The New York
Times January 22, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/magazine/22animal.html
The Animal
Self
By CHARLES
SIEBERT
A big-city aquarium after
closing hours is an
eerie, spectral place.
With the lights turned
down in the empty viewing
galleries, the luminous
dioramas of the different
fish fairly swell
against your senses,
rendering you the viewed and
startled captive, adrift
in your own natural
medium, in a literal
suspension of disbelief.
"Help yourself," Sal
Munoz, a night-shift
biologist at the Seattle
Aquarium, told me one
night this past fall,
pointing to the huge
12-foot-high glass tank in
which the subject of
my specially arranged
private encounter that
evening resided: a
70-pound giant Pacific octopus
named Achilles.
I was first introduced to
Achilles earlier that
day by Roland Anderson,
another scientist at the
aquarium, and I was still
having trouble with
Anderson's description of
him as "a young, pretty
male." There are, as
fellow life forms go, few as
deeply alien - in both
substance and appearance -
as the giant Pacific
octopus. "G.P.O." adults can
weigh more than 100
pounds, and yet all of their
throbbing, multi-tentacled
mass can pass like
water through a drain pipe
no bigger in
circumference than an
apple, just wide enough to
accommodate the octopus's
cartilaginous beak, its
only solid body part.
These creatures look, at
rest, like cracked leather
discards from a
handbag factory; in
motion, like wind-swept
hot-air balloons in severe
deflation distress,
with no one at home in the
balloon's gondola but
for a pair of unsettlingly
knowing black eyes.
It was those eyes more
than anything that I had
asked Anderson for special
permission to come
back and stare into on my
own. Just me and
Achilles. With no one else
around to make me
self-conscious for
engaging in a protracted
stare-down with an
octopus. For reading
impossible complexities
into his muffled side of
the conversation. For
tapping my fingers on the
glass in hopes of getting
Achilles riled. For
behaving, in short, in a
way that even I, an
inveterate lingerer before
zoo enclosures and
fish tanks, would have
considered preposterous
had I not heard Anderson's
real-life octopus
stories earlier that
day.
Anderson told me that he
and his staff started
naming the G.P.O.'s at the
Seattle Aquarium 20
years ago. Not out of
cutesy sentimentality.
Anderson, a longtime
marine biologist and the son
of a sea captain, is not
given to that sort of
thing. It was, he said,
because they couldn't
help noticing the animals'
distinct
personalities. G.P.O.'s
live about three or four
years, and the aquarium
typically keeps three on
the premises - two on
display and one backup or
understudy octopus - so
there have been a good
number of G.P.O.'s at the
aquarium over the past
two decades. Still,
Anderson had little trouble
recalling them: Emily
Dickinson, for example, a
particularly shy, retiring
female G.P.O. who
always hid behind the
tank's rock outcroppings,
or Leisure Suit Larry,
who, Anderson told me,
would have been arrested
in our world for sexual
assault, with his arms
always crawling all over
passing researchers. And
then there was Lucretia
McEvil. She repeatedly
tore her tank apart at
night, scraping up all the
rocks at the base,
pulling up the water
filter, biting through nylon
cables, all the parts left
floating on the
surface when Anderson
arrived in the morning.
One particularly
temperamental G.P.O. so disliked
having his tank cleaned,
he would keep grabbing
the cleaning tools, trying
to pull them into the
tank, his skin going a
bright red. Another took
to regularly soaking one
of the aquarium's female
night biologists with the
water funnel octopuses
normally use to propel
themselves, because he
didn't like it when she
shined her flashlight
into his tank. Yet another
G.P.O. of the Leisure
Suit Larry mold once tried
to pull into his tank
a BBC videographer who got
her hand a bit too
close, wrapping his
tentacles up and down her arm
as fast as she could
unravel them. When she
finally broke free, the
octopus turned a bright
red and doused her with
repeated jets of water.
Just across from Achilles
that night was another
G.P.O. named Mikala, their
two tanks connected by
an overhead, see-through
passageway, the doors to
which were closed. Mikala
was a recent
replacement for Helen, who
had just been released
back into the sea after a
failed attempt by the
scientists to mate her
with Achilles. Anderson
told me that they had left
Achilles and Helen
together in the same tank
for a week, but, he
said, "there wasn't any
chemistry." In the coming
months, they would be
trying the same routine
with Mikala, to see if
anything clicked.
At one point I decided to
absent myself from
Achilles' stare and walk
around to the far side
of his tank to look at
Mikala in hers. Standing
in the narrow space
beneath the overhead
passageway, I found her
sound asleep, mushed
between her tank's outer
glass and some craggy
rocks. I thought about
tapping the glass to see
if I could stir her, but
decided to leave her be.
When I turned around,
Achilles was right there
behind me, bobbing against
the glass, bright red,
his black eyes opened
wide.
"How do we even define
what an emotion is in an
animal?" I recalled Roland
Anderson asking
earlier that day. "And why
do they even have
these different
temperaments?"
It was back in 1991 that
Anderson and Jennifer
Mather, a psychologist
from the University of
Lethbridge in Alberta,
Canada, first decided to
undertake a joint
personality study of 44 smaller
red octopuses at the
aquarium as a way to begin
to codify and systematize
what they thought they
had been observing. Using
three categorizations
from a standard
human-personality-assessment test
- shy, aggressive and
passive - their data would
ultimately show that the
animals did consistently
clump together under these
different categories
in response to various
stimuli, like touching
them with a bristly
test-tube brush or dropping a
crab into the
tank.
"The aggressive ones would
pounce on the crab,"
Anderson told me. "The
passive ones would wait
for the crab to come past
and then grab it. The
shy animal would wait till
overnight when no one
was looking, and we'd find
this little pile of
crab shell in the
morning."
Anderson and Mather's
resulting 1993 paper in the
Journal of Comparative
Psychology, entitled
"Personalities of
Octopuses," was not only the
first-ever documentation
of personality in
invertebrates. It was the
first time in anyone's
memory that the term
"personality" had been
applied to a nonhuman in a
major psychology
journal.
Scientists are not
typically disposed to wielding
a word like "personality"
when talking about
animals. Doing so borders
on the scientific
heresy of
anthropomorphism. And yet for a growing
number of researchers from
a broad range of
disciplines - psychology,
evolutionary biology
and ecology, animal
behavior and welfare - it is
becoming increasingly
difficult to avoid that
term when trying to
describe the variety of
behaviors that they are
now observing in an
equally broad and
expanding array of creatures,
everything from nonhuman
primates to hyenas and
numerous species of birds
to water striders and
stickleback fish and, of
course, giant Pacific
octopuses.
In fact, in the years
since Anderson and Mather's
original paper, a whole
new field of research has
emerged known simply as
"animal personality."
Through close and repeated
observations of
different species in a
variety of group settings
and circumstances,
scientists are finding that
our own behavioral traits
exist in varying
degrees and dimensions
among creatures across all
the branches of life's
tree. Observing our fellow
humans, we all recognize
the daredevil versus the
more cautious, risk-averse
type; the aggressive
bully as opposed to the
meek victim; the
sensitive, reactive
individual versus the more
straight-ahead, proactive
sort, fairly oblivious
to the various subtle
signals of his
surroundings. We wouldn't
have expected to meet
all of them, however, in
everything from farm
animals and birds to fish
and insects and
spiders. But more and more
now, we are
recognizing ourselves and
our ways to be
recapitulations of the
rest of biology. And as
scientists track these
phenomena, they are also
beginning to unravel such
core mysteries as the
bioevolutionary
underpinnings of personality,
both animal and human; the
dynamic interplay
between genes and
environment in the expression
of various personality
traits; and why it is that
nature invented such a
thing as personality in
the first
place.
Animal personality studies
are only the most
recent manifestation of
the inroads that science
is now making into what
has long been uncharted
terrain: the very
inscrutability of our fellow
creatures that has, from
the dawn of human
consciousness, both
begotten and bound us to our
wildest imaginings about
them. All sorts of
research has been done in
recent years revealing
various aspects of animal
complexity: African
gray parrots that can not
only count but can also
grasp the concept of zero;
self-recognition,
empathy and the cultural
transference of tool use
in both chimps and
dolphins; individual
face-recognition among
sheep; courtship songs in
mice; laughter in rats.
This is no longer merely
the stuff of
anthropomorphism or isolated
anecdote. As Jaak
Panksepp, the neuroscientist
who first discovered rat
laughter, has pointed
out: "Every drug used to
treat emotional and
psychiatric disorders in
humans was first
developed and found
effective in animals. This
kind of research would
obviously have no value if
animals were incapable of
experiencing these
emotional
states."
Now, with the emergence of
animal-personality
studies, we are gaining an
even fuller
appreciation not only of
the distinctiveness of
birds and beasts and their
behaviors but also of
their deep resemblances to
us and our own.
Somehow, through the very
creatures we have long
piggybacked upon to tell
stories about ourselves,
we are beginning to get at
the essence of that
one aspect of the self we
have long thought to be
exclusively and
quintessentially ours: the
individual personality.
The octopuses' garden is
proving to be quite deeply
and variously shaded
indeed.
Appropriately enough for a
newly emerging
psychological science, the
world's first Animal
Personality Institute, or
A.P.I., is still more
of a proposition than a
physical place. Indeed,
outside of a newly
established Web site with a
flashy bright blue logo,
A.P.I.'s only visitable
locale can be found on the
third floor of the
psychology-department
building at the University
of Texas in Austin, in the
small, book-crammed
office of A.P.I.'s
founder, Sam Gosling, a
London-born, 37-year-old
professor of psychology.
"This here is my
collection of animal-personality
literature," Gosling told
me one afternoon in
October, pointing to a
long row of thick blue
binders along the top
shelf of his office's
bookcase, including animal
studies from fields as
diverse as agricultural
science, anthropology,
psychology, veterinary
medicine and zoology.
"We're trying to scan them
all and make them
available, because part
of. . . I mean.. . ."
A tall, gaunt figure whose
flowing locks,
untucked striped shirt,
slightly flared bell
bottoms and ankle-high
leather boots give him the
appearance of a 60's-era
British rock star,
Gosling is given to
switching gears midsentence,
his active mind going in a
number of directions
at once. "Part of what
we're trying to do here,"
he continued, "is create a
field."
Gosling, who often refers
to himself as "a bit of
a fraud," being what he
calls "a personality
expert who knows very
little about actual
animals," was a young
graduate student in
psychology at the
University of California,
Berkeley, when he first
came upon Anderson and
Mather's paper on octopus
personality. It was not
at all an area of research
he expected to be
poking his nose into,
having originally attended
Berkeley to pursue a
degree in human personality.
But in the course of one
of his first seminars,
he suddenly found his
thoughts going in an
unlikely direction, what
he now refers to as his
"reductio ad absurdum
moment."
"It was a basic seminar in
human personality," he
recalled. "We were
considering the question of
what is personality. And I
thought, O.K., let's
try to push it to its
limit. To find out what
personality is, let's
start by taking what's
clearly outside that
category and discover what's
different about that.
Let's take animals. They
obviously don't have
personality. So then I
thought, O.K., if animals
don't have it, then
what is it that makes them
not have it, and I
couldn't come up with an
answer."
A standard answer, of
course, is that animals do
not, as far as we know,
reflect upon and argue
with their experiences,
emotions and behaviors in
the way that we humans do.
They do not possess,
in other words, that
dynamic, self-reflective,
internal dialogue the very
outcome of which is,
many scientists say, our
personality. Of course,
whether or not
self-knowledge is truly a defining
characteristic of
personality is a question
scientists disagree on, as
they do about much
else in the field. Indeed,
the whole notion of
personality is one that we
only began trying to
measure and codify in the
past century.
Personality theory started
showing up in the
writings of Ivan Pavlov
and Sigmund Freud as a
somewhat vague, broadly
drawn concept. It has
only been in the last 60
years or so that the
modern science of human
personality began to
emerge, a system of
assessing distinct
personality traits that
has its roots in World
War II, when the U.S.
government assigned to the
Office of Strategic
Services (the forerunner of
today's C.I.A.) the task
of identifying which
individuals had the right
traits to be spies. A
number of different
personality-mapping methods
and traits-assessment
tests have been developed
over the years, all of
them pivoting around the
principle that certain
traits can be consistently
observed in individuals
across time and different
situations. The most
widely applied test today
uses the categories
defined by what is known as
the Five-Factor Model
(F.F.M.): openness,
conscientiousness,
extroversion, agreeableness
and neuroticism. Under
each of these broad
dimension headings are
so-called clusters of
recognizable traits: an
extroverted person, for
example, is more sociable,
outgoing and
assertive; a neurotic one,
more anxious, moody
and stressed.
Gosling, however, was
intent on exploring
personality at its most
rudimentary level - below
the radar, if you will, of
human consciousness.
Applying some of the very
same personality
assessments that we use on
humans, he wondered
whether we could observe
in animals essential
traits like fearfulness,
aggressiveness,
affability or calmness,
traits that can exist
outside of cognition and
yet are clearly and
repeatedly apparent in
varying measures in
different individual
animals within a given
species.
Does one duck, in other
words, behave
consistently differently
from another duck, over
time and across
situations? If so, why doesn't
that meet the definition
of personality as we
apply it to ourselves,
regardless of the presence
or absence of
self-awareness? In a sense, Gosling
was posing a
psychologist's rendition of that old
philosophical query about
whether the tree that
falls in the forest, miles
from anyone's ears,
still makes a sound. That
is, if an animal
behaves in distinctly
consistent ways but isn't
fully cognizant of such
behaviors, can the
behaviors still be aspects
and indications of its
personality?
One way Gosling set about
answering that question
was to focus on a colony
of 34 hyenas being kept
on the Berkeley campus by
Steve Glickman, a
professor of psychology.
With Glickman's
blessing, Gosling asked
four caretakers of the
colony to independently
fill out questionnaires
about each animal, using a
modified version of
the F.F.M. test. He soon
found that the
caretakers' assessments
had the same level of
agreement, or
"convergence," as is found in
assessments done on
humans, with such distinct
human dimensions as
"excitability,"
"sociability," "curiosity"
and "assertiveness"
being repeatedly
observed.
Gosling then reviewed 19
different previous
behavioral studies of
nonhuman species through
the same F.F.M. framework
and found a similar
recurrence of those
dimensions across a
surprisingly broad
spectrum of species. Among the
traits remarked upon were
such things as
"opportunistic,
self-serving" behavior in certain
vervet monkeys;
"emotionality" in rats; "fear
avoidance" in some guppies
and "extroversion" in
others; and, in Anderson
and Mather's 1993 paper,
both "boldness" and
"avoidance" in octopuses.
"The evolutionary
continuity between humans and
other animals suggests
that some dimensions of
personality may be common
across a wide range of
species," Gosling wrote in
the resulting paper he
published in 1999 in the
journal Current
Directions in
Psychological Science. "Scientists
have been reluctant to
ascribe personality
traits, emotion and
cognitions to animals, even
though they readily accept
that the anatomy and
physiology of humans is
similar to that of
animals. Yet there is
nothing in evolutionary
theory to suggest that
only physical traits are
subject to selection
pressures."
Gosling told me that his
seminar adviser thought
the whole thing sounded a
bit "goofy" at first.
Some of his fellow
students, meanwhile, were
irked at him for trying to
bring the field of
personality to disrepute,
as Gosling put it, by
studying silly, trivial,
frivolous stuff. The
major sticking point, of
course, was his
insistence on using the
obviously loaded word
"personality," a choice
that he admits was
purposefully
provocative.
In some quarters, the term
still rankles.
"Personality ratings have
been done with chimps
where you can see in them
intimations of human
characteristics," says
Jack Block, an emeritus
professor of personality
psychology at Berkeley.
"Now, where you want to
take that, I don't know.
Even with chimps, it is a
big extrapolation from
them to us. But
personality in fruit flies or
octopi? Heck, no. All
living organisms do react
to pain and seek what they
have developed to want
in terms of food or
mating. But they cannot
manifest the complexity of
responses that human
beings can."
John Capitanio, a
psychology professor at the
University of California,
Davis, who does
extensive behavioral
studies with rhesus monkeys,
is more willing to
extrapolate. "Animal
behaviorists or behavioral
ecologists are mostly
interested in what the
animal is presenting them
with in terms of
behavior," he told me recently.
"And yet the behaviors
exhibited are not
dissimilar from our own,
and that's what causes
us to infer these
personality characteristics.
Now do they really exist
in animals? I think the
answer is yes, they do in
some form."
In many of his early
talks, people would ask
Gosling why he didn't use
the word "temperament"
instead of personality.
His response was - and is
- that temperament is
always invoked as a purely
biological, inherited
quality, whereas
personality is thought of
as a "higher order
phenomenon" that grows out
of the interaction of
our inherited temperaments
and our experiences.
If he used only the word
temperament with
animals, he would be
dismissing the possibility
that they may have some of
the same personality
processes as humans. "I
don't want to rule that
out," Gosling told me. "I
also think the word
personality is as
appropriate for animals as it
is for us. Of course, we
still have to be
suspicious. People will
also rate the personality
of a loaf of bread or a
car. A colleague has
poked fun at me about
that: 'A temperamental car
is difficult to start
across time and situations.
So why isn't that
personality?' Well, the
fundamental difference, of
course, is that with
an animal there is an
underlying physiology and
biology. Saying my car is
temperamental is an
analogy. And some people
will rate dogs not only
as friendly or fearful but
as philosophical. Now,
I do not believe dogs are
philosophical, whereas
I do believe in their
fearfulness. So we have to
be careful where to draw
the line between what's
reality and what's
analogy."
Dogs, in a way, offer the
most obvious proof of
the existence of animal
personality. They have
long been bound to us and
bred by us precisely
for their very particular
physical and
temperament traits, and,
of course, even among
specific breeds there are
all kinds of variation
in the personalities of
individuals. Indeed,
animals like dogs and cats
point up what often
appears to be a
paradoxically prodigious "duh
factor" behind this
otherwise cutting-edge
science. While scientists
may tussle endlessly
over the validity of
applying the word
personality to nonhumans,
for people in the
everyday world -
especially those who spend any
time around animals - the
assertion that they
have distinct
personalities seems absurdly
obvious.
Not so very long ago,
concepts like animal
sentience, emotion and
personality were not
merely the stuff of
anecdotes told by farmers and
pet owners; they were
wholly embraced by the
scientific community as
well. In the late 19th
century, animal emotion
and behavior were
integral aspects of the
newly emerging science of
human psychology. Charles
Darwin devoted much of
his time after the
publication of "The Origin of
Species" to researching
"The Expression of the
Emotions in Man and
Animals," published in 1872.
Although that era's
cross-species conjecturing
and comparing was often
naïve or intuitive, the
impulse behind it went on
to inform human
psychological study well
into the 20th century.
Beginning with the
appearance in 1908 of more
sober, scientifically
sound works like John
Lubbocks's "On the Senses,
Instincts, and
Intelligence of Animals
With Special Reference to
the Insects" or Edward L.
Thorndike's "Animal
Intelligence," animal
studies figured prominently
in standard human
psychology textbooks well into
the 1940's. And then,
steadily, the animals began
to disappear.
At one point in his Austin
office on the
afternoon I met with him,
Sam Gosling pulled from
his shelves the 1935
edition of "A Handbook of
Social Psychology," a
standard human psychology
textbook of the time, and
showed me the table of
contents. More than a
quarter of the textbook's
chapters were devoted to
studies of animals and
other life forms, titles
like "Population
Behavior of Bacteria,"
"Insect Societies" or "The
Behavior of Mammalian
Herds and Packs." There is
even a chapter devoted to
"Social Origins and
Processes Among Plants."
But in the 1954 edition
of a similar work called
"The Handbook of Social
Psychology," there is but
one chapter devoted to
nonhuman research. Titled
"The Social
Significance of Animal
Studies," it is
essentially a desperate
last plea to social
psychologists not to
abandon animal studies,
arguing at one point that
"social psychology must
be dangerously myopic if
it restricts itself to
human literature." The
warning clearly went
unheeded. The most recent
edition of the
handbook, from 1998, is
devoted entirely to
humans.
The banishment of our
fellow beasts from
psychological literature
can be blamed by and
large on that branch of
psychology known as
behaviorism. The field's
major proponents,
eminent psychologists like
B.F. Skinner, stressed
the inherent
inscrutability of mental states and
perceptions to anyone but
the person experiencing
them. And even though the
behaviorists were
themselves major
proponents of the use of animals
in behavioral research,
they sought to rein in
subjective verbal
descriptions of the animals'
mental states, as well as
the sorts of
experiments that relied on
such necessarily vague
data. If the human mind
was, as Skinner famously
referred to it, "a black
box," then surely the
minds of animals were even
further beyond our ken.
"The great and enduring
contribution of
behaviorism," Gosling
says, "is that it
introduced the scientific
method to the study of
behavior. They said,
'Let's get rid of the fuzzy,
sentimental higher-level
descriptions.' And they
did. They went to great
efforts to record
specific behaviors, things
like how many times a
chimpanzee scratched its
head or nose. But it's
hard to study higher-order
phenomena, things like
personality and emotion,
in just those ways. In
the end, what you're left
with is this long
catalog of meaningless
descriptions. If I need to
know whether I can go into
that cage or not to
clean it, it's not useful
to tell me the chimp
scratched its nose 50,000
times in the past year.
Just tell me, Is it
aggressive or not?"
In their dogged pursuit of
hard science and their
strict avoidance of what
Sam Gosling referred to
in his first published
paper as the "specter of
anthropomorphism," the
behaviorists, especially
in the eyes of many who
currently study animal
behavior, greatly limited
the field of psychology
by ultimately outlawing
things like intuition,
inference and common
sense. Now, however, the
pendulum has begun to
swing back in that
direction, and it is a
shift that has been
impelled, somewhat
surprisingly, by hard science.
Advances in fields like
genetics and molecular
and evolutionary biology
have lent to the study
of psychology something
that it really didn't
have when behaviorism
first came to the fore: a
better understanding of
the biological and
bioevolutionary
underpinnings of behavior. No
longer is the study of
animal behavior rooted in
that inherently naïve
and anthropocentric desire
to see ourselves in
animals or to project upon
them our thoughts and
feelings. Animal
personality, along with
such integral fields as
animal behavior,
behavioral ecology and
evolutionary biology, all
pivot now around what
might be called deep
analogies. The more detailed
and specific our knowledge
has become of the
animals and of the many
differences between them
and us, the more clearly
we can see what is
analogous about our
respective behaviors.
Animal personality, in
other words, is now
redirecting psychology's
focus in a direction the
behaviorists would most
appreciate: away from
airy abstractions about
personality and down to
its very tangible and
widely dispersed roots. It
might be thought of as a
kind of biological
Buddhism or muscular
mythologizing or armed
anthropomorphism: a more
disciplined and detailed
form of that idle
speculating we have all done in
front of the head tilt of
a dog or the sudden
skyward shift of a flock
of sea gulls or the
comings and goings of ants
around their
respective
mounds.
"Now, those there I can
almost guarantee you are
females," Jason Watters, a
behavioral ecologist
at the University of
California, Davis, told me
one afternoon this past
autumn. He was pointing
to a cluster of water
striders that had climbed
up the side wall of one of
the collecting pools
in the artificial stream
that Watters had erected
at the far western edge of
the Davis campus for a
six-month study that he
and his lab director,
Andy Sih, recently
completed on the role of
genetic and environmental
factors in the
expression of behavior in
water striders: those
spindly black,
surface-flitting wraiths whose
indent on their tenuous
native terrain is never
more than four slightly
concave,
lunar-module-like landing
cups.
Watters personally reared
several thousand water
striders for the
experiment and would come to
know them about as
intimately as any human can an
insect. He knew each
strider's parents and
siblings. He photographed
and marked each of them
with paint-on numbers and
then tracked them
through more or less every
circumstance and
experience in their
roughly yearlong lives: what
and how they ate, their
responses to new
environments or to
simulated predator attacks,
their social interactions
and mating practices
out in the simulated
stream.
"I haven't gathered all
the data yet," Watters
said, grabbing one of the
clustered striders and
confirming his suspicion
about its sex. "But what
we do know is that these
water striders express
consistent behavioral
types. Like in the presence
of a predator some
individuals will run and get
right out of the water.
Others don't seem
concerned whatsoever. Just
sit there. Others get
out and then get back in
after a little while. So
there's a great deal of
variation in what they
do. Especially in a mating
situation, here in the
stream we've found among
the males that there is
the consistently more
aggressive guy - so that's
his type or his
personality - and then there are
these very active,
hyperaggressive males. They're
the ones who are always
forcing females to have
sex and driving them out
of the water and really
messing things up for
themselves and everybody.
We don't know yet if this
is really the best way
to be or what the point of
it is. We're working
on that. But I've got to
believe there's going to
be some circumstances
where it's a good idea to
be a really mean, brutish
type of guy and others
where it's
not."
A similar array of
behaviors is now being
encountered in other
insects. In her current
research at Davis, Judy
Stamps, a professor of
biology and animal
behavior, has been looking
into how early experience
affects habitat
selection in drosophila,
better known to you and
me as the common fruit
fly. Stamps escorted me
one afternoon to one of
the biology department's
"animal rooms," where she
and her students have
been conducting their
experiments. The room was
the size of a small
walk-in closet, barely large
enough to contain the
11-foot-long metal table
before us.
To a tiny fruit fly,
however, the strange,
artificial fruit-bowl
habitats of upward twisting
wire set at either end of
the table are separate
universes, the various
fruit-shaped planets of
which, Stamps has
discovered, fruit flies
approach and settle in a
number of ways, some of
which depend on early
experience and some on
their distinct
personalities. Fruit flies born
and raised on a plum, for
example, will seek out
the next plum to settle
upon, as will the
offspring that they raise
there: a "no place like
home" impulse. But in the
course of their
research, Stamps and her
students have also
encountered everything
from overly shy, timorous
fruit flies to bold
trailblazers to downright
feisty and ultimately
self-defeating bullies.
"You don't think of
drosophila in that way,"
Stamps told me. "They can
be very territorial,
and some of the males are
fairly aggressive. They
tussle with each other.
When we did our
free-range fly
experiments, we marked them
individually. We put
little colored paint dots on
their thorax. The students
loved it. They'd say:
'You know Blue? He's been
attacking everyone this
morning. He's on Banana A,
and everyone else is
on Banana B. He's the
ruler of Banana A.' Of
course, the other thing
we've noticed is that
individuals that behave
like Blue get into
trouble because, you see,
they end up with nobody
to mate with."
Another member of Andy
Sih's lab, Alison Bell,
has done extensive studies
of the three-spined
stickleback fish, a tiny
prehistoric-looking fish
with armorlike outer
lateral plates and serrated,
lancelike spines
protruding from the dorsal
region. As well as finding
the same spectrum of
behaviors in sticklebacks
- from extremely bold
and bullying sticklebacks
to extremely shy and
timid ones - Bell has
found groups of
sticklebacks that exhibit
a similar type of
behavior: tribelike
populations of bold and
aggressive sticklebacks,
for example, or of
extremely timid ones.
Their collective
disposition seems to have
been shaped by the
respective environment in
which they were raised
- whether it was
predator-free or predator-laden
- and their physical
appearance reflects their
environment as well: the
timid sticklebacks
having far heavier armor
and longer, more
serrated
spines.
The questions that
scientists are now beginning
to address are why
evolution has wielded such a
variety of temperaments in
animals and why it
hasn't weeded out the
clearly deleterious ones:
the shyness and timidity
that deprives some
members of a group of food
or mates or the
overaggression and extreme
risk-taking behavior
that can often result in
both the disruption of
the group's overall
reproductive success and the
aggressors' becoming some
other creature's food.
Roland Anderson sees the
diversity of
temperaments as a
manifestation of that most
basic biological
imperative of survival, an array
of personality traits
being kept in play in a
given species because of
the differing, shifting
environmental
circumstances that groups may
encounter. "What happens,"
he asked, "if a big
school of herring comes
along and eats all the
aggressive, fearless males
in a group of smaller
fish? Well, there will
still be some of the more
passive or shy ones hiding
under that rock that
can say: 'Hey, they're all
gone now. There's a
nice-looking female over
there. I think I'll
reproduce with
her."'
Andy Sih, like most of his
colleagues at Davis,
views personality
differences in animals in a
Darwinian context. He
considers specific
behaviors and preferences
from an evolutionary
perspective and tries to
determine how various
traits affect the
long-term survival of a given
species. And in the course
of his research on
everything from water
striders to salamanders,
Sih has become fairly
obsessed with what he calls
"stupid behaviors," ones
that don't seem to make
any evolutionary sense
whatsoever.
"You'd expect animals to
be doing smart stuff,"
Sih told me one evening
over dinner. "The whole
tradition in most of
evolutionary ecology has
been to emphasize
adaptation where organisms do
smart things. But I've
been making the case for a
while that the most
interesting behaviors are
actually the
stupidest."
It's typically the males
of a given species that
seem to figure most
prominently in the
stupid-behavior department
- the militant,
mayhem-causing water
striders and sticklebacks,
for example, or fierce
male Western bluebirds,
who spend so much time
defending nests or
courting females that they
completely neglect
their own offspring. But
perhaps the most glaring
instance of dumb-animal
doings is to be found in
the female North American
fishing spider. Studies
have shown that a good
number of female fishing
spiders are from a very
early age highly driven
and effective hunters. It
is a trait that serves
them well most of their
lives, particularly in
lean times, but it wholly
backfires during mating
season, when these females
can't keep themselves
from eating prospective
suitors.
"Now why would anybody,
why would any organism do
that?" asked Sih. "If you
look at these female
spiders just in the
context of mating behavior,
you would conclude that
they're doing something
mighty stupid here. But
their behavioral type is
very good for them for
much of their life growing
up in a highly competitive
world where food is
often scarce. They're so
geared up, though, that
when mating season comes
around, they really mess
up. And experiments have
shown that even if
they're given a reasonable
amount of food,
they'll still behave this
way."
These same hyped-up
females have also been shown
to be the most fearless in
the face of predators.
In simulated attacks, all
fishing spiders
retreated underwater. The
overaggressive,
ravenous females, however,
were always the first
to pop back up, giving
them at once the greatest
chance of getting
available food and, if the
predator was still around,
of becoming its meal.
Of course, a good
proportion of female fishing
spiders are able to make
the distinction between
sex and dinner and between
finding and becoming
dinner. But for Sih and
others, the persistence
in certain members of a
species of these extreme
behaviors and the
inability of some to modulate
that behavior give rise to
a more profound
question about the nature
of personality types in
general and how plastic or
not they actually are,
whether in animals or
humans.
In animals, it is now
becoming evident, there is
a certain degree of
evolutionary inertia when it
comes to their behavior,
wherein the very
behaviors that accord some
members of the group a
distinct evolutionary
advantage in one set of
circumstances can do them
in in the next. They
are stuck, to some extent,
with their distinct
ways of being. We humans,
on the other hand, tend
to think of our
personalities as protean, mutable
entities that, unlike our
physical selves, we can
shape to suit shifting
circumstances. Sih
disagrees. He says he
thinks that our behaviors,
no matter how complex the
human social contexts
that help to shape them,
are not nearly as pliant
as we believe them to
be.
"Behavioral ecologists
actually tend to model
animals and humans as both
being very flexible,
as being capable of
changing their behaviors as
necessary to do the right
things in all
situations," he said. But
in our own day-to-day
experience, he said, we
recognize that humans
don't really behave that
way. "We all know that
overly bold person," he
pointed out. "We have
friends like that. They do
things that are just
like: Hey, this can get
you killed. What are they
doing that for? And there
are people that are
shy, and they're missing
out on opportunities
they could have
had."
There is currently a
paucity of human studies
along these lines, but a
recently published
human-personality study of
545 people by Daniel
Nettle of the University
of Newcastle in England
shows a strong parallel
with some of these recent
animal studies. It found
that the more
extroverted and outgoing
people were, the more
sex partners they tended
to have, an evolutionary
edge that was mitigated by
the fact that these
were the same people who
were most likely to end
up in the hospital because
of stupid risk-taking
behaviors.
Indeed, however elaborate
an argument we humans
may have with our own
biology, we are each of us
to some extent locked into
a personality type, a
consistent way of being
without which we would
each be, in a sense,
unrecognizable to ourselves
or others. The oft-heard
comment "Hey, that's not
like you" is a tacit
acknowledgment of your
recognizably consistent
way of being. If, in
other words, someone were
to be entirely flexible
and unpredictable in their
behavior, were able to
respond with any one of
the full palette of
behavioral responses in
any given circumstance,
they would be not only, as
Andy Sih put it,
"scary to be around," but
they would also be
someone of whom you could
say, they have no
personality.
This set of ideas, Sih
told me, suggests new
questions that are rarely
posed about humans.
"Like why do we even have
a personality?" he
asked. "Why do we have a
relatively narrow range
of responses as opposed to
a full range? Why
can't we all be bold when
we need to be and
cautious and shy when we
need to be? Then we'd
have no identifiable
personality, and that would
free us all to become
optimal."
For Sih, the answer seems
to be that our
personality is a
manifestation of a complex
interplay between genetic
inheritance and
environment and early-life
experience. Bold
people, for example, are
both naturally disposed
to boldness and, further,
choose to be bold,
becoming ever better at
it, building from an
early age a mountain of
abilities and tendencies
that become a personality.
It might happen, as
well, that an inherently
shy person is induced by
an early-life experience
to venture away from his
or her natural disposition
and cultivate a bold
personality. But whether a
person ends up
building and climbing a
shy or a bold mountain,
it may become increasingly
difficult to come back
down and build another
one.
"It's not impossible," Sih
said, "but it's not
going to be easy. I'll
give you another human
example. It's always
mystified me why anyone
would be a pessimist. It
seems to me like
optimism has to be the way
to go. But, in fact,
there is some recent
literature that shows that
pessimists are good at
being pessimists. And that
when things go badly, they
expected it anyway,
and it doesn't hurt them.
And so it's this notion
that personality types
build because of these
feedback
loops."
In human beings, of
course, as with other highly
social species, the
shaping of personality
entails a complex web of
influences and
imperatives. It is not
merely about the
acquisition of food or
mates but involves as well
issues of group
interaction, cooperation,
deception and so on. It is
a dynamic that, in an
ever more complex series
of evolutionary feedback
loops, at once impelled
the formation of larger
and more sophisticated
brains and the more
nuanced emotional
responses to social interaction
- feelings of
embarrassment, guilt, empathy,
confidence, etc. - that
such a brain allows.
The attempt to parse that
web of entanglements
has for decades been a
motivation of fields like
psychology, psychiatry and
sociology. What seems
so promising about the
field of animal
personality is that in the
course of allowing us
to better understand and
more effectively
conserve the animals
themselves, it is also
affording scientists new
pathways of
understanding ourselves
and our behavior, through
the kind of
experimentation that we are unable to
perform on
humans.
"Do thrill seekers thrive
in certain speculative
business or military
environments?" Sih asked. "I
don't know. But I can do
experiments to look at
analogous situations in
animals, can take
different animals with
different personalities
and see how they do in
different environments -
in a high-predation-risk
situation, in a
cooperative situation,
during a courtship-mating
situation. Along similar
lines, we can test ideas
like, Are animals
particularly aggressive when
they invade new regions
because it is primarily
the bold, aggressive
individuals that tend to
immigrate to new areas?
How does the personality
of the immigrant pool in
humans differ from those
who stay behind, and does
that difference
influence success - and
does this basic view
apply to the melting pot
of America?"
Alison Bell has done
related experiments with
sticklebacks. It has long
been clear to
researchers that fish that
have lived for many
generations in the
proximity of dangerous
predators are less bold
and less aggressive than
animals that have lived
relatively risk-free.
What Bell discovered is
that those cautious
tendencies outlast the
presence of risk, even by
a generation. When she
moved sticklebacks who had
always lived in a
high-risk environment into a
low-risk environment, she
found that not only did
they retain their cautious
tendencies, but so did
their offspring. Even fish
raised from birth in a
low-risk environment
behave more fearfully if
raised by a particularly
vigilant father from a
high-risk
background.
"There's definitely the
effect of genetic
difference," Bell
explained, "but there's also
the effect of what is
experienced as they grow
up. Genotype and
environment interactions make it
difficult to detect the
effects of genes, because
you have to take the
environment into account.
This is annoying to
geneticists." To scientists
like Bell who are studying
the interplay of genes
and environment, however,
it is of profound
interest.
In the coming year, the
sequence of the full
stickleback genome will
have been assembled,
which will open doors into
all kinds of
cross-species research on
the relationship
between genes and
environment. Alison Bell will
be looking at such things
as risk-taking behavior
in sticklebacks - which
may, by extension, give
us insight into the
behavior of humans. The same
genes and hormone receptor
systems associated
with such behaviors have
been conserved across a
broad spectrum of species
from sticklebacks to
rhesus monkeys to us. John
Capitanio has already
done a number of
experiments with rhesus monkeys
that look into how the
manner of their rearing
affects what Capitanio (in
a hedge on the loaded
P-word) calls an animal's
"biobehavioral
organization" - and how,
in turn, that
biobehavioral organization
affects everything
from gene expression to
immune-system function
against ailments like
simian AIDS.
What once seemed the
hopelessly subjective
pursuit of understanding
human behavior and
personality is now
increasingly being tied down
to and girded by the
objective moorings of our
own and other animals'
biology. The very names of
newly emergent fields like
biological psychiatry,
molecular psychiatry and,
of course, animal
personality reflect this
trend. It is not, as
Capitanio points out, a
reductionistic concept
but more of a holistic
one, one that allows for
an unprecedentedly subtle
reading of the
integrative influences -
genetic, experiential
and environmental - that
shape each individual's
personality.
Capitanio is currently
writing, with Sam Gosling,
the first chapter on
animal personality to be
included in "The Handbook
of Personality," a
standard reference book of
human-personality
psychology. This week, he
will be in Palm
Springs, Calif.,
presenting a paper on
personality in rhesus
monkeys as part of an
animal-social psychology
symposium led by Gosling
at the annual meeting of
the Society for
Personality and Social
Psychology, the first
symposium of its kind at a
human psychology
conference. For Gosling,
it is the realization of
the very thing he
envisioned when he first
started pursuing the
possibility of personality
in animals at Berkeley
back in the mid-1990's.
"What really got me
interested when I started
exploring this," Gosling
told me, "is I noticed
that what the animal
researchers were doing in
practice was exactly what
human researchers were
saying would be the
perfect study they could do
in a perfect world. Like
you ask a human
personality researcher,
they might say what we'd
do is take a bunch of
individuals, and we'd watch
them from conception till
death and record all
the major events in their
lives and know who
mated with whom and who
had a fight with whom.
And if we wanted, we could
give them frightening
stimuli and so on. And a
lot of my job is saying
to those in human
psychology: 'Hey, you should
talk to these other guys.
What they're doing is
really relevant.' I'm like
the middleman."
Looking through some of
the animal-personality
literature in Gosling's
office that afternoon, I
came upon an intriguing
paper titled "Microscopic
Brains," published in the
March 13, 1964, edition
of the journal Science, in
the midst of the great
animal blackout from
psychological literature.
Written by a professor of
zoology and psychology
at the University of
Pennsylvania named Vincent
Dethier, the paper is at
once a study of insect
behavior and a remarkably
prescient argument for
a more intuitive,
empathetic and integrative
approach to the study of
psychology.
"The farther removed an
animal is from
ourselves," Dethier
writes, "the less sympathetic
we are in ascribing to it
those components of
behavior that we know in
ourselves. There is some
fuzzy point of transition
in the phylogenetic
scale where our
empathizing acquires an unsavory
aura. Yet there is little
justification for this
schism. If we subscribe to
an idea of a lineal
evolution of behavior,
there is no reason for
failing to search for
adumbrations of higher
behavior in
invertebrates."
Dethier concludes on a
decidedly haunting note:
"Perhaps," he writes,
"these insects are little
machines in a deep sleep,
but looking at their
rigidly armored bodies,
their staring eyes and
their mute performances,
one cannot help at times
wondering if there is
anyone inside."
We will never know, of
course, one way or the
other. And yet somehow,
science, of all things,
is rendering the empirical
answer to such a
question incidental to a
more felt and intuitive
one. Perched now, like
entranced children, along
the banks of their
respective simulated streams,
scientists are staring for
hours at the least
human of creatures -
everything from bullying
fruit flies to ravenous,
oversexed water striders
and fishing spiders to
perilously fearless hordes
of armored stickleback
fish - and are beginning
to see in them not just
their distinct patterns
of behavior but also
something deeply and
distinctly recognizable.
Something, well, not
altogether
inhuman.
Charles Siebert is a
contributing writer and the
author most recently of "A
Man After His Own
Heart: A True
Story."