Temperament vs Character and Personality: The Difference

"Sorry, I'm just a choleric." The sentence lands in a meeting a minute after the speaker cut a colleague off mid-thought and swept her proposal off the table as a waste of time. It sounds like an explanation, except that it glues two different things together: temperament decides how fast your blood pressure rises, character decides what you do in the next three seconds.

In everyday speech the terms have long since merged. "She has a strong personality" means volume and self-assurance, "he has character" means he will not betray you, and when somebody is said to have temperament, what is usually meant is that they slam doors. Psychology handles the three differently, and this is not hair-splitting. The difference between them determines what is worth changing about yourself and what is a waste of time.

Incidentally, the original meaning of the word is the exact opposite of today's. The Latin temperamentum means the right mixture, a balanced proportion. Having temperament once meant having your fluids in balance, not being explosive.

Temperament: what you came into the world with

Temperament is an innate style of reacting. It does not describe what you think or what you believe, but how a reaction happens in you: how fast it kicks in, how strong it is, how long it takes to fade and how many stimuli you can take before you start to overload.

The American psychologist Mary Rothbart defined it as a combination of two components: reactivity and self-regulation. Reactivity is what fires in you on its own, before you have a chance to weigh anything. Self-regulation is the ability to slow that wave, redirect it or wait for it to pass. The first part is stable for years, the second matures gradually and can be trained.

That this foundation exists from the beginning was shown best by Jerome Kagan. In his long-term research he followed four-month-old infants and distinguished highly reactive from low-reactive children by how strongly they responded to new stimuli. That simple characteristic predicted the degree of reserve and caution many years later, even though the children had passed through different families and schools in the meantime.

It is worth saying what temperament is not. It says nothing about intelligence, about ability or about how well you will do your job, and it does not determine your opinions and values either. A slow and cautious person can be braver in a decision than a fast type, because courage is not measured by pace but by what a person is risking.

This maps onto the classic four temperaments rather directly. In the 1950s Hans Eysenck showed that the old types can be described by two axes: extraversion and emotional stability. 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. That history is covered in more detail in the overview of the four temperaments.

Character: what you have made of it

The Greek charakter meant a stamp, a mark engraved on a coin. The image still fits. Character is the imprint left in you by upbringing, environment and, above all, your own repeated decisions.

It covers values, moral stances and habits. Whether you keep your word when it is inconvenient. Whether you admit a mistake nobody would have caught. Whether you make time for somebody at a moment when you are drained yourself. None of that is given to you in advance, and none of it can be discovered by measuring somebody's pace or irritability.

The distinction has modern professional backing too. In the 1990s the psychiatrist Robert Cloninger proposed describing both levels separately: temperament as the automatic emotional reactions that appear early and persist, and character as the system of goals, values and self-concept that gets built over a lifetime. Among other things he argued that two people with the same temperament profile behave completely differently in life depending on how mature their character is.

One thing about character is surprising: it is most visible precisely where it runs against temperament. A calm apology from somebody who catches fire within a second weighs more than a calm apology from a phlegmatic whom the situation did not really rattle. The value of a decision is measured by what it cost you.

Personality: the whole in which the two meet

Personality is the umbrella term. Gordon Allport defined it in 1937 as the dynamic organization of psychophysical systems that determines the way a person adapts to the world. In his definition he identified temperament as the part most tied to biological makeup and therefore the most heritable.

Today's view develops that into layers. Dan McAdams and Jennifer Pals (2006) described personality as three floors stacked on top of each other: basic traits, then so-called characteristic adaptations (goals, values, roles, coping strategies) and finally the life story a person tells about themselves. Temperament sits on the ground floor, character on the middle and upper ones. Personality is the whole building.

Why "I'm a choleric" does not hold up as an excuse

Let us follow the logic through. If temperament really determined behavior, all cholerics would have to behave the same way. You only have to look into two offices.

Peter and Steve both run a team and both have a short fuse. An error turns up in the source data and both of them go red within a second. Peter fires a sharp message into the group chat and then spends two days wondering why people talk to him through an intermediary. Steve has his own rehearsed procedure: write the same thing into an empty document, stand up, go get a coffee and only then decide what to send. He sends about a third of the original text and the matter is settled by lunchtime.

Temperament did the same thing in both of them. They parted ways only in what they did with that wave. And the difference is exactly where character lives, because Steve's procedure is not a gift of nature but a habit he introduced at some point and then repeated a hundred times.

The excuse has one more weakness: it is selective. Hardly anybody uses it for a small dishonesty or for forgetting to call their mother. It gets pulled out mainly for things we would rather not deal with anyway. When did you last hear somebody say "sorry, I'm a phlegmatic, so I never made that decision and somebody else made it for me"?

One version of the sentence does make sense, though, and it depends on when it is said. "I talk fast and sometimes cut people off, so please stop me" is information given in advance that makes life easier for the other side. "I cut you off because I'm a choleric" is the same thing said afterward, and it works as a way of closing the subject. The difference between a heads-up and an excuse lies entirely in the timing.

A useful shorthand goes like this. Temperament explains why you had the urge. It does not explain why you gave in to it.

What can be done with temperament when it cannot be swapped

Working with your own temperament does not aim at the reaction itself, which is usually faster than awareness. It aims at the three seconds after it and at the environment you move in. A few approaches work across all four types:

• Know your own warning signal. A clenched jaw, quickened breathing, an urge to leave the room or, conversely, a need to have the last word right now.
• Put one mechanical obstacle between the stimulus and the response. Write it but do not send it. Stand up. Postpone the decision until morning.
• Choose your environment instead of fighting yourself in an unsuitable one. A highly reactive person gains far more from a predictable routine than from another round of resolutions.
• Agree with the people around you in advance. The sentence "if I'm talking too fast, stop me" saves a great deal of explaining afterward.
• Learn to repair. A fast, specific apology costs less energy than a week of tense silence.

How much of this can realistically be changed and what stays is covered in the separate piece on whether temperament can change. In short: basic reactivity holds, the repertoire of responses widens throughout life.

How to tell what is temperament in you and what is just habit

The practical distinction rests on three questions. Does it show up across situations, at home as well as at work? Do you remember it in yourself from childhood? And does it kick in before you can weigh anything? Three yeses point to temperament. When the thing is tied to one environment or one phase of life, it is more likely a learned pattern that can be unlearned.

Self-assessment gets it wrong more often than you expect, because we judge ourselves by who we would like to be. A quiet person who prides themselves on decisiveness will describe themselves as a choleric. A fast type who likes the image of the balanced stoic will file themselves among the phlegmatics. This is exactly why it helps to compare your own impression with answers about concrete situations: our temperament test has 24 questions and takes about four minutes, and the result is your main type along with its streak. Other routes to the same thing are described in the piece on how to find your temperament, and anyone who wants a finer yardstick than four boxes will find it in the comparison of temperament and the Big Five.

For one week, try keeping a two-column log. On the left, the situation that wound you up or pulled you down; on the right, what you did about it. After seven days the left column will show you temperament in all its repetitiveness. The right one will show character, and above all where it still has gaps.