Type A Personality: A Case of Smoke and Mirrors
How An Industry Influenced Personality Research
Unless you are living under a rock, or have a non-existent social life, chances are you have either
1) been called a type-A person
2) known someone who you consider a type-A personality or
3) Known of someone who perfectly describes the type-A personality.
The Type-A personality, a person who is super-organized, likes to stay on top of things, is ambitious and driven, is one of the most popular terms that have crossed the bridge from academic psychology to pop culture.
We use it to describe the irritating friend who always has a folder for everything, the friend who likes everything done on their terms, or the friend who has everything planned out somehow.
But does the personality ‘type’ really exist? Or was it a lie sold to us by people with vested interests? Today’s story is about the research that went behind the Type-A/B personalities and the dubious claims they made. But before that, you need to know about the main character of this story: The Tobacco Industry.
An Industry Under Attack
During the 1950s, concerns were rising about the harmful effects of smoking on an individual’s lifespan. There were concerns that smoking and tobacco consumption may lead to cancer, heart disease, and early death.
While they were touted as ‘Freedom Torches’ in the 1930s, the world had started realizing that tobacco may actually cause more harm than good.
But the Tobacco Industry was not going to go down without a fight. The industry was a multibillion-dollar business. It simply could not go away with a whimper.
In 1959, tobacco companies moved their attention to the field of behavioral research. They wanted to see if some behaviors or personalities could be blamed for the high rates of cancer in people who smoke.
They were willing to fund research and offer chairs in college boards in exchange for ‘favorable’ research findings.
You probably know where this story is going. It is going exactly where you think it’s going.
The Birth of the Type-A person
Cardiologists Friedman and Rosenman in the 1950s described the Type-A personality for the first time as people with a need for achievement, time urgency, aggressiveness, and hostility.
They proposed that compared to their calm counterparts, the Type-B people, type-A people were 2-6 times more likely to develop Coronary Heart Disease (CHD), a disease which until then was closely associated with smoking.
The idea behind the study and its claims was simple.
The modern American life is fast-paced and stressful. Some people are more prone to taking on stressful activities than others (Type-A people). The high amounts of stress, due to their personality, lead to diseases such as CHD and cancer.
This was good research for the Tobacco industry because it completely let them off the hook for causing cancer. The Tobacco industry started arguing that people who were stressed smoked to release some stress. It wasn’t their fault that the stress also caused them to get cancer.
Shut Up and Take My Money
Friedman and Rosenman’s ‘research’ was cited by the Tobacco industry for decades after it was first published. Even though attempts at replication failed in the 1980s, the idea stayed.
It didn’t matter if it was true or not. It only mattered that it kept the truth from coming out for quite a long time. What did the two researchers get out of this? Were they only tiny pawns being used by the big bad Tobacco?
Not exactly.
Until 1997, records show that Friedman’s research institute got nearly $11 million from Tobacco manufacturers to fund studies on the behavioral predictors of coronary heart disease.
Rosenman was consistently featured in films and promotional materials used by the tobacco companies to convince people that smoking was a symptom, not the cause of cancer.
The researchers got recognition and money for their work. Would anyone say no to that?
So What About Type-As?
Do Type-A people really exist? Did Freidman and Rosenman make up their first study in the 1950s under the influence of the tobacco industry as well?
Well, we cannot be sure. There were a lot of methodological issues with the original work that the two did. And when you think about it Type-A people are really tough to define.
Psychologists today believe that a type-A person is better described as someone high on conscientiousness - the drive to do one’s work dutifully and in an organized manner.
The type-A/B typology of personality has little scientific value in the modern world. Despite that, we continue to conduct research on it because we still believe Type-A people are more likely to have CHD - a lie that was sold to us by the tobacco industry.
Corruption in Research
More than the non-validity of the type-A personality as a separate form of personality, the story should be making you question the role funding plays in research.
Research requires a lot of money. It doesn’t always lead to a ‘positive’ finding either. It is quite possible that the funders expect something in return for their charity. One of my interns put it better than I could have:
“Research [can] become tainted with corruption, the need for money, and broadly, capitalism. The health of the people and the curiosity for knowledge are the last of the concerns.”
It’s a poignant reflection of the issues that plague research in Psychology. Our incentives and our priorities are quite often at odds with truth instead of being in search of it.
The story I shared today was only possible because of the work of Mark Petticrew, a public health professional.
He and his collaborators went through years of documents from the Tobacco Industry to tell us the truth about the Type-A personality.
How many more skeletons do we still have in our closets?
And that is it for this week! How do you feel about the Type-A personality and its ties to the tobacco industry? Do you think you can let go of the idea of a Type-A person?
You can let me know in the comments or by replying to this email.
So does that make cluster A/B personality invalid? This story should come out into the limelight so that more researches could be done I guess.
This is so concerning specially when these approaches are taught in our ncert and at a very basic level of psychology when we talk about understanding personality.