Animals have Personalities also

We know our siblings and in-laws have personalities — sometimes to a fault. But science recently has revealed that such individual differences are widespread in the animal kingdom, even reaching to spiders, birds, mice, squid, rats and pigs.

Now a new mathematical model helps to explain how and why such animal temperaments develop over time.

The model explains a central question of both animal and human personality — why certain individuals are more rigid or flexible than others, and why some change their behavior in response to changes in their environment while others do not.

The field of animal-personality study is starting to gain some substance and credibility, said University of Texas psychologist Sam Gosling, who does research in this field.

"When I started doing this, like 10 years ago, things were really different. I remember people thought it was anthropomorphic [to use the term animal personality]," said Gosling, who was not involved in the recent study.

Prestigious scientific journals are publishing research articles explicitly on the topic of animal personality, he said.

"I think it does reflect a new sense of respect in the field and I think it's opening up all kinds of important opportunities and allowing us to test questions we simply couldn't test without animal studies," Gosling said.

Individuals coexist
The researchers also found animal personalities tend to persist. That's because, as the adage goes, practice makes perfect. Individuals who are responsive gain experience, so it behooves them to continue such behavior in the future.

"Individuals that have been responsive before have a slight advantage in collecting or interpreting environmental cues," Weissing told LiveScience. "This is a plausible assumption, since the performance of individuals generally improves with the experience they have."
Similar personality types also exist in humans. "Some humans behave rather routine, in a rigid way. And others behave in a rather flexible way," Weissing said. "The first type is rather traditional, conservative, always following the trodden path of the past, whereas the other type is more interested in change, interested in the environment, always sampling the environment."

While the model simulations didn't directly analyze human behavior, Weissing said there is a crossover between non-human animals and the rest of the animal kingdom.