Profiling people never stopped. We just made it trendy.
Blood types, attachment styles, zodiacs; the box changes, but our instincts don’t.
Take a stroll through a trendy coffee shop on a Saturday morning, and you’ll find a girl in an Alo hat and an iced latte going off on a wild tangent about astrology.
Gossiping about a date comes to a screeching halt for one question: what's his sign? Then the conversation spirals ferociously into justifying red flag behavior or comparing him to an old Gemini fling your best friend used to date.
This isn’t just a habit in America. Swap out zodiacs for a blood type and you’re describing a convo happening in Tokyo right now. It sounds comical to make claims like: Type A is uptight, Type O is resilient, Type B doesn’t call you back. But laughing at blood type correlations lets us off the hook for doing the exact same thing with star signs.
Attachment styles aren't some secret in a shrink's notes anymore. They're trending hard enough to pop on your feed as a personality quiz. The Enneagram turned into a seating chart on a brunch at Cippolinis.
"Ugh, he's such a Virgo" is doing the same cognitive labor a blood type chart is doing in Tokyo: it's a shortcut that lets you stop collecting evidence about a person and start honing in on patterns against a type you already have opinions about.
This essay is going to make two claims that don't sit comfortably together: that sorting people into types is harmless, efficient brain work—and that it's the exact same mechanism behind the worst kind of profiling. Both are true. I'm not going to resolve that for you, because I haven't resolved it for myself.
Sorting people into types doesn’t help you understand them. All you’re doing is deciding—deciding quickly who gets the benefit of the doubt.
I spent a good amount of my twenties studying criminology, which means I spent a good amount of my twenties reading about how ‘type’ thinking gets weaponized when the stakes are higher than a group chat. Type-based reasoning about people has a body count. The original blood-type-personality theory wasn’t some cute Japanese table talk that came out of left field. It’s rooted in colonial-era ideas about which populations were inherently ‘untrustworthy’, fancied up in biology terminology because biology sounds like science, and science sounds like fact.
Profiling—the kind that influences who gets pulled over, who gets believed, who gets a pass—runs on the same system as your Co-Star app. Take a person, skip the part where you actually find out who they are, and toss them into a category that was decided way before they walked into the room.
The four blood types, the sixteen Enneagram numbers, the twelve zodiacs, the ‘avoidant vs. anxious’ traits—they all feel harmless and fun because we use them on people we love to explain why he won’t text back or why your sister needs six hours to decompress after a night out. But we’re using the same tools. The same mental shortcut humans have always used to size up strangers and decide who to trust, who’s dangerous, who’s lying, who’s ‘just always been like that’, hasn't gone away. We've just pointed it at smaller, friendlier situations (dating, friendships) and convinced ourselves it's more evolved now because it comes with a quiz result instead of just a gut feeling.
A little history from Japan
In 1927, a Japanese professor, Takeji Furukawa, published a paper arguing that blood type predicted temperament. His findings didn’t have much evidence either, on top of a small sample with a hypothesis that should’ve been buried in a journal nobody read twice. Colonial administrators in Japanese-occupied Taiwan used blood-type reasoning to argue that the local population was ‘less civilized’, which is part of this history that never makes it on the highlight reel; the theory was wrong but it was useful to people who wanted a scientific-sounding reason to justify how they already wanted to treat someone. Read that again.
This theory popped up again in '71—almost forty years later—when a broadcaster named Masahiko Nomi with zero medical background, no psychology training, just a knack for writing something people wanted to believe—published a bestseller that turned it into the personality system Japan still half-jokingly, half-seriously runs on today. Ketsueki-gata still shows up on dating profiles, and even resumes. Somewhere, a discredited theory about 'civilized' versus 'uncivilized' blood rebranded itself as a fun fact you bring up on a first date.
Storytime
I once watched someone close to me forgive their fiancé for something you’re supposed to leave over: cheating again for the third time. ‘Because that’s just the Virgo in him’ or ‘that’s just his narcissistic personality, he can’t help it.’
We’ve all done something like this. Maybe not forgive a cheater three times—but we’ve taken a label that was supposed to describe a pattern and used it as a hall pass instead. The type didn’t explain anything behind the behavior, other than excuse the shit out of it.
My ex was insecure—texting me all night while I was out without him, demanding to know if I went to another lounge or who I was with. I remember taking a photo holding the damn menu of the place I was at. I blamed his insecurities for not ever having a ‘serious girlfriend’ before. I called it a type of anxious attachment behavior. I thought he was possessive. I confused it for love. I blamed it on him being a Capricorn.
That’s the sleight of hand I didn’t clock in real time. I thought I was being generous and self-aware by reaching for the psychological vocabulary—when all I was actually doing was hopping over the harder, less flattering question: is this person treating me right? Yes or no.
“He just needs reassurance” answers a different question than the one I was really asking. It just sounds more sophisticated than “he just wants to make sure I’m safe. That’s why he calls all the time.” It feels like an upgrade instead of a dodge.
This is the flaw with every ‘type’ system. Instead of figuring out who he was, I filed him under Capricorn—insecure, possessive, too intense—and called it a day. Judging him specifically would have meant sitting with the possibility that I was wrong about him, or being unfair to him, or having to check my own behavior. Was I causing him to feel paranoid or insecure? That’s the uncomfortable part. A label doesn’t ask any of that from you. It hands you the verdict and lets you move on like nothing was your fault.
Where it stops being cute
This is where the criminology in me has to get a word in. The mental move that lets you forgive a bad-text back pattern because ‘he’s a narcissistic Virgo’ is not the cute version of a different phenomenon. It’s literally the same phenomenon, running at a lower speed. Psychologists call this: the fundamental attribution error—our humanistic urge to constantly explain someone’s behavior by reiterating who they are (to ourselves) rather than admit what’s actually happening—especially once we’ve already decided which ‘type’ they belong to.
Once a person is filed away under a label or a type, we stop updating new relevant information. Any evidence that contradicts the type gets treated as an outlier or the exception. But evidence that confirms the type gets logged in as proof we were right all along. And this is true for whatever the type is: “Type B is unreliable” translates with the same logic as “that’s the kind of person who looks like trouble.”
I spent years learning how this exact mechanism works at a much higher volume than dating. A criminology degree teaches you that ‘suspicious’ isn’t a fact about a person. It’s a story a witness tells themselves in half a second, and the story changes depending on who’s standing in front of them. The same hoodie, the same hour, the same street reads as menacing on one guy and ‘rough day, mind your business’ on another; and you and I both know what's usually doing the sorting in that half-second. Nobody’s pulling up an Enneagram chart before deciding who to be wary of on a subway platform at night. But the shortcut underneath both is the same exact one: skip the person, toss them in a category, move on.
I want to be careful here though, because the stakes are not even close. Not texting back an 'insecure ex' costs you nothing. Being on the wrong end of someone's snap judgment about who looks dangerous can cost you your life. But it’s the same machine running both. A four box blood chart, a sixteen type quiz, a twelve sign horoscope, a half second read on a stranger. Different system but same instinct—we stop looking and start assuming.
Keep the memes
Sharing zodiac memes back and forth at 1 in the morning is some entertaining brain rotting. I can’t pretend that it isn’t. That pull toward classifying people isn’t a character flaw in humans. It’s efficient brain work doing what it’s built to do; analyzing a pattern and moving on.
Notice the moment you reach for the label. Notice what question you’re actually avoiding when you do that. ‘He’s just insecure’ is doing the job of ‘I don’t want to sit with the fact that he doesn’t trust me'.’ Or ‘she’s such a Type A’ is doing the job of ‘I find her so exhausting and can care less to learn why.’’ The type isn’t the villain here. The relief of not having to look closer at her, or him, or the stranger on the platform is.
The End
I grew up with a mom handing me a version of fate you could read in the stars, along side inherited Greek witchy superstitions. Living in New York gave me the version in a stranger’s eyes before they’ve said a word — quicker, colder, more of instinct instead of astrology. I’ve spent a lot of time creeping between the two: the impulse she gave me, to believe people are decent from a glance, against the one New York gave me, to recognize exactly how they aren’t. Studying how badly that second impulse can go hasn’t cured me of the first. It’s just taught me that nobody is ever actually ‘as nice as they seem.’
