Type A isn't real:

Are you highly organised, detail-oriented and ambitious? Or perhaps you’re the laid-back, ‘go with the flow’ type who’s known for being calm, adaptable and a bit spontaneous? Maybe you’re the friend who plans the holiday itinerary, or the friend who doesn’t follow it? Are you the one who’s always 15 minutes early – or 15 minutes late?

These tropes are often known as Type A and Type B personalities – a common way people categorise themselves. While they’ve grown in popularity online, Contact sat down with UQ expert and psychologist Dr Jack Leggett (Bachelor of Psychological Science '10, Doctor of Philosophy '19) to uncover whether these personality types are based on fact, how to find out which you are and if you can change.

Dr Jack Leggett
School of Psychology

The use of ‘Type A’ and ‘Type B’ is not widely accepted in current personality psychology. The original idea behind these categories was that Type A people have consistently high levels of drive, competitiveness and ambition, while Type B people have consistently low levels of these same traits.

While it’s certainly true that some people have a Type A (or B) profile, type systems are now considered too simplistic. Describing personality using just 2 types is a lot like describing how someone looks using just 2 categories, such as tall and short. Even if the categories have some validity, they’re too crude. Another problem is that most people don’t fit neatly into either type, instead falling between them.

Today, the most widely accepted model of personality is the 5-factor model or ‘Big Five’. It uses spectrums (factors) to describe 5 major traits. Importantly, when using spectrums, the most likely place to fall on each personality trait is actually near the middle. The model has its critics, and personality remains an active area of research, but the Big Five can be measured reliably, and they even have some predictive power regarding major life outcomes such as longevity and relationship satisfaction.

What are the Big Five and how do you know which you are?

The Big Five factors are:

• Openness: a person’s level of intellectual, artistic and aesthetic interest
• Conscientiousness: how hard-working, organised and reliable they are
• Extraversion: their tendency to be assertive and outgoing
• Agreeableness: their politeness, kindness and cooperativeness
• Neuroticism, or negative emotionality: their tendency to experience negative emotional states like sadness and anxiety.

Their initial letters give us the handy acronym OCEAN, which is also a good reminder of the vastness of human personality variation.

The Big Five traits are mostly not correlated with one another – for example, being highly conscientious doesn’t make it more likely that you’ll also be agreeable.

A person’s Big Five profile is usually measured with a self-report questionnaire. Even without a questionnaire, you might make a reasonable guess at your own profile. Self-judgement isn’t always accurate, though. We often view our own personality traits as normal, so if you’re extreme on a trait, you might under-estimate how far from the norm you really are, or how many people are living surprisingly comfortably at the opposite extreme.

Can your personality change based on your environment?

Yes, absolutely, and this is a great question for sharpening our thinking about personality.

Personality certainly differs between people, but the same person can be very different at different times. Even a highly sociable person wants to be alone sometimes. One relevant study had participants answer ‘personality’ questions several times per day for about 2 weeks, but the questions were phrased to ask how the participant had felt or acted just during the last hour. A striking result was that, on most measures, most participants showed almost the full range of possible scores.

Many people feel intuitively that their personality is different at home versus in the workplace, or different from one workplace to another. There’s clear research evidence for this as well. Personality questionnaires can predict job performance to some extent, but their predictive power increases if the questions ask specifically about how the person is in their work context; this difference in predictive power implies a difference in personality between contexts.

What does this mean for the way we approach relationships?

We know some of the big patterns linking personality to relationships, but what exactly they mean is often less clear. A consistent finding is that people in intimate relationships tend to be somewhat similar in personality. On the other hand, recent studies find that greater inter-partner similarity is not associated with relationship satisfaction or with broader life satisfaction. One explanation is that having similar personalities isn’t actually important for compatibility, and that partners tend to be similar just because similar people are more likely to meet in the first place.

Another possibility is that any effect of having similar personalities is overwhelmed by the effect of just being easy or hard to get along with in general. On average, you’re likely to be more satisfied in your relationship if you or your partner scores lower in neuroticism and higher in the other traits, especially agreeableness. Again, these are general tendencies, and there’s no universally good or bad level of a trait – I’m sure we can all think of times when it’s important to be disagreeable.

We should also keep in mind that the Big Five doesn’t fully capture things like values, goals and specific interests, where similarity between partners might be more important. This kind of compatibility research is fairly new, so our understanding might change a lot in the future.

Why do people love to classify themselves and each other?

Categorising people is certainly popular. Beyond the realm of personality, there are learning styles, political groupings, star signs and other questionable examples. However, most category schemes aren’t 100% accurate. We’ve focused here on the Big Five, which of course uses spectrums, but more broadly, it’s hard to find any psychological trait that behaves categorically.

For all their problems, categories do have the basic advantage of being simple. There might also be social motives. Thinking in categories might make it easier to form stable social groups for coordinated action – political parties are an obvious example.

For what it’s worth, someone for whom the Type A personality concept resonates could be described in Big Five terms as conscientious, disagreeable and perhaps somewhat neurotic.