A study of the socionic characteristics of males and females for improving the reliability of aptitude screening of aviation specialists

Aim. This article continues the series of studies aimed at improving the aptitude screening of commercial aviation personnel. The socionic characteristics of a human operator define his/her work with information flows, and their significance is the higher, the greater is the time shortage they have to deal with as part of their professional activities, therefore, in this paper, those characteristics were examined as professionally important qualities of both a pilot, and an air traffic controller. The task consisted in evaluating the socionic characteristics of male and female control room specialists, who have successfully completed aptitude screening in commercial aviation, identifying the presence or absence of differences between the obtained results. Additionally, for the sake of comparison, the research covered the socionic characteristics of males and females, whose professional activities have nothing to do with technology. In total, the study includes data of over 3116 tested persons.Methods. The 5-th modification of the MM-1 socionic test developed by the Saint Petersburg State University of Civil Aviation was used as the psychodiagnostic method for estimating constituent socionic characteristics. The obtained samples were primarily compared using Pearson’s chi-squared test. The results were also processed using correlation analysis.Results. The paper presents socionic portraits,i.e. the distribution of the dominating components of the human socionic model among various samples, socionic models of various professional groups (human socionic model for a typical member of a sample), as well as graphical data per individual psychological dichotomies: “extraversion – introversion”, “logic – ethics”, “sensorics – intuition”, “rationality – irrationality”.Conclusions. The identified differences between the studied samples are primarily professional in their nature, i.e. comparing samples of individuals from the same professional group and approximately the same age, but different gender, in no case reliable differences were identified. Thus, no fundamental gender-specific differences were identified by the socionic psychodiagnostic method used as part of this work. However, the analysis of a number of Russian and foreign sources dedicated to gender differences suggests that improving the reliability of aptitude screening of aviation specialists requires further research involving the evaluation of the differences in the expression of the necessary professionally significant qualities of control room specialists, not by criterion of biological sex, but rather in accordance with the identified gender-related personality type.