Sassy Mythbusting: There’s No Such Thing as “Type A” Personality
Welcome to the Behavioural Sassonomics series where we bust pop psychology myths! This new segment is intended to be fun, educational, and will surely make you look smart in front of your friends. Today: Type A Personality is NOT A THING.
I probably don’t even need to describe the picture of a “Type A” individual. The term is so commonly used out there to describe the high-strung, achievement-oriented, competitive, stressed, bossy, organized person you imagine walking hurriedly down Wall Street.
In fact, it’s so popular and pervasive as a term, I got “about 6,580,000,000 results” on Google when I searched it. More concerning, it seems that sites claiming to be about Psychology describe it as a real theory, and some sites even say you should be using this framework to hire people!
Someone described me as Type A the other day. I’m very collaborative and conscientious so immediately I knew the trope of the bossy corporate person didn’t fit. So I looked into it further. Guess what?
Type A Personality is NOT A THING.
Let’s look into it a bit further and try to understand why labelling people as Type A could be problematic.
How Did The Type A Personality Idea Come Up, Anyway?
The idea dates back to the 1950s, based on observations by two cardiologists, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman. They observed that there were patterns of behaviour more associated with cardiac events and they labelled those who exhibit these behaviours ‘Type A’. The Type A individuals were more wound up, competitive, aggressive, and self-critical. Type B people tend to be less stressed, more social, and less achievement-oriented than Type B. The cardiologists performed a longitudinal study, following patients over eight and a half years, asking them questions about stress-associated behaviours. They found people who were Type A were more than twice as likely to develop coronary heart disease.
The rise in popularity of personality frameworks to understand, judge, or label people has taken off like wildfire, and Type A has become a household term and is even listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.
It Turns Out, Type A Personality Doesn’t Exist
Michael Wilmot, formerly of University of Toronto Scarborough, and team compiled comprehensive evidence that Type A personality is not a thing. Wilmot and colleagues’ paper set out to replicate and re-analyze original studies with more up-to-date survey methods to find out if it would produce the same results. Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, their studies were unable to replicate the results, showing that the construct from the original paper and research were not indeed valid.
In another twist, a 2012 paper found evidence that the original study by the cardiologists was heavily bankrolled by the cigarette industry, who were looking to downplay the impact of cigarettes on heart disease by insinuating it was more to do with behaviour and personality. Hm.
The Myth of Type A Represents Our Outdated Views on Personality
The results of study by Wilmot and team that didn’t find evidence for Type A as a naturally occurring personality type supports our now accepted view that personality should be thought of as continuums for specific traits, rather than categories. We now better understand that individuals fall on continuums of traits, and the strict categorization of people into types doesn’t really capture the full picture.
The original survey questions illustrate this categorical approach through dichotomous questions - for example:
Do you feel guilty if you use spare time to relax?
Do you need to win in order to derive enjoyment from games and sports?
Do you generally move, walk and eat rapidly?
You can only answer yes or no to these questions. But what if you only sometimes feel guilty using your spare time to relax? How do you answer then?
When the categories around personality are strict, that can get us into trouble. In this case, you can imagine that some people have some of the traits of Type A, and some people have other traits of Type A. You could make an error labelling someone Type A which suggests they have certain traits that they don’t even have.
In the case of someone calling me Type A recently, perhaps I was exhibiting a characteristic or two she was associating with Type A like being organized and pushing towards a goal, but I wasn’t exhibiting many other characteristics, like being aggressive or competitive.
So, you can’t be Type A. I mean, really, at best you could have some characteristics of traits associated with Type A.
Let’s Stop Using The Term Type A, Shall We?
Most academics consider Type A/Type B to be outdated. Though it appeals to us in its ability to easily define others, pigeonholing someone into a type isn’t really that helpful in understanding the full picture about that individual.
Where we get into real trouble, however, is using dichotomous or outdated frameworks to make hiring or professional decisions about an employee. At that point you are not really evaluating them, but rather you are only evaluating the qualities of the ‘type’ you assigned them to. That probably won’t really help you in your hiring decision!
Buzzfeed personality assessments, such as the likes of “I Can Sum Up Your Whole Personality In 5 Words With Only 15 Random Questions” can be fun and funny, but very few people are thinking the results are seriously determinate of who they are. If you are interested in an academically and psychologically accepted assessment of personality, try “The Big Five”, which reports where you stand on a continuum for five traits.
Final takeaway
In an era of reckoning around inclusion, labelling and pigeonholing people is not a good idea. What is a great idea if spending time to get to know others. And also, tying back to the original study by the cardiologists about the connection between stress and coronary events, it is definitely a good idea to reduce stress and stop smoking, both of which have an impact on heart disease!
Love,
