Sanguine Temperament: The Optimist Who Gets People Moving

The coffee break has just started at a corporate training day. Ten minutes later six people who did not know each other this morning are standing by the window, and in the middle of them is the one person who got them there. He organized nothing. He just started talking and the others joined in.

The classic four-temperament typology has a name for him: the sanguine. Of the four types this one is spotted the fastest, because its defining feature carries across half the room. It is also one of the most underrated, because people mistake lightness for shallowness.

You spot one before they finish introducing themselves

A sanguine does not walk into a room so much as float into it. Within five minutes they know who they are going to sit with, and a stranger turns into an acquaintance over a single coffee. They tell stories with their hands, and a detour into an anecdote is practically the rule with them, because it tends to be more interesting than the topic itself.

The second marker is how fast their mood turns. Something annoys them in the morning and by lunchtime it has become a funny story. They carry no grudges, so you can have an argument with one and go to lunch an hour later as though nothing happened.

The third sign only surfaces once you know them longer. A sanguine needs an audience. Talking into an empty room drains the energy out of them within moments, because their fuel is not the ideas themselves but the reactions to them.

Then there is how they behave in a line, in a waiting room and anywhere else where nothing is happening. They put up with boredom for a shorter stretch than the other three types. Out comes the phone, or a conversation with a stranger, or a suggestion that they try to sort it out some other way, just so that something is happening.

The last clue is a memory for people instead of facts. A sanguine may not remember what the email said, but they will know that the woman in accounting had knee surgery and how her son's wedding went. In a company where half the information travels down the hallway, that is an advantage no system replaces.

When did you last leave a busy event charged up instead of drained? The answer to that one question sorts your colleagues more reliably than most questionnaires.

Where the blood in the name came from

The name comes from the Latin sanguis, meaning blood. Around 400 BC Hippocrates argued that character is decided by the ratio of four bodily fluids, and he believed this one prevailed in the lively, cheerful type. The four types were named six centuries later by the Roman physician Galen.

The theory of bodily fluids has been dead a long time, but the observation behind it survived. In the 20th century the British psychologist Hans Eysenck worked with it and described personality along two axes: the degree of extraversion and emotional stability. In his grid the sanguine comes out as a stable extravert, a person turned outward who is also not troubled by things for long.

Ivan Pavlov arrived at a very similar place by a different route. In his experiments with dogs he distinguished types of nervous system, and the sanguine matched the strong, balanced and mobile type. The whole line from Hippocrates to modern psychology is traced in the overview of the four temperaments.

What a sanguine does better than the other three types

The most useful quality shows up the moment a group gets stuck. Where others shrug and wait for instructions, the sanguine comes up with a suggestion and finds somebody for it on the spot. It does not have to be the best idea in the room, but it is the one that finally gets people moving.

The second advantage is resilience to rejection. They call ten people, seven turn them down, and they take it as part of the game rather than a verdict on themselves. After a bad day they shake it off by the next morning and find a reason to try again tomorrow.

That this approach pays off more than we expect was shown by Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder (2014). They asked commuters on Chicago trains to strike up a conversation with a stranger during the ride. Beforehand the participants predicted it would be unpleasant and that the other person would brush them off. In fact they rated that ride as more pleasant than the people who traveled in silence, and rejection essentially never happened. A sanguine does not make that prediction error, because the conversation starts before they have time to think it through.

What does that look like in practice? Laura joined a manufacturing company as an office administrator. Within three weeks she knew the first names of everyone in the warehouse, which her predecessor had not managed in two years. When a customer then needed a shipment a day early, she did not go through the request system; she walked down to the line and found Pete. It was out the door within the hour. On paper she went around the process. In practice she saved the order.

This, by the way, is why a sanguine component in a team shows up in the speed of information rather than in the number of meetings. Things reach the people who are supposed to deal with them, because somebody knows their names and is not afraid to approach them.

Their role after bad news is underrated too. When an unpleasant announcement lands, the other three types go quiet, look for someone to blame or add up the damage. The sanguine is usually the first to say something that shifts the mood in the room, and people leave with the sense that things can continue. They have not made the problem any smaller, only shortened the time everybody spent paralyzed.

The price of lightness

Most of a sanguine's weaknesses are their strengths turned inside out. These are not two different sets of qualities but one set that either pays off or hurts, depending on the situation.

It shows most clearly in finishing things. Whatever stops being fun quietly ends halfway, and the sanguine usually does not even register it, because their mind is already on the next idea. It is not irresponsibility so much as a problem with estimating: at the moment they make the promise, they mean it completely.

The people around them eventually adjust and start counting on them differently. They stop asking about deadlines and check with somebody else instead, which upsets the sanguine, because they see themselves as the one who always helps. Reproach changes nothing; what does is a two-sentence message right after the meeting saying who does what and by when.

Their handling of conflict is less obvious. A sanguine does not avoid a dispute, they shorten it: quick to make up, turn it into a joke and move on, because tension makes it hard for them to breathe. The other side may not be finished, though, and the unresolved matter comes back every time a similar situation shows up.

The second weakness is harder to see. Without listeners the energy fades, and a bad mood the sanguine does not want to show hides behind performed cheerfulness. That is the warning sign with them: the moment they start acting out a good mood they do not have inside, something has usually been wrong for a while.

At work and in close relationships

Professionally they do best in an environment with a buzz around them, where the result shows up soon and improvising is allowed. Sales, public events, client work, anything with fast feedback. Solitude, spreadsheets and the same procedure over and over drain them faster than any workload. A deadline reliably wakes them, but only the very last one. How to negotiate those conditions without changing your field is covered in the piece on temperament at work.

Working from home is a story of its own. A whole day alone with a laptop is one of the settings where a sanguine suffers, even when they like the work and get through it without trouble. What they are missing is exactly what drives them: short conversations between tasks, other people's reactions and the chance to show somebody straight away what they have done.

Relationships involve a similar trade. They have plenty of friends and a new person joins the circle easily. Depth is the harder part: they steer a serious conversation toward something lighter before it starts to hurt, and a partner ends up feeling they never quite got through. If you ask a second time at such a moment and wait a while, the answer usually comes. How the temperaments meet in daily life together is covered in the piece on temperaments in relationships.

Hardly anyone is a pure sanguine. Usually it is a strong sanguine component colored by something else, which the result calls a streak. A sanguine with a choleric streak has turned the idea into a plan by evening; a sanguine with a melancholic streak keeps a cheerful facade with a second, far more sensitive line underneath that nobody else knows about. Our temperament test has 24 questions and takes about four minutes; besides the primary type it shows the streak that colors it, and it serves as an approximate picture, not a diagnosis. What the individual pairs mean is covered in the piece on temperament combinations.

What people get wrong about sanguines

"They are unreliable." The most common and least accurate label. A sanguine does not forget out of indifference but because the promise never got written down anywhere and one wave of enthusiasm overrode another. A shared calendar note achieves more here than ten conversations about responsibility.

"Anyone that cheerful is not dealing with anything." Cheerfulness is a sanguine's normal state, not proof that they have no worries. The difference between honest and performed good spirits is usually visible only to somebody who has known them a long time, and it is worth asking about directly once.

"They have no depth." They do, they just do not show it at a table with eight people. One on one, after midnight or on a long drive you will hear things from a sanguine that never come out in a crowd.

Try one experiment this week. Next time you are with somebody you suspect has a strong sanguine component, ask a question and then leave five seconds of silence after it. Most such conversations break open in exactly that pause, because a sanguine cannot stand it and starts talking about what is really bothering them.