we are. But, while behavior is a consequence of type, I would argue that it is not a consequence of just type. Rather, I see behavior as a result of a "collision" between several things: 

1. type;
2. the context of the situation;
3. other factors that influenced and continue to influence the person. These include, but are not limited to, culture, upbringing, past experiences and mental health. 

What this means is that, while behavior is a consequence of type, the connection between behavior and type is not linear. There is not a single person on Earth whose personality and behavioral tendencies did not change at all over the course of their lifespan. People change, sometimes beyond recognition, but their socionics type stays the same. 

Still, we do not have direct access to another person's mind, so behavior is all we have to go off of if we want to type someone. And it is definitely possible to use behavior as evidence of type, but in order to do so we must take into account the context of the situation and the person's past and present experiences. We must explain how this behavior follows from type for this specific person and in these specific circumstances. Behavior in itself, without knowing the context and the person, is not evidence of type and should not be ascribed to specific types, nor should we say that any behavior is impossible for the specific types. 

I realize that this condition makes it harder to practice socionics. It means that we can never do it perfectly because we can never know all the factors needed to type someone with full certainty. Even when trying our best, occasionally we will still fail and make surface-level typings with faulty reasoning. But I think that we should still strive for a nuanced and situational approach to typing, because, when practiced well, socionics can be an amazing tool that can aid us in understanding others and ourselves - something that it can hardly do when types are viewed as nothing more than mere clusters of personality traits and behavioral patterns.