In the 1950s, a secretary in a San Francisco medical office noticed something weird: some of the chairs in the waiting room needed to be reupholstered more frequently than others. Patients with coronary disease, she realised, nearly always arrived on time and gravitated towards hard upholstered chairs rather than comfy sofas. They’d then sit on the edge of the chair, fidget, and aggressively leap up when their names were called.
This insight took on a life of its own. First it helped inspire the cardiologists she reportedly mentioned it to – Dr Ray Rosenman and Dr Meyer Friedman, who wrote a 1959 paper that essentially invented the idea of a “type A” personality. It classified competitive, productivity-obsessed workaholics as demonstrating “overt behaviour pattern A”, and argued they were more likely to get heart attacks. They later wrote a book, Type A Behaviour and Your Heart, which became a bestseller. Familiar story, eh? A woman has an insight which is then monetised by two men.
Another familiar story: a corporation steps in to co-opt this newly popular idea. The tobacco industry soon promoted Friedman and Rosenman’s findings to argue that smoking didn’t cause cancer. Rather, they argued, smokers were more likely to be type A and that caused cancer.
Decades later, videos about personality types are going viral on TikTok. Clearly, I’m type A(DHD) because I saw a recent headline about TikTok teens and their personality classification obsession, and went straight into procrastination mode. I stopped whatever I was supposed to be doing, opened 1,200 different tabs, and hyperfixated on the issue – including a long search for the name of the secretary who had the initial insight. But, if she existed (some accounts credit an upholsterer), her name isn’t easy to find. I even asked ChatGPT, which unhelpfully hallucinated and told me her name was Mrs Mabel Adams.
My conclusion after all this? Whether it’s Hippocrates’s humoral theory, the Myers-Briggs personality test, or type A/B, most personality “science” is largely bunk. But we’re all desperate for organisational systems to help make sense of ourselves and the world, so it’s compelling bunk. My main takeaway, though, is that I need to fix my procrastination problem.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist and the author of Strong Female Lead
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