Behavioral ecology of human personality

What is it about?

Behavioral ecology is a subdiscipline of evolutionary biology aimed to understand behavior from an evolutionary viewpoint. Recently, the researchers from this field made attempts to explore and explain animal personality (e.g. aggressiveness, boldness, exploration, etc). In the last 15 years the field become quite rich in empirical findings and theoretical models. However, the researchers in the field of human personality are mostly unaware of this progress and relatively rarely use behavioral ecological framework in personality research (with notable exceptions). We believe that human personality psychology would gain an opportunity to better understand human behavior if behavioral ecological viewpoint would be used to a greater extent in the research of human individual differences. In this manuscript we describe the theoretical framework and representative data from the field of behavioral ecology of personality. Furthermore, we describe possible ways to implement this framework in human personality research.

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Why is it important?

Behavioral ecological models can help the researchers of human personality to answer the crucial questions of personality traits in humans: why there is personality in the first place (why do individuals differ in aggressiveness or sociability), why are these behavioral patterns relatively stable throughout the ontogeny, and why are functionally different personality traits (e.g. boldness and aggressiveness) related to each other? These are the key questions of personality and they probably cannot be answered without the implementation of evolutionary framework.

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