\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>n 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\u2019d then sit on the edge of the chair, fidget, and aggressively leap up when their names were called.<\/p>\n This insight took on a life of its own. First it helped inspire the cardiologists she reportedly mentioned it to \u2013 Dr Ray Rosenman and Dr Meyer Friedman, who wrote a 1959 paper that essentially invented the idea of a \u201ctype A\u201d personality. It classified competitive, productivity-obsessed workaholics as demonstrating \u201covert behaviour pattern A\u201d, and argued they were more likely to get heart attacks. They later wrote a book, Type A Behaviour and Your Heart, <\/em>which became a bestseller. Familiar story, eh? A woman has an insight which is then monetised by two men.<\/p>\n Another familiar story: a corporation steps in to co-opt this newly popular idea. The tobacco industry soon promoted Friedman and Rosenman\u2019s findings to argue that smoking didn\u2019t cause cancer. Rather, they argued, smokers were more likely to be type A and that <\/em>caused cancer.<\/p>\n Decades later, videos about personality types are going viral on TikTok. Clearly, I\u2019m 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 \u2013 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\u2019t easy to find. I even asked ChatGPT, which unhelpfully hallucinated and told me her name was Mrs Mabel Adams.<\/p>\n My conclusion after all this? Whether it\u2019s Hippocrates\u2019s humoral theory, the Myers-Briggs personality test, or type A\/B, most personality \u201cscience\u201d is largely bunk. But we\u2019re all desperate for organisational systems to help make sense of ourselves and the world, so it\u2019s compelling bunk. My main takeaway, though, is that I need to fix my procrastination problem.<\/p>\n Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist and the author of Strong Female Lead<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019d then sit on<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31297,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[6621,165,6622,271,4259],"class_list":{"0":"post-31296","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-arwa","9":"tag-care","10":"tag-mahdawi","11":"tag-personality","12":"tag-type"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}