Choleric Temperament: How to Recognize One and Live With It

How many times this week did you finish a sentence for somebody who, in your view, was talking far too slowly? If you can recall at least two such moments, you carry more of the choleric component than most people around you. Impatience with somebody else's pace is the first and most reliable sign of this temperament, far more accurate than the loudness people usually point to.

You recognize a choleric by pace, not by shouting

The most widespread image of a choleric is a person who pounds the table. Volume, though, is a secondary feature and plenty of cholerics do not have it at all. The core sits elsewhere: they see the goal and the shortest route to it before the others have finished listening to the introduction, and they handle inaction worse than a mistake.

You can recognize them by how their sentences are built. They start with the conclusion and only then fill in how they got there. "Here is what we will do" comes first, the reasons only if you ask, and they can listen to somebody else's long introduction for about two minutes.

The second sign is how they handle decisions. When nothing happens for a long time, they would rather decide badly than not at all, because a bad decision can be corrected while waiting produces nothing. Responsibility that everybody else passes along, they take on themselves, even when they have no authority to do so.

It shows best in small things. In a restaurant where nobody has brought the order for half an hour, a choleric gets up not because they are hungry but because nothing is happening. They walk to the counter, sort it out in thirty seconds and come back to the table genuinely puzzled that nobody did it sooner.

The third sign is the timing of anger. A choleric flares up fast and five minutes later the fire is out, except that the other side still remembers the sentence a month on. The mismatch between how briefly they burn and how long it hurts everyone else is behind most of the trouble a choleric has with the people around them.

Bile, dogs and Eysenck's second axis

The name comes from the Greek chole, meaning bile. According to Hippocrates it was this fluid that prevailed in the fierce, combative type, and the Roman physician Galen then named the four types in the 2nd century AD in the form we still use. The doctrine of bodily fluids did not survive, but sorting people by the speed and force of their reactions stayed in circulation.

In the 1950s and 1960s Hans Eysenck built personality on two axes, extraversion and emotional stability, and the choleric came out as an unstable extravert. That word sounds worse than what it describes: it simply means a strong and fast emotional reaction, not a disorder. Ivan Pavlov, for his part, distinguished types of nervous system in his dogs, and the choleric matched the strong but unbalanced type, with excitation outweighing inhibition.

Both lines converge on the same picture. A choleric has a fast start and a slower brake. Where the other three types came from and how modern psychology treats them is summarized in the overview of the four temperaments.

Why cholerics so often end up in charge

Ask people who makes the decisions in their team and the name lands within a second. It tends to be the person who was first to say out loud what would be done, even though nobody appointed them. The choleric component works like an elevator into a leadership role, and it often does not even feel like ambition, more like an unwillingness to watch nothing happen.

In a crisis that is an enormous advantage. A choleric stops explaining and starts acting, so the people around them gladly step aside, because they want somebody to take the wheel. They also protect their people and take their problems as their own; usually they take them in hand right away, without anyone asking.

The catch was uncovered by research from Cameron Anderson and Gavin Kilduff (2009). In groups working on a task together, the greatest influence went to people high in dominance. Not because their answers were better, but because they spoke sooner, more often and with more certainty, and the others read that certainty as competence. Speed, in other words, looks like correctness even though it has nothing to do with it.

The practical fallout looks like this. Ryan runs a team of five and at the Monday meeting a decision usually lands within forty seconds, because he makes it. Six months later he complains that his people are passive and never propose anything. That team has simply learned that a proposal is pointless, because the decision gets made without it anyway.

One of their advantages only becomes obvious once you work in a different team. With a choleric you know where you stand. They do not hand out praise in advance, so when they say something is good they mean it literally, and you hear the objection that same day rather than a year later at a performance review. After a boss who spoke in hints, that kind of directness feels almost like relief.

When did somebody last tell you straight out that you pushed too hard? If you cannot recall, that does not necessarily mean it never happened. The truth about how you come across will only come from a person who is not afraid of you, and there are usually few of those around a choleric.

Where it costs a choleric the most

The most expensive item is not the arguments they lose but the relationships that quietly go cold. With a slower pace around them a choleric loses patience, cuts in and decides for others before they finish speaking. The sharpness they take for being matter-of-fact lands on the other side as an attack, and because nothing dramatic happened, nobody raises it. People just stop asking.

The second cost lands on their own body. A meta-analysis by Yoichi Chida and Andrew Steptoe (2009) pulled together dozens of long-term studies and found that chronic anger and hostility are linked to a higher risk of heart disease, including in people who had no illness at the start of the follow-up. The distinction matters, though: this is not about a quick flare-up that dies down in five minutes, but about a permanently irritable stance toward everything around you. Choleric temperament by itself is neither a diagnosis nor a sentence.

Under stress a choleric has a shorter fuse. A trifle they would otherwise let pass without blinking sets them off, and then the sentences fly faster than the thoughts. Two very simple things help: movement, and the rule that they can write the unpleasant message by all means but send it only after a second read. What long-term pressure does to each of the temperaments is covered in the piece on temperament and stress.

At home the whole thing plays out differently than at work. Children of cholerics often describe the same experience: the parent was fair, stood up for them and could solve anything, but coming to them with something half-finished was hard. A choleric answers an unfinished thing with a proposed solution, even when the other side only wanted to say they were having a hard time. Telling "advise me" apart from "listen to me" is the toughest discipline of their day.

Their own pace comes with a bill too. Routine, drawn-out meetings and rounds of sign-off tire them more than a whole day of real work, so they load on more things just to keep something moving. The tiredness then arrives not as exhaustion but as irritability, and it lands on somebody who has nothing to do with it.

That leaves the thing cholerics handle worst: admitting their own mistake. Apologizing is technically easy for them, but conceding that the others were right from the start means calling their own pace into question. And pace is exactly what a choleric prides themselves on.

The choleric against the other three temperaments

Most of the friction can be predicted in advance, because it does not come from ill will but from a difference in speed and in how badly a person needs things closed.

A practical guide for the other side, meaning partners, colleagues and children of cholerics, is in the separate piece on how to get along with a choleric. The short version: keep it brief, start with the conclusion and leave them the last word, because presented with a done deal they will go against it on principle.

A pure choleric is rare, though. More common is a choleric component with a streak that changes how it reads: with a phlegmatic streak they can handle the long haul, where a pure type would run out of fire before the work ran out; with a melancholic streak they push for quality and cannot stand loose ends around them. Our temperament test has 24 questions, takes about four minutes and shows that streak alongside the primary type; treat the result as an approximate picture, not a label.

Three things people get wrong about cholerics

"A choleric is a nasty person." Sharpness and ill will are two different things. Most cholerics defend their people tooth and nail and are first to help in an emergency; they just do it without asking and without dressing it up, so it is easily confused with ruthlessness.

"They cannot control themselves." They can, they just do it two seconds later than would have been useful. The difference between a choleric people can live with and a choleric people walk away from is usually not the strength of the emotion but whether they have built the habit of a pause between the impulse and the sentence.

"A choleric automatically makes a good boss." Here it helps to go back to Anderson and Kilduff. A fast decision and a correct decision are unrelated, and a company that promotes for decisiveness is often selecting for self-confidence. A choleric makes a good boss the moment they have somebody beside them who contradicts them and they can take it.

If you recognized yourself in the description, try keeping a tally for a week. After every meeting, note how many times you interrupted somebody and how many times you decided something nobody asked you to decide. The numbers tend to be higher than people expect, and above all they show in which situations it happens: almost always two or three of them keep recurring.