Bruce Banner personality type: INTP

When Bruce Banner finally joins the fight in New York, he walks toward a giant alien creature, tells Steve that his secret is that he is always angry, and turns green on command. It is one of the best moments in The Avengers. It also explains Bruce: a man who survives by keeping a very large part of himself locked away.

Start with the enneagram, because it drives everything. Bruce is a Five with a Six wing. Fives cope with a scary world by withdrawing into their heads, saving their energy and keeping people at a safe distance.

When The Avengers finds him in Calcutta, he is treating patients in a poor neighborhood, far from anyone he could hurt. The Six wing adds the constant anxiety. He admits in the 2012 film that he once tried to end his life and the Other Guy stopped the bullet. Hiding is not laziness for Bruce. It is safety.

His MBTI type is INTP. He is happiest inside a problem, alone, following the logic wherever it goes. He and Tony build Ultron in secret because neither can resist the puzzle. The curious, playful side lights up around other scientists, and the routines that keep the Hulk quiet, the breathing and the careful distance, are his anchor.

Feeling is where the danger lives. Emotions he does not process come out all at once, and big. The Hulk is, in a way, the part of him that holds every feeling he refuses to have. In Age of Ultron he and Natasha nearly try something real, and he flies off alone in a Quinjet rather than risk it. In Infinity War the Hulk refuses to come out at all, which is the most passive-aggressive thing a giant has ever done.

So the growth in Endgame makes sense. Bruce stops fighting the Hulk and spends eighteen months in a gamma lab merging the two. Smart Hulk poses for selfies, eats in diners and does the snap that brings everyone back, burning his own arm to do it. A Five comes out of hiding and gives fully.

Some fans type him INFP, because he is so gentle and so wounded. I see that. Still, his first move in a crisis is analysis rather than values, and his closest bonds form over a shared puzzle.