What a great question, and one that I get asked as often as
‘how are you today’? I am a behavioural and evolutionary biologist, and animal
personality is the main focus of my PhD thesis. That puzzles a lot of my friends.
'How can an animal have a personality?’ they ask. Then comes: ‘how do you
measure it?’ And last, ‘why does someone pay you to do that?’
Ah. Well, let me take it one question at a time.
First things first, how can an animal have a personality.
You can’t ask an animal how it feels, or get one to fill out a questionnaire.
Yet so many pet owners say their dog is friendly, or their cat is shy, or their
rabbit has something against people wearing purple socks. These pet owners have
picked up on the consistent
behaviours of their pet. They have seen their pet behave in similar ways repeatedly, at different times and in
different situations. Having a personality means behaving consistently, which
is possible for every mobile organism from a single celled organism to
ourselves. But personality is not just behaving consistently. Bob the basset
hound has his own personality because it is different from Gary the German
shepherd. Bob is friendly, Gary is shy. Personality, then, is one individual
behaving consistently compared to itself, and differently compared to other
individuals of the same species. So animals can have a personality!
And how do you measure it? If a personality means behaving
consistently compared to others, measuring personality is simple. We just
observe how different individuals behave in a given situation more than once.
For one aspect of my work, I repeatedly measure how individual birds react to a
piece of paper. This gives me an idea of how bold a given bird is and how
consistently it is so bold. This individual gets compared to the other
individuals I have measured, so that some individuals can be classed as
relatively bold whilst others can be classed as relatively shy.
And now the biggie: Why does someone pay you to do that? Well,
I could give explanations about improving our understanding of human societies
and behaviour. But first and foremost, I study animal personality because it is
amazing. Think a bit deeper: behaviour is an individual’s toolkit for survival.
Behaviour acts as a buffer between what is relatively stable (genes and
physical characteristics) and the rapidly fluctuating environment the
individual lives in. Personality shows us that the behavioural toolkit is not
complete, and that this incomplete toolkit is somehow better than being able to
do everything. Perhaps personality minimises the costs of being very flexible
(bigger brains, sensitive senses that detect environmental change, etc).
Perhaps specialising allows an individual to get more out of the resources it
has in its local environment. Or, having a specific behavioural toolkit may be
part of following a specific trajectory through life (different life history
strategies).
So a study of personality rapidly becomes a question of why
individuals live as they do. It can be measured easily enough in birds:
consistent behaviour can come from consistent observation. And it is easy
enough to define personality as behavioural consistency. At which point, my
friends ask the question ‘so what have you found?’ and in their eyes I see
eager enthusiasm and boundless curiosity for a topic that they didn’t know
existed a few minutes before.
What have I found? Well, that can wait for a future
instalment.
by Issie Winney
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