Ask someone who’s never read a page of Epictetus to describe a Stoic, and you’ll get some version of the same sketch: unreadable, self-contained, a little cold. Someone who doesn’t need you. Turns out that’s not just an outsider’s stereotype — it’s how Stoics describe themselves. A 2026 study in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, “The Interpersonal Nature of Stoicism” by Matthew M. Yalch and Kaleigh M. Newcomb of Palo Alto University, is the first to map Stoic attitudes onto a validated model of interpersonal style. And the people who scored high on Stoicism placed themselves in the cold, detached quadrant of that map.

Here’s the twist the authors themselves point to: that’s not what Stoic philosophy actually teaches. A Roman-era Stoic named Hierocles wrote the rebuttal eighteen centuries early, and it isn’t subtle. His model of ethical life is a set of circles you’re supposed to be dragging inward — toward more people, not fewer.

The Quick Verdict

Question	What the research found
Did self-identified Stoics rate themselves as warm or cold?	Cold — Stoic attitudes projected into the detached region of the interpersonal circumplex
Is that what Stoic philosophy teaches?	No. The study authors flag this as a contradiction: Stoicism itself emphasizes interpersonal engagement
Who was studied?	447 adults recruited online
What did they measure Stoicism against?	The interpersonal circumplex (IPC), a validated map of interpersonal style built on warmth and dominance
Is this the first study of its kind?	Yes — the first to empirically locate Stoicism on the IPC
What did Hierocles argue, 1,800 years earlier?	That the work of Stoic ethics is pulling the outer circles of concern inward — strangers treated like family, not held at arm’s length

The Quick Version

Yalch and Newcomb’s 2026 study measured how people high in Stoic attitudes rate themselves on the interpersonal circumplex — a well-established psychological map of warmth versus coldness, dominance versus submission. Self-identified Stoics landed in the cold quadrant. The researchers say this doesn’t match the actual content of Stoic philosophy, which was never a doctrine of withdrawal. Hierocles, writing in the 2nd century CE, gave the clearest ancient version of the counterargument: Stoic ethics is a practice of expanding who counts as close to you, not shrinking it.

What the Study Actually Did

Yalch and Newcomb recruited 447 adults online and gave them a validated measure of Stoic attitudes alongside a measure built on the interpersonal circumplex — a two-axis model researchers have used for decades to locate a person’s interpersonal style. One axis runs from dominant to submissive. The other runs from warm to cold. Every personality trait involving how you relate to other people can, in theory, be plotted somewhere on that circle.

That’s the part that hadn’t been done before. Plenty of research has asked whether Stoicism helps or hurts well-being, whether it correlates with resilience, whether it overlaps with mindfulness. Nobody had taken Stoic attitudes and asked, specifically: where do they sit on the map psychologists already use to chart how warm or cold, how dominant or submissive, a person’s style with other people tends to be. Yalch and Newcomb ran that test. The answer came back cold — statistically, Stoicism projected toward the detached, low-warmth region of the circumplex, the same territory associated with a tendency to describe yourself as emotionally distant from others.

What Is the Interpersonal Circumplex?

The interpersonal circumplex is a two-dimensional model that organizes personality traits around two axes: agency (dominant to submissive) and communion (warm to cold). Any interpersonal trait — friendly, aloof, assertive, timid — can be located as a point on the resulting circle, making it a standard tool for comparing how different traits or groups relate to one another.

Researchers have used it since the 1950s to study everything from narcissism to attachment style. Plugging Stoicism into it for the first time wasn’t a small methodological footnote. It was the first time anyone checked whether the philosophy’s reputation for emotional distance shows up as a measurable interpersonal signature, rather than just a cultural impression.

The Contradiction the Study Names Outright

This is the detail that keeps the study from being a simple “Stoicism confirmed cold” headline. Yalch and Newcomb don’t stop at reporting the finding. They say directly that it doesn’t square with what Stoic philosophy and the Stoic way of life actually emphasize — interpersonal engagement, not detachment.

That’s a striking thing for a psychology paper to say about its own data. It means the researchers are treating the philosophical texts as a real constraint on how to interpret the numbers, not just decoration for the introduction. The self-report doesn’t match the source material. Something is getting lost between what Stoicism says and how people who call themselves Stoic describe their own relational style.

Hierocles is where you go to see exactly what’s getting lost.

Hierocles Already Wrote the Rebuttal

Hierocles was a 2nd-century Stoic — we don’t know much else about his life — whose Elements of Ethics survives mostly through a papyrus fragment and through Stobaeus’s later summaries. What survives is enough. He gave Stoic ethics its most literal image: concentric circles, radiating outward from the self.

At the center: your own mind. Next ring out: immediate family. Then extended family, then your local community, then your city and country, and finally, at the outer edge, all of humanity. It reads like a target, self at the bullseye. But Hierocles wasn’t describing a hierarchy of who matters more. He was describing a starting position — and the entire ethical task was what you do from there.

What you do is pull the outer rings in. Hierocles’ own language, as it comes down to us: the work is to draw the circles toward the center, “transferring people to the inner circles,” treating strangers with something closer to the care you’d give family. Not staying politely detached from the outer rings. Actively dragging them closer. We’ve covered the mechanics of this practice — oikeiosis, the Stoic term for it — in more depth elsewhere, but the short version is enough to make the point here: a Stoic who’s doing this correctly ends up more entangled with strangers over time, not less.

That’s about as far from “cold and detached” as an ethical program gets. Hierocles isn’t a fringe figure making a minority argument inside Stoicism, either — he’s transmitting oikeiosis, a load-bearing concept that runs through Cicero’s account of Stoic ethics and through Marcus Aurelius’s insistence, in the Meditations, that humans “were born to work together, like feet, like hands, like eyelids.” The architecture of the philosophy points outward. The 2026 data says the self-image of its practitioners points inward. Both things are true, and that gap is the actual story.

What Are Hierocles’ Circles of Concern?

Hierocles’ circles run outward from the self in a fixed order, each ring representing a widening sphere of people the Stoic is meant to draw closer through deliberate practice:

1. The self — your own mind, the center point
2. Immediate family — parents, spouse, children
3. Extended family — relatives beyond the household
4. Local community — neighbors, fellow citizens of your town
5. Country — your broader civic and national community
6. All of humanity — the outermost ring, everyone who shares reason

The practice isn’t memorizing the order. It’s treating the order as something to collapse — pulling ring six toward ring one, one relationship at a time.

So Why Do Stoics Rate Themselves Cold?

The study doesn’t fully answer this, and neither Yalch nor Newcomb claim to. But there’s a reasonable read sitting right next to the philosophy itself.

Stoic practice looks calm from the outside. The whole discipline of separating what’s in your control from what isn’t produces a kind of even-keeled affect under pressure — we’ve written before about the difference between that composure and actual emotional suppression, and the two get confused constantly. Someone who has trained themselves not to visibly spiral during a crisis can look, from a distance, indifferent. Self-report measures ask people how they’d describe their own style, and “calm under pressure” and “cold” are not the same trait, but they can produce overlapping answers on a questionnaire built around adjectives like reserved or unemotional.

There’s also the pop-Stoicism problem this site keeps returning to: a lot of people who’d call themselves Stoic on a survey learned the philosophy through hustle-culture quote graphics that strip out everything Hierocles cared about and keep only the toughness. If your Stoicism came from a highlight reel of “control what you can control” memes, rating yourself as detached on a personality inventory isn’t a misunderstanding of your own traits. It’s an accurate report of a genuinely incomplete philosophy — just not the one Hierocles or Marcus Aurelius actually held.

Where the Data Doesn’t Reach

Worth being honest about the limits here, because it would be easy to over-read a single self-report study into a bigger claim than it can support.

This measures how people describe themselves, not how they actually behave with other people. Self-report and observed behavior diverge all the time, in every direction — someone can rate themselves as cold on a questionnaire and be the person a friend calls first during a crisis. The study doesn’t watch Stoics interact with anyone. It asks them to check boxes about their own style, and 447 adults recruited online is a real sample but not a stand-in for how Stoic communities actually function day to day.

It’s also one study, the first of its kind, which means it hasn’t been replicated. Yalch and Newcomb frame their own findings as adding nuance and opening directions for future research, not as a settled verdict on what Stoicism does interpersonally. That’s the right level of confidence to hold about it right now.

A Practice Worth Trying

If the gap between Stoic philosophy and Stoic self-image is real, closing it isn’t a matter of trying harder to seem warm. It’s closing the actual gap Hierocles described.

1. Name your current circles honestly. Who’s actually in your inner ring right now versus who you’d claim is there if asked? Be specific — not “family” in the abstract, but the people you’d actually call at 2 a.m.
2. Pick one person from an outer ring. A coworker, a neighbor, someone in your extended community you interact with but don’t really know. Hierocles’ target was strangers and acquaintances, not people you already love.
3. Do one thing that pulls them a ring closer. Ask a real question. Remember something they told you last time and follow up on it. Small, specific, repeatable — the circles move one interaction at a time, not through a single grand gesture.
4. Notice if calm gets mistaken for cold. If someone reads your composure as indifference, that’s worth naming out loud rather than assuming they’ll eventually see through it. Hierocles’ whole model depends on the inner state being visible in the outer behavior.

None of this requires abandoning what actually works about Stoic composure under pressure. It requires not letting that composure stand in for the interpersonal half of the philosophy that Hierocles thought was the entire point.

The Myth Was Never in the Texts

The “cold Stoic” isn’t a slander invented by people who’ve never read the philosophy. It’s apparently how a real sample of self-identified Stoics see themselves, measured on a validated scale, for the first time. That’s worth taking seriously rather than waving away.

But taking it seriously means going back to what Hierocles actually argued, not settling for the caricature the data seems to confirm. He didn’t build a philosophy of the self-contained individual. He built a set of circles designed to collapse, with the explicit goal of making strangers feel like family. A Stoic who’s doing what Hierocles described ends up more entangled with other people over time, not less. If that’s not showing up in how Stoics rate themselves, the problem isn’t with the circles. It’s with how much of them got left out somewhere between the 2nd century and the survey.

---

This post discusses psychological research on Stoic self-perception. It isn’t a substitute for professional guidance on relationships or mental health. If isolation or disconnection feels like more than a philosophical question, a therapist can help in ways a philosophy essay can’t.