Are you Type A or Type B?
The Truth Behind The Pop Psychology Trend
It has become a common turn of phrase to describe oneself as a ‘Type A’ or ‘Type B’ person.
The recent TikTok discourse around these personality types essentially equates Type A to someone who has their shit together and type B to a more spontaneous, messy personality. In recent months, the ability to blame my faults on my Type B personality type has brought me much comfort.
The question, ‘Do you think you’re Type A or Type B’ is a fun conversation starter over dinner with friends. When using the pop psychology definitions, you can usually spot which side of the spectrum someone falls on from a mile off. Occasionally the answer is not quite as clear cut.
“What?? You can’t be Type A, you’re so messy!!”
“Yeah, but I have to be so extremely Type A at work that when I get home I don’t have any Type A left in me.”
So where has this expression come from, and is it legit? According to Psychology Today, ‘Type A personality’ was a term coined by cardiologists, not psychologists. Meyer Friedman and R.H. Rosenman hypothesised that people with ‘Type A’ personality traits were at greater risk of cardiovascular disease.
As someone who has always envied so-called ‘Type A’ personalities, this was not what I was expecting.
My perception of the ‘Type A’ personality was that they were effortlessly organised. They did meal prep religiously on a Sunday, attended Yoga on a week night, and did not make spelling mistakes in important documents. Could there be a mental and physical burden that comes with organising your underwear drawer by colour? Possibly. But I always thought these things just came naturally to the Type A’s out there.
If we’re talking in clinical terms, this is not the case. Psychology Today describes a Type A personality as ‘a behavioural pattern, involving impatience and a sense of time-related pressure, irritability, and competitive drive’. In contrast, Type B is essentially described as the chill one. All this has led me to the conclusion that I should stop describing my friends as ‘Type A’ thinking it’s a compliment…
As humans, we love to categorise ourselves and others by personality type, whether that be using the pseudo-scientific Myers-Briggs test (the TikTok algorithm scarily seems to have guessed my MTBI type… I’m an INFJ by the way), labelling ourselves as introverts or extroverts, or even the debunked Left-brain/Right-brained theory.
While we should remind ourselves that such trends and theories shouldn’t be taken too literally, they nonetheless serve as useful (and fun) tools to help us understand ourselves in relation to the world around us. So for the foreseeable, I will continue to describe myself as Type B, smug in the knowledge that I have a reduced risk of heart disease.
