Temperament Combinations: What Your Second Type Says

Two sanguines can be further apart in one meeting than a sanguine and a phlegmatic. That is not a flaw in the typology. The primary temperament is only half the information, and the other half is carried by the streak, the component sitting right behind it.

A pure type, where one component leaves the other three far behind, is something you meet only rarely. In most people the two highest numbers sit close together, and the second one decides what the first temperament actually looks like on an ordinary Monday.

How the streak is calculated

The four temperaments do not exclude one another. Each gets its own score on a hundred-point scale, so the result is not letters but four numbers side by side. The highest is the primary temperament, and the runner-up counts as a streak if it trails by no more than fifteen points.

When the gap is bigger it is a pure type and the description sticks to one component. Four pure profiles plus twelve combinations give sixteen possible results. Compared with the classic four boxes that is an entirely different resolution: anybody who has worked with both can tell a choleric with a phlegmatic streak from a choleric with a melancholic streak.

The fifteen-point boundary is a cutoff, not a law of nature. If your primary component is at 78 and the second at 62, the description of the streak will fit you noticeably more loosely than it fits somebody sitting at 74 and 71. And if three numbers land close together, do not read it as a measurement error. It usually belongs to a person who adapts flexibly to the situation, at the cost of other people finding it harder to predict what to expect.

Our temperament test has 24 questions, takes about four minutes and shows, besides the primary component and its streak, the one that came out lowest for you. Where the four types came from and why they have lasted two thousand years is covered in the overview of the four temperaments.

The sanguine, three different ways

Take two people from the same marketing team. Both talk fast, both laugh loudest in the meeting, and both scored highest on the sanguine component. On Monday morning an email arrives saying the client is pushing the campaign back by a month.

Within ten minutes Paula has called everyone together, reshuffled the deadlines and divided up who takes what. Nick reads the same email, shrugs and suggests the client will be back in two weeks anyway, so why bother with it now. Same temperament, two different streaks.

When the choleric component sits right behind the sanguine one, the enthusiasm gets a deadline. An idea does not stay just talk; by evening it has usually turned into a plan with somebody starting work on it. The price is paid in tone: in the heat of the thing such a person can run over even the one who went into the idea with them first.

A phlegmatic streak works the other way. The openness stays, the volume comes down, and such a person is easy to be around, because they do not dramatize and they do not take offense. What they are missing is an inner driver, so whatever is neither fun nor strictly necessary gets postponed indefinitely.

For comparison it is worth looking at a pure sanguine. Entertaining people, pulling a group together and finding the better side of everything comes to them without thinking, and that very clarity is their weak spot. Without a firm calendar and somebody who asks about deadlines, unfinished things pile up around them faster than they can close them. A streak in this sense works as a counterweight, and where it is missing, it really is missing.

The strangest one is the melancholic streak, because it is invisible from outside. On the surface you get the cheerful one; underneath runs a second, far more sensitive line, and the gap between the two tends to be surprisingly wide. Such a person can entertain and understand at the same time, but you ride a rollercoaster with them: enthusiasm carries them high and one sentence that lands badly brings them down just as fast.

Twelve combinations at a glance

The table keeps the order primary temperament first, then streak. The descriptions are shorthand, not a diagnosis, and they focus mainly on what the streak adds to the basic character and where it turns against it.

Try to remember: when did somebody last describe your character in a way where the first half fit exactly and the second half not at all? Usually that is not bad guessing on their part. They hit the primary component and missed the streak.

Combinations from opposite quadrants

That some pairs sit together worse than others is no accident. In the 1950s and 1960s Hans Eysenck showed that the four classic temperaments can be assembled from two independent dimensions: extraversion and emotional stability. In his framework the sanguine comes out as a stable extravert, the choleric as an unstable extravert, the phlegmatic as a stable introvert and the melancholic as an unstable introvert.

Neighboring pairs differ in only one dimension. A sanguine and a choleric are both extraverts, one of them simply reacts more calmly. A sanguine and a phlegmatic share stability and part ways on pace and the need for an audience. Combinations like these hold together easily inside one person, because they do not cross each other's path.

It is different with pairs that sit in opposite corners. A sanguine with a melancholic streak and a choleric with a phlegmatic streak differ on both dimensions at once. Two different modes then run inside one person: one day you see the sociable, unbreakable type, another day the one who carries things around in their head for a long time.

What is interesting is that such a result is usually not a measurement error. Mostly it is a rather accurate description of the gap between what people can see in you and what goes on inside. It is familiar to anyone whose friends keep telling them how unflappable they are while they spend their evenings replaying one single sentence from the afternoon meeting.

The practical consequence of this difference is predictability. With neighboring combinations the people around you roughly know what to expect. With opposite ones they get it wrong, because they remember one setting and the other one catches them out. A phlegmatic with a choleric streak experiences this regularly: most of the time they cruise, and when they do put their foot down once, their colleagues feel that something extraordinary has happened.

Why the order matters

A sanguine with a choleric streak and a choleric with a sanguine streak differ in the table only by the order of two components. In practice they are two different people.

The first one gets everyone excited and only starts organizing once the thing is already rolling. The second decides first and then goes looking for people to pull with them. From outside both look like an energetic person; inside, a different motivation is running. One of them wants to be part of something together; the other wants the result.

It works similarly with the phlegmatic and choleric pair. A choleric with a phlegmatic streak can push and then bring the pace back down, so they can go the distance where a purely choleric character would run out of fire before the work ran out. A phlegmatic with a choleric streak is in no hurry most of the time and puts their foot down only where the thing genuinely matters to them. The first is a driver who learned to save energy. The second is a mild person with one clearly drawn line.

What to do with the streak in practice

The most useful thing is usually knowing where the two components fight inside you. A melancholic with a sanguine streak wants to be among people and to have peace with themselves at the same time. When one of those needs gets overlooked for too long, it speaks up as tiredness or irritation, while the person looks for the cause in their job or their relationship.

The second thing worth reading is the lowest score. It points to situations that cost you more energy than they cost other people. Someone with the choleric component at the bottom postpones an unpleasant conversation even when it cannot be postponed any longer. Someone with the melancholic component at the bottom misses a small thing that later costs more than the time it saved. This is not a list of faults to fix, more a map of situations where it pays to bring somebody else in.

The streak is useful in an argument too. Most conflicts between people with the same primary temperament do not revolve around what they have in common but around that second number. Two phlegmatics will not fight about pace. They will fight because one of them has a choleric streak and has no intention of giving way on one specific thing, even after six months.

If you are unsure which of two components is on top in you, do not examine what you think about yourself but what you actually do in specific situations. The method, along with the questions worth asking the people around you, is in the piece on how to find your temperament. And Eysenck's two dimensions lead on to the comparison of temperament with the Big Five, where it becomes clear what survived from the ancient typology and what did not.

The fastest home test for a streak is a single sentence you say about yourself to a stranger. Anyone who begins with "I'm the calm type, but..." has already given away that they treat one component as the baseline and the other as the exception to the rule. That "but" after the comma is usually exactly the streak.