Type A, or Type B?
[mogwai’s note: the first draft of this article was written hurriedly on my phone. Added a little more context now.]
I had a private moment of realization today, about an hour ago, while sitting in the carefully lit room of Otres restaurant, watching a man perform to a small crowd.
His name is Judah. I may be misspelling it, but that’s definitely how it’s pronounced. When he sat on the high stool, before he began strumming his guitar, people in the room were chanting ‘Judah!’, and he repaid them in boyish grins. Obviously he was a favorite.
Midway through his performance, unfortunately, PHCN took the light, and he put his performance in a hover pattern — he kept playing the guitar, but stopped singing. Someone behind me commented, ‘aw, the power thing has thrown him off,’ and he strummed, still smiling exasperatedly, before resuming with a ‘can you hear me still?’
And we nodded, yes, we can hear you, Judah. Do your thing.
And he did his thing, and when the power was restored, he slid smoothly back into the mic’d performance.
It was a simple event, but it made me think about something I read a long time ago, about Type A and Type B personalities.
Because I’m not writing a psychology post, I’ll summarize at the surface level:
“ In this hypothesis, personalities that are more competitive, highly organized, ambitious, impatient, highly aware of time management and/or aggressive are labeled Type A, while more relaxed, less ‘neurotic’, ‘frantic’, ‘explainable’, personalities are labeled Type B.” (Wikipedia)
The interactions betwee those traits can be easily explained by Game theory, specifically The Prisoner’s Dilemma. When faced with the challenges of the dilemma, Type A personalities draw more hostility and competition from both A’s and B’s within the game. They tended to apply more punishments to their counterparts than Bs needed to or wanted to on other Bs.
Why did watching a dreadlocked singer trigger my memory of the non-rigorous Type A and B classification? Well — it hit me while watching him perform that if I could split Judah into Type A and Type B versions of himself, we’d have experienced two different outcomes/reactions to that power outage.
And it made me wonder which of them would have resonated with me? The affable smiling man waiting for the power to be restored, or the person who would thunder through his performance, then comment to anyone who looked about how it was ‘inefficient’ to perform to an audience with power tripping out?
And then I wondered, did it matter? I generally admire Type A people. They are visible, you know — they fill a room and they get things done at great personal stress, but when I step away momentarily from this capitalism-powered life, I find myself wishing I could be more of a Type B.
It makes me think.
