Temperament tests, from the four humours to the Big Five

What is a temperament test?

Most tests sold under that name do one of two things. The older kind places you in one of four temperaments, sanguine, choleric, melancholic or phlegmatic, from a short set of questions about how you react and how much you seek people out. The newer kind, associated with David Keirsey, groups the sixteen Myers-Briggs types into four temperaments and gives you one of them.

Both are attempts at a real and useful question: which dispositions show up early, stay fairly constant, and shape how a person meets ordinary days. Psychology still asks that question. It answers it with scales rather than boxes, and with a different set of dimensions than four.

Where do the four temperaments come from?

The four humours

The framework is ancient. Hippocratic medicine held that the body contained four fluids, blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm, and that health was a matter of their balance. In the second century the physician Galen took the idea further and tied each fluid to a characteristic way of being. Sanguine was cheerful and sociable; choleric, quick and forceful; melancholic, inward and easily cast down; phlegmatic, slow, calm and hard to stir. That scheme outlived the medicine it came from by well over a thousand years, and it still shapes how people describe each other.

The physiology was wrong. The observation underneath it was not. Galen was describing two things that genuinely vary between people: how far outward a person turns, and how strongly they react when something goes wrong. Those two contrasts are what the modern reading preserves.

Keirsey's four temperaments

David Keirsey proposed a different four in the 1970s, built on the Myers-Briggs letters rather than on fluids. The Keirsey Temperament Sorter is a self-report questionnaire that produces a four-letter type and groups the sixteen types into Artisan (the SP types), Guardian (SJ), Idealist (NF) and Rational (NT). The descriptions are rich, and many people find them recognisable. The letters themselves do track real traits: they line up with four of the Big Five, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness (Furnham, 1996). As measurement, the sorter inherits the difficulty of any scheme built on cut points: the scales underneath are continuous, and most people sit near the middle of them.

What does temperament mean in psychology now?

It has a narrower and more precise meaning. Temperament refers to individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation that appear early in life, rest on biology, and are shaped over time by experience (Rothbart, 2007). Reactivity is how quickly and strongly a child responds to what happens: how easily distressed, how easily delighted, how much they approach. Regulation is what the child can do about it: how well attention can be shifted, how long an impulse can be held.

Research on temperament usually works with a handful of broad dimensions rather than four types, commonly a surgent, outgoing factor, a negative-emotion factor and an effortful-control factor. Those three line up recognisably with adult Extraversion, Emotional Stability and Conscientiousness.

The continuity from early temperament to adult traits is real and partial. Childhood differences in reactivity and control predict later personality and a range of outcomes, while leaving plenty of room for change along the way (Shiner & Caspi, 2003). Adult rank order on traits is already fairly stable by early adulthood and becomes more so with age (Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000). Temperament is a starting position, not a destination.

How do the four temperaments map onto the Big Five?

Roughly, and only across two dimensions. If you set outward-turning against inward-turning on one axis and even-tempered against easily stirred on the other, the four classical temperaments fall neatly into the four corners. In Big Five terms those axes are Extraversion and Emotional Stability, the reverse of which is called Neuroticism.

Two things are worth saying about this map. It is approximate: the classical descriptions bundle in other material, so the choleric portrait also carries lower Agreeableness and the melancholic one carries higher Openness in most retellings. And each corner is a region of a space, not a point, so two sanguine people can sit a long way apart.

The Extraversion half of the grid has been studied closely. Extraversion is reliably associated with more positive feeling, and Neuroticism with more negative feeling, and the two run largely independently rather than as ends of one scale (Costa & McCrae, 1980). That is the piece of the ancient scheme that has held up best.

What do four boxes lose?

Three things, and the third is the one people notice least.

• The numbers. Both dimensions are continuous, with most people near the middle. Sorting into corners means a small difference either side of a cut point decides which temperament you are handed, and the difference disappears from the result (McCrae & Costa, 1989).
• The certainty. A box invites conclusions the underlying measurement cannot support, which is the central caution in the psychometric review of four-letter type formulas (Pittenger, 2005). A scale does not have that problem, because a small change in score is reported as a small change.
• Three whole dimensions. Personality descriptions converge on five broad factors, not two (Goldberg, 1993). A four-temperament grid says nothing about Conscientiousness, Agreeableness or Openness to Experience, and those are where much of the prediction lives.

Short tests have a further cost of their own: reliability rises with the number of questions, and very abbreviated measures understate how much a trait actually matters (Credé et al., 2012). None of this makes the four temperaments a bad vocabulary. Sanguine and phlegmatic are vivid words, and people use them accurately about each other. They are simply a coarse reading of something that can be measured finely.

Why does Wellington use scores and bands instead of a temperament?

Extraversion and Emotional Stability are quantities. Score either across a large sample and the result is a bell: a crowded middle, thin ends, and every value in between occupied by somebody.

Nowhere on that curve does sanguine end and phlegmatic begin, so the corners of the grid are drawn rather than found. The cost falls on whoever sits near a line, whose result changes when their answers shift by a point from one sitting to the next. Type scales compared with trait inventories behaved as continuous dimensions with no distinct types beneath them (McCrae & Costa, 1989), and the broad structure they belong to was settled over decades of descriptive research (Goldberg, 1993).

Wellington reports the quantity. Each dimension is placed against a reference sample as a percentile, then covered by three bands with published cut-offs: Quiet as far as the 30th percentile, Balanced as far as the 70th, High above it, on norms that stay provisional until the norming sample is complete. The bands and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside.

A band is easier to say than a percentile, and a name easier still, so the combination of bands also carries a named Portrait. It is a summary chosen from the scores rather than a box that stands in for them. The name is for practicality, and the numbers are the measurement.

How does Wellington measure temperament?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

It does not report a temperament, because it measures the dimensions underneath one. The free Snapshot asks 60 questions, takes about 7 minutes, and scores 6 dimensions: the Big Five and Honesty-Humility. Each statement is rated on a five-point accuracy scale, each score is the average of its statements, and each average is placed against a reference sample as a percentile, then reported in one of three bands: Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above it. The norms are provisional until the norming sample is complete. You answer the first ten questions straight away, then sign in with an email so your answers are saved and your results can be shown. There is no card.

The two axes of the old grid, outward-turning and even-tempered, are measured here as Extraversion and Emotional Stability. Every band has its own written page, prepared in advance by the writing and psychology team. On Extraversion the Quiet band is called The Quiet Room and the High band The Open Door; on Emotional Stability the Quiet band is The Living Barometer and the High band The Wide Floor. A sanguine reading would be a High band on both, a melancholic one a Quiet band on both, and the report will tell you how far into each band you actually are.

The Wellington Membership adds the Portrait, 336 questions in 4 chapters and about 36 minutes, to reach 90 traits, including every facet beneath the six dimensions and the 24 VIA character strengths. You can see how the scores are built in the methodology. Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not designed for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Questions people ask

Is the four temperaments theory accurate?

The physiology behind it is not; the observation is partly right. Galen's four corners correspond to two real dimensions, Extraversion and Emotional Stability, which modern research measures as continuous scales. What the four-box version misses is how far from the middle you sit, and the three other broad dimensions that personality research keeps finding (Goldberg, 1993).

What is the difference between temperament and personality?

Temperament usually means the early-appearing, biologically grounded differences in reactivity and self-regulation that are visible in infancy and childhood (Rothbart, 2007). Personality is the fuller adult pattern those differences grow into, including habits, values and characteristic ways of handling people. The two are continuous with one another rather than separate things.

Is the Keirsey Temperament Sorter the same as the MBTI?

They are separate instruments that use the same four letters. Keirsey's sorter produces a four-letter type and groups the sixteen into four temperaments, with his own descriptions attached. Because both rest on cut points across scales that behave as continuous dimensions rather than dichotomies (McCrae & Costa, 1989), the letters carry less information than the descriptions attached to them suggest (Pittenger, 2005).

Can your temperament change?

The starting position is fairly persistent, and it is not fixed. Childhood reactivity and control predict adult traits without determining them (Shiner & Caspi, 2003), and rank order on adult traits is stable but not perfect, tightening with age (Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000). Average levels also drift across adulthood, usually toward more calm and more conscientiousness (Roberts et al., 2006).