What type A behaviour looks like
Friedman and Rosenman described type A as an "action-emotion complex": a person engaged in a chronic struggle to achieve more and more in less and less time. In practice the pattern shows up as a handful of recognisable habits:
- Time urgency. Finishing other people's sentences, hating queues, checking the clock, doing two things at once.
- Competitive achievement striving. Turning work, sport and even games into contests, and measuring a day by how much got done.
- Impatience and irritability. Frustration when others are slow or plans change.
- Hostility. In some people, a cynical, easily angered stance towards others. This turned out to be the most important part (see below).
- Difficulty relaxing. Feeling guilty when doing nothing.
The type B pattern is defined as the absence of these features: unhurried, less driven by competition, slower to anger. Type B does not mean lazy or unambitious; many highly successful people work steadily without the sense of constant urgency.
Where the idea came from
Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman were cardiologists in San Francisco. Friedman later told the story of an upholsterer who noticed that the chairs in their waiting room were worn only on the front edge of the seat, as if the patients could not sit back. Whatever the truth of the anecdote, the two doctors began to suspect that a hurried, hard-driving way of living raised the risk of coronary heart disease.
To test it they set up the Western Collaborative Group Study in 1960 and 1961, following more than 3,000 employed men in California. After about eight and a half years, men rated type A in a structured interview had roughly twice the rate of coronary heart disease of type B men, even after accounting for smoking, blood pressure and cholesterol (Rosenman and colleagues, 1975). Their popular book, Type A Behavior and Your Heart (1974), made the term part of everyday language, and in 1981 a US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute review panel accepted type A as an independent risk factor.
What later research found, and what it didn't
The strong early result did not hold up well. The large Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial found no link between type A and heart disease (Shekelle and colleagues, 1985), and a 22-year follow-up of the original study found that type A men who had already had a heart attack were, if anything, less likely to die of it than type B men (Ragland and Brand, 1988). When researchers took the pattern apart, the component that kept predicting heart problems was hostility, not ambition or speed. A meta-analysis by Miller and colleagues (1996) found hostility to be an independent risk factor for coronary heart disease, and the wider literature suggests the global type A label adds little once hostility is taken into account.
Two further points are worth knowing. First, an analysis of internal tobacco-industry documents found that the industry, including Philip Morris, was a major funder of type A research and used selected results to deflect attention from smoking as a cause of heart disease (Petticrew, Lee and McKee, 2012). Second, type A was never a clinical diagnosis and is not one now. It is a description of behaviour, measured on a continuum, and the two-box version of A versus B is a simplification.
Type A vs type B, C and D
The success of the label led to more letters. Only one of them has a meaningful research base.
| Label | Core description | Status of the evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Type A | Hurried, competitive, impatient, sometimes hostile | Widely studied; heart-disease link now attributed mainly to hostility |
| Type B | Relaxed, unhurried, slower to anger | Defined as the opposite of type A |
| Type C | Suppresses emotion, compliant, avoids conflict | Proposed as "cancer-prone" in the 1980s; not supported by later studies |
| Type D | "Distressed": frequent negative emotion plus social inhibition | Developed by Johan Denollet in the 1990s; findings on heart outcomes are mixed |
Labels such as type E or type F circulate online but are not established research categories.
How the Big Five maps onto type A
Modern personality psychology describes people with five broad traits rather than letters (see personality traits). The type A pattern is not one of them; it is a blend of several:
- Conscientiousness, especially the achievement-striving and self-discipline facets, captures the drive and the urge to get things done.
- Neuroticism, especially angry hostility and impatience, captures the irritability and the stress of feeling behind.
- Low Agreeableness captures the competitive, cynical and hostile side.
- Extraversion, through its activity and assertiveness facets, captures the fast pace.
That is why a Big Five profile is more informative than the type A label. Two people who both call themselves type A can differ sharply: one is highly conscientious and calm, the other is impatient and quick to anger. The research suggests it is the second profile, not the first, that is worth paying attention to. Our Big Five test is modelled on this five-trait framework and shows where you sit on each trait.
Sources
- Friedman, M. and Rosenman, R. H. (1974). Type A Behavior and Your Heart. Knopf.
- Rosenman, R. H. et al. (1975). Coronary heart disease in the Western Collaborative Group Study: final follow-up experience of 8 1/2 years. JAMA.
- Shekelle, R. B. et al. (1985). The MRFIT behavior pattern study II. American Journal of Epidemiology.
- Ragland, D. R. and Brand, R. J. (1988). Type A behavior and mortality from coronary heart disease. New England Journal of Medicine.
- Miller, T. Q. et al. (1996). A meta-analytic review of research on hostility and physical health. Psychological Bulletin.
- Petticrew, M. P., Lee, K. and McKee, M. (2012). Type A behavior pattern and coronary heart disease: Philip Morris's "crown jewel". American Journal of Public Health.
- Denollet, J. (2005). DS14: standard assessment of negative affectivity, social inhibition, and Type D personality. Psychosomatic Medicine.
- Costa, P. T. and McCrae, R. R. (1992). NEO PI-R Professional Manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.
Frequently asked questions
what is type a personality
It is a behaviour pattern of competitiveness, time urgency, impatience and, in some people, hostility, first described by the cardiologists Friedman and Rosenman. It is a description on a continuum, not a diagnosis, and most people show some type A habits rather than all of them.
Who is a Type B personality?
Someone at the relaxed end of the same scale: unhurried, less competitive and slower to anger. Type B people can be just as ambitious and productive; they simply work without the constant sense of racing the clock.
What are type A, B, C, D personalities?
Type A is hurried and competitive, type B relaxed, type C emotionally suppressed and conflict-avoiding, and type D "distressed", combining frequent negative emotion with social inhibition. Only A and D have a substantial research literature, and none of them is a clinical category.
Is there a type C personality?
The label exists. It was proposed in the 1980s to describe people who suppress emotions and avoid conflict, and was once linked to cancer risk. Later and larger studies did not support that link, so type C is rarely used in research today.
Who is a type D personality?
Type D, proposed by Johan Denollet, describes people who often feel worried, gloomy or irritable and who hold back from expressing those feelings around others. It is measured with a short questionnaire, and studies on whether it predicts heart outcomes have given mixed results.
What is a type F personality?
There is no established type F in personality research. The letter appears in online quizzes and articles, usually for a fun-loving or free-spirited style, but it has no agreed definition or validated measure behind it.
What are the top 3 rarest personality types?
The A, B, C and D labels have no reliable population counts, so there is no rarest type among them. The question usually refers to the 16-type model, where US sample data in the official manual put INFJ, ENTJ and INTJ as the least common, each at around 1.5 to 2% of people. See the 16 personality types.