If it pays to be a jerk, why isn’t everyone that way?
Long-term research on chimpanzees offers new clues to the puzzle of personality
Peer-Reviewed PublicationIMAGE: KNOWN AS A BULLY, FRODO THE CHIMPANZEE WAS GOMBE'S ALPHA MALE FOR FIVE YEARS. view more
CREDIT: IAN C. GILBY, ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY.
DURHAM, N.C. -- Throw a tantrum. Threaten, shove aside or steal from your colleagues. Science confirms, yet again, that brutish behavior can be an effective path to power. And not just in humans, but in chimpanzees, too.
A new study appearing April 24 in the journal PeerJ Life and Environment found that male chimps with more bullying, greedy and irritable personalities reached higher rungs of the social ladder and were more successful at siring offspring than their more deferential and conscientious counterparts.
But if that’s the case, researchers ask, why isn’t every chimp a bully?
A team led by researchers at the University of Edinburgh and Duke University followed 28 male chimps living in Gombe National Park in Tanzania.
A previous study of Gombe chimpanzees led by Edinburgh’s Alexander Weiss along with Duke professor Anne Pusey and colleagues showed how some chimpanzees are more sociable, while others are loners. Some lean towards easy-going, while others are more overbearing or quick to pick fights.
Tanzanian field researchers who knew the chimpanzees well performed the personality assessments, based on years of near-daily observations of how each chimpanzee behaved and interacted with other chimps.
In the current study, researchers found that male chimps with certain personality traits -- in this case, a combination of high dominance and low conscientiousness -- tend to fare better in life than others.
“Personality matters,” said Joseph Feldblum, assistant research professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke and the other lead author of the study.
It may not be shocking to learn that bullying has its perks. But for some researchers, findings like these pose a conundrum: If males with certain personality tendencies are more likely to rise to the top and reproduce, and pass the genes for those traits on to their offspring, then shouldn’t every male be that way?
In other words, why do personality differences exist at all?
“It’s an evolutionary puzzle,” Feldblum said.
One long-held theory is that different personality traits pay off at different points in animals’ lives. Even if being aggressive gives young male chimps an edge, it might backfire when they’re older. Or perhaps certain traits are a liability in youth but an asset in old age.
“Think of the personality traits that lead some people to peak in high school versus later in life,” Weiss said. “It’s a trade-off.”
But when the team tested this idea, using 37 years of data going back to some of Jane Goodall’s early work at Gombe in the 1970s, they found the same personality traits were linked to high rank and reproductive success across the lifespan.
The findings suggest that something else must explain the diversity of personalities in chimpanzees. It might be that the “best” personality to have varies depending on environmental or social conditions, or that a trait that is beneficial to males is costly to females, Feldblum said.
If that were true, then “genes associated with those traits would be kept in the population,” Weiss said.
Not too many years ago, the mere suggestion that animals have personalities at all was considered taboo. Jane Goodall herself was accused of anthropomorphism when she described some of the Gombe chimpanzees as “bolder” or “more fearful” than others, some as “affectionate” and others “cold.”
Since that time, scientists studying creatures ranging from birds to squid have found evidence of distinctive personalities in animals: quirks and idiosyncrasies and ways of relating to the world that remain reasonably stable over time and across situations.
Weiss says personality ratings for animals have proven to be as consistent from one observer to the next as are similar measures of human personality.
“The data just don’t support the skepticism,” Weiss said.
This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (#BCS-9021946, #BCS-0452315, #BCS-0648481, #BCS-9319909, #IIS-0431141, #IOS-1052693, #IOS-1457260, #EF-0905606 and #DGE-1106401), the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, the Jane Goodall Institute, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (R01-AI058715), Harris Steel Group, the University of Edinburgh, University of Minnesota, Duke University and the British Academy (PF20/100086).
CITATION: "Personality Traits, Rank Attainment, and Siring Success Throughout the Lives of Male Chimpanzees of Gombe National Park," Alexander Weiss, Joseph T. Feldblum, Drew M. Altschul, D. Anthony Collins, Shadrack Kamenya, Deus Mjungu, Steffen Foerster, Ian C. Gilby, Michael L. Wilson, Anne E. Pusey. PeerJ,April 24, 2023. DOI: 10.7717/peerj.1508.
JOURNAL
PeerJ
ARTICLE TITLE
Personality traits, rank attainment, and siring success throughout the lives of male chimpanzees of Gombe National Park
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
24-Apr-2023
Monkeys are smarter than we thought
PITTSBURGH, April 24, 2023 – A paradigm-shifting study published today in Nature Neuroscience shows that, just like humans, monkeys are capable of complex deliberation and careful decision-making. The study is first to show that monkeys can think deeply about a problem and consider combinations of factors such as costs, consequences and constraints. In doing so, monkeys can find optimal outcomes rather than impulsively reaching for the first available option.
“Humans are not the only animals capable of slow and thoughtful deliberation,” said senior author William Stauffer, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “Our work shows that monkeys have a rich mental state that renders them capable of intelligent thinking. It’s a new paradigm for studying the neurophysiological basis for deliberative thought.”
Consider a fundamental question: how do we, as humans, think about what we want? What happens in our brains when we close our eyes and deliberate over complex questions, such as who to spend time with or what to study at school? And are other animals, including monkeys, capable of the same complexity of thought?
Several decades ago, the Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman, Ph.D., revolutionized the field of behavioral economics with Prospect Theory. In his book, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” he postulated that humans employ two distinct systems of thinking: one nearly instantaneous that happens automatically, and the other much slower conscious logical reasoning that requires more mental effort.
Kahneman dubbed the first, effortless, type of thinking as ‘fast’ and the second as ‘slow.’ Slow, effortful thinking enables us to write music, develop scientific hypothesis and balance our checkbooks.
As it turns out, humans’ slow thinking is not unique.
By presenting monkeys with combinatorial optimization problems in what Pitt neuroscientists dubbed the ‘knapsack task’ and rewarding the animals based on the value of the submitted solutions, researchers showed that monkeys employed sophisticated mathematical reasoning and used efficient computational algorithms to tackle complex problems.
The scientists discovered that the animals’ performance and speed of deliberation was dependent on the task’s complexity, and that their solutions closely matched those generated by efficient computer algorithms designed specifically to solve the optimization problem.
“Results from this work will contribute neurophysiological evidence to enlighten centuries of discussions about dual process theories of the mind, the structure of thoughts, and the neurobiological basis of intuition and reasoning,” wrote Stauffer in an accompanying research briefing.
Tao Hong of Carnegie Mellon University is the lead author of the paper.
JOURNAL
Nature Neuroscience
ARTICLE TITLE
Computational complexity drives sustained deliberation
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
24-Apr-2023
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