For her recent girls’ trip to Sicily, 26-year-old Lucia booked the flights, accommodation, airport transfers, dinner reservations and day activities. She even packed a first-aid kit and enough plasters, anticipating everyone’s holiday sandal blisters. Lucia is a self-confessed Type A – an expert when it comes to spreadsheets, calendar invites and colour-coded itineraries. Her friends, however, are Type B – laidback, sometimes lazy, a bit chaotic. And upon their arrival at the villa Lucia had booked for all of them, they didn’t seem all that grateful.
“They didn’t put any ideas into the collaborative Google doc I’d shared the week before,” she tells me. “I said I was happy to book things, but I didn’t expect to plan the whole thing. I know I sound a bit intense at times, but I was trying to make sure we all had the best holiday possible, and they didn’t seem to care as much.”
Dynamics between Type As and Type Bs can be tricky. On TikTok, a recent trend has seen young people share satirical videos of their friendship group, usually filmed on holiday, in which they grow increasingly resentful over their differences. In one video that’s acquired more than 2 million views, a feckless Type B asks their stubborn Type A friend if they can just “go with the flow” while on holiday, rather than sticking to a strict schedule. The Type A looks at their watch and replies: “OK, but what time does the flow start?”
Lucia has found she’s become more critical of her friends’ apparent Type B tendencies since their holiday, and she’s had brief moments when she’s questioned their entire friendship. “I do love how spontaneous they can be, but I’ve also noticed how they prefer to make plans at the last minute, even when I suggest things in advance,” she says. “Sometimes I wonder if it might have been different if I’d had another Type A to match my energy on that trip.”
It’s easy for Lucia to see herself in the Type A box, since she’s always been an organised person. And I’m sure that, reading this, you’ve already concluded whether you fall into the A or B category yourself. I initially thought I must be a Type A – I take airport admin very seriously, cannot go to sleep with a messy bedroom, and keep a rigorous calendar. But the more I researched these personality types, I realised it was like reading a horoscope: you’ll believe that vague, general descriptions are uniquely tailored to you.
This wouldn’t be the first time a trend has gone viral for categorising, grouping and drawing lines between groups of people. It was only last year that TikTok had a brief fascination with the Myers-Briggs type indicator, encouraging people to take a test to find the combination of initials that best describes their personality. Then there’s been the mainstream embrace in recent years of star signs, and what they say about us (“Geminis are bad”; “Don’t date a Pisces”). And let’s not forget the adults who still use Harry Potter house allegiances to gauge personality traits. So, should I be adding “Type A” to my laundry list of identifiers, which already includes Aries, “Extroverted, Intuitive, Feeling, and Judging”, and anxious-attached?
While personality types may sound scientific and significant, we shouldn’t concentrate on them too much, according to Dr Jennifer Veilleux, a psychologist and professor at the University of Arkansas. She says that personality types are not real. “People do not clearly fit into a type, and personality science does not go into types, either,” she says. Today, most personality researchers take a trait-based rather than a type-based approach.
It’s comforting to categorise ourselves and others, allowing us to sort people into boxes more quickly and therefore predict their behaviour. But it can also be extremely limiting. Veilleux thinks we could be over-identifying with types, which makes us believe that our personalities are fixed or unchangeable. “Typing implies that personality can’t change, which is not true,” she says. “Science suggests that people who want to change their personalities, typically to become more extroverted, agreeable, and less neurotic, can have success. But if someone thinks of themselves or someone else as a ‘type’, they may not think that change is possible.” And most people won’t fit into any one type, either.
When you look at the beginnings of the Type A/Type B personality categorisation, you might also find cracks. The theory was developed in the 1950s by a pair of cardiologists researching the possible causes of coronary heart disease. The researchers concluded that someone with a Type A personality is more likely to be concerned with status, work and achievement, and that stress puts them at a high risk of heart disease. Those with Type B personalities reported higher levels of life satisfaction and were more likely to be even-tempered, patient and happy.
The crucial bit, though: much of this research was funded by the tobacco industry as part of a strategy to blame anything but cigarettes for declining public health. So while the findings are interesting, and might sound legitimate, plenty of them have today been disputed by cardiologists, psychologists and researchers. Competing theories find that while anxiety can correlate with heart problems, being conscientious and diligent is actually linked to better health.
If you put aside the scientific flimsiness of the categories, we can still learn a lot from the traits associated with them. Dr Kibby McMahon, a clinical psychologist and CEO of KulaMind, thinks that the characteristics attached to both Type As and Type Bs play a significant role in shaping friendships and relationships. McMahon describes Type As as “conscientious, obsessive-compulsive, and perfectionistic”, while Type Bs are distractible, creative and laidback – but they are often drawn to each other because opposites attract.
The burden of responsibility for the organised friend, though, can put a huge strain on relationships, as Lucia experienced. If there are shared responsibilities like cleaning, paying bills or planning activities, these duties can fall on the person who fits into the Type A category. “The Type B’s tendency to miss deadlines, overlook details, procrastinate, or fail to follow through on promises can put the burden on the Type A person to compensate,” says McMahon. But in turn, the perfectionism and sometimes critical nature of a Type A can hold the Type B to unrealistic expectations.
@aubreygavelloo Its called ~balance~ @Victoria Garrick Browne #bestfriends #trip
Today, the most widely accepted way to understand our personality traits is the Big Five model. Under this theory, the broad building blocks of our personalities are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. “Type A is really about high conscientiousness, one of the Big Five personality traits,” says Veilleux. “People who are high in conscientiousness are planful, organised, and want to get things done on time.” All of us can have different levels of conscientiousness, and the same goes for the rest of the Big Five personality traits. This means that we’re all, effectively, a little bit of everything.
Traits, then, are not fixed. They can shift over time, whether moulded by your life experiences or simply by your own desire to change your behaviour long-term. Lucia found that learning from other people’s traits has had a positive impact – she properly relaxed on holiday when she started to embrace her friends’ “go with the flow” attitude.
“I think I put a lot of pressure on myself to have this action-packed trip, but actually, lying by the pool chatting with my friends is exactly what I needed,” she says. “Maybe I’m more Type B than I realised.”
