Type A Or Type B Personality Test

About this test

The type A / type B distinction comes from two American cardiologists, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, who published a now-famous observation in the late 1950s: the chairs in their waiting room wore out at the front edge, because their patients didn't sit, they perched. They went on to describe a hurried, competitive profile locked in a fight with the clock, and a calmer counterpart.

What followed is more nuanced than the legend. Their original study linked type A to elevated cardiac risk, but research over the following decades did not confirm that for the profile as a whole: speed and ambition aren't what weigh on the body, hostility and chronic irritation are. An enthusiastic type A and a furious type A do not share a medical file. So this test predicts nothing about your health, and doesn't try to.

What it does do is useful: it locates your relationship with time, waiting, competition and failure — the four arenas where this profile is most visible. Knowing where you sit explains a lot of everyday friction: why a queue winds you up, why a colleague seems slow, why an empty Sunday feels either like a gift or like a problem to be solved.

How it works

Every answer is worth 0 to 4 points depending on the intensity of the trait. The total is scaled to 100: the higher the score, the further you lean towards type A. The middle bands are deliberately wide, because most people are not consistently one or the other.