Introducing The Four Personalities

Many of you may have read about and studied what is commonly known as “the four personalities,” or "the four temperaments." Today there are many theories about personality and personality types in psychology and folk psychology, and it is not my intention to outline or discuss them all. Rather, in this post and in the posts that follow I will be considering one, which says that (generally speaking) people can be broken down into four different categories of behavior: Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholy and Phlegmatic. This post marks the beginning of a series of posts which will further discuss the details and implications of this perspective.

As a side note, I have never written about what I will from now on refer to as “The Personalities,” though I have been a student of it for many years. What I am going to write in this and future posts is not material of my own creation. The best and most accessible book I can recommend on the subject is Personality Plus by Florence Littauer.

Above I stated that people can be broken down into four different categories of behavior: Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholy, and Phlegmatic. A “category of behavior” is simply a set of behavioral dispositions, or personality traits, that people consistently display, each one broadly being labeled with a different word. This is not to say that everyone is either Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholy, or Phlegmatic. A given person may indeed be considered a “Sanguine,” or a “Phlegmatic,” but such a label is not supposed to tell us all there is to know about their personality (it may, however, tell us a lot). The fact is is that everyone is a combination of the four personalities. We all have elements of each of the four personalities in varying proportions, and in varying ways, which combine to make up our own unique personality. Moreover, most of us will find that we dominate in two of the four personalities, having a “strong pair” and a “weak pair” to describe ourselves (generally in each pair one will be stronger). Thus, even though I have elements of all four personalities in my own personality, my strong pair happens to be Choleric (50%) and Sanguine (37.5%), while my weak pair happens to be Melancholy (7.5%) and Phlegmatic (5%). If you already understand The Personalities, then you already have a pretty good grasp of mine, though the way in which I instantiate traits from each personality type will be hidden from you until you become acquainted with me.

In the posts that follow we will begin discussing each personality in detail. First up will be Sanguine (stay tuned).