The science behind one of the most common ways we describe ourselves had dubious financial backing.

Type A behavior pattern (TABP), the personality characteristics we assign to people who are ambitious and time conscious — often to a fault — is a big part of popular psychological psyche. Who hasn't heard someone describe themselves or others as "Type A" personality, or its less punctual and more laid-back opposite, "Type B"?

There's also the belief that Type A's are more susceptible to coronary heart disease and heart attacks. This has stuck with the collective conscious of our society: Your stressed-out personality is literally killing you.

But the catch-all description we use to describe our nature isn't supported by modern research.

In fact, the popularization of TABP actually came from flawed studies funded by the tobacco industry that were meant to obscure and discredit claims about tobacco's harmful effects.

In 2002, after multiple lawsuits in the 1990s and early 2000s, the tobacco industry was ordered to release documents and memos to the public in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at the University of San Francisco. The haul of paperwork includes decades' worth of internal communication from companies like Philip Morris and British American Tobacco, as well as industry advocacy groups like the Tobacco Institute.

A scientific review study in 2011, led by Mark Pettigrew, a professor of public health evaluation at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, analyzed these documents and found that the popularization of TABP occurred in spite of a lack of replicable scientific results.

His study searched the database from 1959 to 2011, flagging documents that contained relevant keywords, like "stress," "heart disease," "personality," "TABP," and "type A behavior." Pettigrew told Tech Insider that he found evidence showing tobacco companies supported "science that was useful for litigation" for decades.

Obscuring tobacco's health harms

Silberio77/Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) In the 1950s, the tobacco industry had a problem.

The public was learning that tobacco smoking was linked to a whole suite of terrible health effects. So to protect its massive interests, the industry formed the Tobacco Research Committee in 1958, which would later become the Tobacco Institute.

The committee had a few goals: Manufacture dissent over anti-tobacco findings, as well as determine health benefits from smoking.

Around this time, two cardiologists, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, claimed to find a causal relationship between personality and coronary heart disease (CHD).

This link was of great value for the tobacco industry. Their strategy, as Pettigrew explained, was "making the argument that cancer and coronary heart disease could be caused by one's personality."

The tobacco industry didn't need invincible proof. It just had to show that smoking didn't necessarily cause heart disease — that, instead, people with personalities who were predisposed to developing the disease just happened to smoke.

While this wasn't the most solid argument against smoking's harm, it was enough to defend the industry in court for years.

Similar strategies, like "Project Whitecoat," sought out scientists to defend the tobacco industry, especially focusing on downplaying the health risks of secondhand smoke. Another worked with Hans Selye, the Austrian-Canadian endocrinologist considered the "father of stress," to support the notion that stress caused cancer.

In the case of TABP, Friedman's reputation was also valuable to the cause. In a 1962 internal document from Hill and Knowlton, a PR firm that promoted the tobacco industry, Friedman was included in a list of "serious workers in their respective fields who have not appeared as protagonists in the debates on tobacco and health."

For the next few decades, the two psychologists' work appeared in leaflets, films, and press releases produced by the Tobacco Institute for the public. One 1968 film's message was simple: "Smoking is a symptom—not a cause—of cancer." Smoking could mitigate stress, which was the real culprit, they asserted.

This cozy relationship was not one-sided, either.

Up until 1997, the Phillip Morris company provided the Meyer Friedman Institute with almost $11 million dollars of funding for multiple studies. Friedman looked for funding from other sources as well to obscure their influence, as one Meyer Friedman Institute correspondence with the tobacco company showed.

“We obtained these funds initially to get a wider base of support for the project so that no one could or ever would say that only Philip Morris financed this research project," Friedman wrote.

That's not to say that Friedman and Rosenman made the whole thing up for the tobacco industry, but their initial 1959 study had its issues (for example, it only looked at white, middle-class, American men).

Most damning was the fact that the results couldn't be replicated.

"[They] did find a link to having this particular behavior and CHD," Pettigrew said, "but other people that moved into the field who didn’t have connections to the tobacco industry weren’t able to replicate the findings."

Later studies in Northern Ireland, Japan, and France weren't able to find a conclusive link between psychological factors and CHD.

So, in light of this biased connection, is your ambitious, stressed-out personality leading you to a early grave? Fortunately, probably not — though just like many other science and health misconceptions, society has latched on to the belief and never let go.

"It really has no scientific value or standing anymore," Pettigrew said. "But it doesn't matter because it has entered the culture. And it entered with a big push from the tobacco industry."