Type A and Type B personality: what the evidence says

What do Type A and Type B mean?

In ordinary use the labels describe how a person moves through a day. Type A is competitive and driven, impatient with delay, doing two things at once and quick to irritation when blocked. Type B is the other half of the pair: unhurried, even-tempered, able to work hard without treating every task as a contest.

The pair did not come out of personality research. It came out of cardiology in the middle of the twentieth century, when heart specialists described a behavioural style they saw among their patients. That origin explains its shape: the label was built to separate a group of interest from everyone else, so there are two boxes rather than a scale.

Two different things are bundled inside the description. One is pace and drive: hurry, ambition, doing more in less time. The other is hostility: irritability with other people, a readiness to take offence. They often appear together, but they are not the same thing and need not appear in the same person.

What did the research on Type A find?

The idea was taken seriously enough to be reviewed quantitatively. A 1987 review in Psychological Bulletin examined psychological predictors of heart disease across a body of studies (Booth-Kewley & Friedman, 1987), so the question of which psychological characteristics relate to heart problems has been looked at meta-analytically since the 1980s.

Figures from that review circulate widely at second hand, and this page does not repeat them. The paper carries no published abstract, so what it concluded cannot be read from its own summary, and the editorial standards here are to cite a study only for what it states itself.

The more useful point does not depend on any single paper. Type A is not one thing, and a label that folds pace, ambition and irritability into a yes-or-no answer cannot tell you which of them you have. Those components have been measured separately for decades, and that evidence is on personality and health.

How does Type A read in Big Five terms?

The table is a reading, not a validated crosswalk. No published conversion from a Type A questionnaire to Big Five scores exists, so it compares what the description says with what the trait dimensions measure.

At least three separate measurements sit inside the Type A box. Someone fast and ambitious but warm with colleagues is nothing like someone fast, ambitious and hostile.

Why does a two-box label lose information?

Because what it is made of is continuous. Measure a broad disposition in a large sample and scores spread out with most people near the middle, not into two clusters with a gap between. The trait description came out of decades of lexical and questionnaire work and reports a position rather than a category (Goldberg, 1993).

The best-studied case makes the arithmetic plain. Scored alongside a five-factor inventory in 468 adults, the scales of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator behaved as continuous dimensions, with no support for the view that they measure dichotomous preferences or distinct types (McCrae & Costa, 1989). The Type A split is not exempt.

• The rounding. Someone just above a cut point and someone far above it get the same label; someone just below gets the opposite one.
• The instability. Most people sit near the middle, so a hard month can move the label without the person having changed.
• The bundling. Two boxes cannot say that your pace is high and your hostility low, which is the most useful thing they could report.

What actually predicts health behaviour and emotional difficulty?

For behaviour, Conscientiousness carries the evidence. A meta-analysis assembled 194 studies relating conscientiousness-related traits to the leading behavioural contributors to mortality, including tobacco use, diet, heavy drinking and risky driving (Bogg & Roberts, 2004). Those traits were negatively related to every risky behaviour in the set and positively related to every protective one. It is the best-evidenced route from a trait to a health outcome.

For how difficult feelings arrive and pass, the dimension is Emotional Stability, whose opposite pole is Neuroticism. A review of its public health significance defines Neuroticism as a stable tendency to respond to threat, frustration or loss with negative emotion, and argues that it predicts many health outcomes and health service use (Lahey, 2009). A meta-analysis of 175 studies found it markedly elevated among people with common emotional difficulties, mean d = 1.65, with Conscientiousness low, mean d = -1.01 (Kotov et al., 2010). Those associations describe groups.

So the Type A question is the wrong instrument for the worry behind it. It mixes a Conscientiousness facet, an Extraversion facet and two flavours of negative feeling into one word. The answerable version is narrower: how persistent am I, how fast, how warm, and how quickly does frustration arrive.

Am I Type A or Type B?

Almost everyone is in between, because the dispositions underneath are spread continuously. Three passes at your own description are more use than the label.

• Separate the hurry from the hostility. List the last three times you felt rushed and the last three times you felt irritated with someone. If those are the same events, the two are tangled for you. If not, probably only one is high.
• Ask what the pace costs. A fast tempo you enjoy and a fast tempo you cannot get out of look identical from outside and feel nothing alike. The second is closer to low Emotional Stability than to high drive.
• Refuse the moral reading. Drive finishes long work and crowds out rest; an easy tempo protects the week and lets a deadline slide. The types of personality page covers the other systems that cut the same ground.

How does Wellington measure this?

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.

The free Snapshot asks 60 questions, takes about 7 minutes and scores 6 continuous dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience and Honesty-Humility. Each is the average of several statements on a five-point accuracy scale, placed against a reference sample as a percentile and reported in one of three bands: Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above it. Norms are provisional while the norming sample is completed, and the methods page says so. 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. You answer the first ten questions before anything is asked; after question ten you sign in with an email so answers are saved and results can be shown.

The pieces the label runs together are reported separately in the Wellington Membership, $4.99 a month, which adds 336 questions across 4 chapters to reach 90 traits. Those include achievement striving and activity level for drive and pace, and calmness for how quickly frustration arrives. The membership grows toward 255 traits across eight domains.

Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. Nothing here is medical advice, and a personality score is not a health assessment; a worry about your heart is a conversation for a doctor. Wellington is not designed for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Questions people ask

Is Type A personality a real psychological category?

It is a real description that people recognise, but not a natural category. The dispositions it is built from are continuous, so most people fall between the two boxes, and the label bundles pace, ambition and irritability without saying which is high.

Is being Type A bad for you?

This page does not make that claim. The 1987 quantitative review of psychological predictors of heart disease is cited here only for its existence, because it carries no published abstract against which a finding could be checked. The trait evidence is narrower: conscientiousness-related traits relate to every major health behaviour in the expected direction across 194 studies (Bogg & Roberts, 2004), and Neuroticism predicts a range of health outcomes and health service use (Lahey, 2009).

What is the difference between Type A and Type B?

In the popular description, Type A is competitive, hurried and quick to irritation, while Type B is unhurried and even-tempered. In trait terms that difference spreads across at least three dimensions: activity level and achievement striving for pace and drive, and Agreeableness and Emotional Stability for temper. A person can be high on one and low on another.

Can a Type A personality change?

The traits underneath move slowly rather than not at all. Rank order becomes more consistent with age, from about .31 in childhood to a plateau near .74 in later midlife (Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000), so people mostly keep their relative standing while still shifting.