The 4 Temperaments

Long before the MBTI sorted people into 16 types, long before the Big Five measured personality on five continuous scales, a Greek physician named Hippocrates proposed something simpler: there are four kinds of people. He was wrong about the mechanism (bodily fluids don't determine character) but remarkably right about the pattern. Two thousand years later, personality science keeps rediscovering the same four clusters in new clothing.

Humors and temperaments: a 2,000-year-old idea

Around the 5th century BCE, Hippocrates proposed that human moods and behaviours are governed by four bodily fluids, or humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.¹ Each person's temperament supposedly reflected whichever humor dominated. Too much blood made you lively. Too much black bile made you brooding.

A few centuries later, Galen of Pergamon gave the four types their lasting names: sanguine (blood), choleric (yellow bile), melancholic (black bile), and phlegmatic (phlegm).¹ He paired each with elemental qualities (hot or cold, wet or dry) borrowed from Greek cosmology. The word temperament itself comes from Latin temperare: to mix, to bring into balance.

The English words melancholy and bilious still carry the imprint. Melancholy literally means “black bile” in Greek. Bilious (for an ill-tempered person) comes from the bile that defined the choleric type.

Medieval physicians treated both body and mind through this lens. A patient's disposition (cheerful, angry, morose, calm) was a clue to their bodily state. Modern medicine has discredited the biology entirely.² But the character portraits survived the death of the theory that created them.

Meet the four temperaments

The sanguine was linked to the heart and spring. The choleric to the spleen and summer. The melancholic to the liver and autumn. The phlegmatic to the brain and winter.³ These associations show how deeply ancient thinkers tried to map personality onto the physical world.

Is anyone purely one temperament? Not really. Even Galen acknowledged that most people are a mix. You might be mainly phlegmatic with a streak of melancholic, or sanguine at parties but choleric at work. The model always allowed for blended temperaments.³

From old temperaments to modern personality science

The humors are dead. But the pattern isn't. In the 1940s, British psychologist Hans Eysenck identified two fundamental personality dimensions: extraversion and neuroticism. When he mapped people along both axes, four clusters emerged, matching the ancient categories almost exactly.⁴

Subsequent research confirmed that extraversion and emotional stability (low neuroticism) are two of the Big Five personality traits, suggesting the temperaments were early intuitions about real trait combinations.⁵ Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov even noticed temperamental differences in dogs' nervous systems, classifying some as “choleric” (excitable) and others as “phlegmatic” (calm).⁶

Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist, proposed four temperament dimensions linked to specific neurotransmitter systems (dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, estrogen/oxytocin).⁷ Four again, though defined very differently from Hippocrates. The number might be coincidence, or it might reflect something basic about how humans cluster personality traits. Modern colour personality tests follow the same instinct, mapping four colours onto the same four behavioural clusters.

Keirsey's temperaments and the MBTI connection

In 1978, American psychologist David Keirsey revived the four-temperament idea and linked it to the MBTI. He noticed that the 16 MBTI types cluster into four groups based on their middle two letters. He called them Artisans (SP types), Guardians (SJ types), Idealists (NF types), and Rationals (NT types).⁸

Keirsey openly mapped his groups onto the classical temperaments. Artisans share the sanguine's spontaneous energy. Guardians reflect the phlegmatic's steady dependability. Idealists carry some of the melancholic's emotional depth. Rationals echo the choleric's drive for competence.⁹ The parallels aren't perfect, but they gave a 2,000-year-old idea a fresh vocabulary. An ENFJ, for instance, carries much of the choleric's charismatic drive alongside the idealist's warmth.

It's worth noting that Keirsey's model and the MBTI differ in focus. The MBTI emphasises cognitive functions (how you perceive and judge), with each of the four MBTI letters capturing a specific preference. Keirsey emphasised observable behaviour patterns.⁸ Both are better understood as conversation starters than scientific instruments. The MBTI's own reliability is limited: over 50% of people get a different type upon retesting just weeks later.¹⁰

Do the four temperaments hold up today?

In a strict scientific sense, no. You won't find a peer-reviewed paper proving that all humans fall neatly into four groups. Personality traits are largely continuous, not clumped into discrete bins.¹¹ A 2018 Northwestern University study analysed 1.5 million questionnaires and reported four data-driven personality clusters, but a follow-up analysis argued those clusters might be statistical artifacts rather than real types.¹¹

And yet the temperaments refuse to disappear. They survive as cultural shorthand and as a reminder that simplicity has power. “I'm a melancholic” communicates something immediate and human that “I score high on neuroticism and low on extraversion” never will.

The honest position: enjoy the archetypes, use them for self-reflection and empathy, but don't treat them as hard rules. Modern tools like the Big Five Personality Test give a more precise picture. You might discover, for example, that you score high in Extraversion and Agreeableness (explaining your sanguine warmth) but also high in Neuroticism (adding a touch of the anxious melancholic). Real personalities are complex like that. About 40–60% of personality variance is genetic,¹² and the rest is shaped by environment, experience, and choice.

Frequently asked questions

References

1. TheBalance.Clinic. Four Types of Temperaments. Source ↩
2. Brewminate. The Four Temperaments in Ancient and Medieval Medicine. Source ↩
3. Psychology.Town. Hippocrates' Four Temperaments: Personality Insights. Source ↩
4. TheBalance.Clinic. Eysenck's two-axis model and the four temperaments. Source ↩
5. Mr. Kuchewar. Big Five Personality Traits and historical temperaments. Source ↩
6. ScienceDirect. Pavlov's influence on biologically oriented temperament research. Source ↩
7. Fisher HE et al. Four broad temperament dimensions. PLoS ONE. 2015. Source ↩
8. BA.net. Keirsey Temperament Sorter overview. Source ↩
9. Personality-Psychology.com. Four Temperaments and Humors. Source ↩
10. SoulTrace. Accurate Personality Test: What Actually Works. Source ↩
11. PMC. Are there discrete personality types? Critique of the Northwestern clusters. Source ↩
12. Frontiers in Psychology. Genetic influences on personality. Source ↩