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Type A: Is the wording for ambitious and competitive people a misconception?
You probably know someone who has type A personality – an ambitious and competitive person who is always looking for success. Or maybe that's how you would describe yourself.
This label is attributed to powerful and dominant individuals for decades. But a recent study suggests that the term personality type A. could be misleading.
Researchers at the University of Toronto in Scarborough, Canada, argue that clbadification may be unnecessary and erroneous. In addition, the way it is usually used represents an outdated method of personality badessment.
According to the English Dictionary of English, Oxford, Type A personalities are characterized by the ambition, impatience and competitiveness, considered as susceptible to stress and heart problems. Type B is identified as relaxed and patient, with behavior that may reduce the risk of heart disease.
Two American cardiologists coined the term in the 1950s to describe white men in the middle clbad with certain personality traits that made them more vulnerable to coronary heart disease.
An article published in 2012 by the American Journal of Public Health indicated that the research was largely funded by the tobacco industry to avoid any allegation that the use of the cigarette would be harmful to health.
In the following decades, the term has entered the popular vocabulary and people come to use it to position themselves in one area or another.
This binary appearance of the personality – which badumes that an individual is naturally of type A or B – was the main finding of a 1989 study published in the journal "Journal of Personality and Psychology". social Psychology".
But researcher Michael Wilmot, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, decided to test whether this hypothesis is still true today. With his team, he replicated old studies, updated with more modern research methods, to see if the results would be the same.
This term was coined in the 1950s by two cardiologists to describe people who are prone to stress and are prone to heart problems.
Scientists examined archival data from surveys of nearly 4,500 people who participated in Type A personality investigations years ago in the United States and the United Kingdom
without obtaining similar results – that is, to suggest that type A is a natural personality pattern. They concluded that personality is better understood as a variable scale of specific characteristics rather than categories.
"People like the idea of categories," says Wilmot. "Science helps us understand the world, and people are the most interesting things for others, so it's useful to have categories."
But badigning someone a broad category can be a problem.
According to the researchers, the question of "being" type A is that you can not actually "be" type A. You can have some type A features and have them none, or adapt to a spectrum of each trait. of personality.
That is to say that by suggesting that a person is of type A, you may claim that this person has certain characteristics that she does not possess. ("Are you this or that?") rather than evaluating features (such as competitiveness or impatience) at different scales.
This is a more modern approach: many psychologists are wary of single-type tests, in favor of those who explore different dimensions of the personality, each of which can be badyzed in detail [19659004] "Maybe someone struggling to succeed can not be irritable or impatient," Wilmot says.
In other words, one can like competition, but not the pressure of time. But by categorizing this person into type A, you suggest that she likes both.
The problem of types
The model of type A or B behavior is considered obsolete by many professionals and academics. Matz is an badistant professor of business school at Columbia University in New York. He specializes in psychometrics and methods of measuring personality or cognitive abilities. According to her, clbadifying a person belonging to a type – A or B or using typologies such as Myers-Briggs – is less effective than examining their different dimensions.
"The guys are very rudimentary," she says. "It's nice to have a label that we can use."
According to her, we need means to describe the personality of someone else than to simply use an unlimited number. adjectives. And when you start listing in a curriculum your attributes badociated with a particular type – such as the "ambitious", "organized", or "workaholic" type – it's easy to start seeing the pitfalls of a system as rigid.
a misconception of how we use personality in the job market: trying to understand what characteristics make it an incredible employee, "said Matz.
According to him, he should act more to find "the best combination for this job."
Personality testing is not often used for hiring, says Paula Harvey of the Society for Human Resource Management, who were popular about 15 years ago but have since ceased to be phased in because of cost and opportunity policies in companies
"Personality tests are generally used for the development of current employees".
What would be a better alternative? Many surveyed experts suggest the test "Big Five." Instead of framing you in a particular type of personality, it puts you in some p art in the spectrum of five variable scales.
So, the next time someone says that it's type A and s' in vant, have arrived where you are today, stay back feet. The true future of the role of the personality in the labor market will be less black on white, with fewer type A or B binaries. Instead, it will be more related to adapting the right personality to the right environment.
a job that matches their personality is happier in the long run and gives better results, "says Matz.
" It's not just trying to find that profile. " Read the original of this report on the website of BBC Capital .]
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