Socionic library
articles, books and educational materials

of the International institute of Socionics

Maurice Yolles, Gerhard Fink
An Introduction to Mindset Theory

The plural agency is a self-referential, self-regulating, self-organising, adaptive, proactive and culturally stable collective, having a normative personality belonging to a psychosocial framework of the “collective mind.” The agency can be characterised by Mindset types, a derivative of Maruyama’s Mindscape meta-theory - a little known but powerful epistemic approach that can anticipate an agency’s patterns of behaviour and demands. A Mindscape is a construct from which coherent sets of behavioural mindsets can emerge. However, Mindscape theory lacks generative transparency, and the Mindset theory we develop changes this. Mindset Theory is based on the SagivSchwartz (2007) cultural values study from which 8 Mindset types are generated that individually or in combination can characterise personality and anticipate behaviour.

Mindsets, Mindscapes, Traits, Jungian psychological functions, Attitude, Temperament, Self-organisation, Adaptation

Jung established a basis for the development of a cognitive theory of personality. It became the entry point for a number of other schemas for personality that centre on personality differences between individuals. They include the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) schema and its close relative Socionics linking Jung’s conceptualisations with those of Freud and Kepinski (Müller, Malsch & Schulz-Schaeffer, 1998). Other schemas include the Five Factor Method (Cattel, 1945), often referred to as FFM or the Big Five. There is a main distinction in the approaches adopted by MBTI and FFM: the former is a typology (i.e., identifying personality types) of personality preference patterns (Cody, 1996), and the latter is a trait approach that indicates a personality framework of indicative variables. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, since the states that traits variables adopt can be represented as types (Eysenck, 1957).


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