The Evolution of Personality and Individual Differences

422 Pages·2010·3.26 MB·English

by  David M. Buss

The Evolution of Personality and Individual Differences

2011
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The evolution of personality and individual differences / edited by David M. Buss and
Patricia H. Hawley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-537209-0
1. Personality—Genetic aspects. 2. Personality—Social aspects. 3. Individual differences.
4. Evolutionary psychology. I. Buss, David M. II. Hawley, Patricia H.
BF698.9.B5E86 2010
155.7—dc22
2010009176

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents

Contributors vii

Introduction ix

Patricia H. Hawley and David M. Buss

Part I: Personality and the Social Adaptive Landscape
1. Evolutionary Perspectives on the Five-Factor Model of Personality 5

Daniel Nettle
2. Personality and the Adaptive Landscape: The Role of Individual Differences
in Creating and Solving Social Adaptive Problems 29

David M. Buss
Part II: Developmental and Life History Perspectives on Personality
3. The Role of Competition and Cooperation in Shaping Personality: An
Evolutionary Perspective on Social Dominance, Machiavellianism, and
Children’s Social Development 61

Patricia H. Hawley
4. Why Siblings Are Like Darwin’s Finches: Birth Order, Sibling Competition,
and Adaptive Divergence within the Family 86

Frank J. Sulloway
5. Explaining Individual Differences in Personality: Why We Need a Modular
Theory 121

Judith Rich Harris

v

6. The Development of Life History Strategies: Toward a Multi-Stage
Theory 154

Marco Del Giudice and Jay Belsky
7. Toward an Evolutionary-Developmental Explanation of Alternative
Reproductive Strategies: The Central Role of Switch-Controlled
Modular Systems 177

Bruce J. Ellis
8. Ecological Approaches to Personality 210

Aurelio José Figueredo, Pedro S. A. Wolf, Paul R. Gladden, Sally
Olderbak, Dok J. Andrzejczak, and W. Jake Jacobs
Part III: Evolutionary Genetics of Personality
9. Bridging the Gap Between Modern Evolutionary Psychology and the
Study of Individual Differences 243

Lars Penke
10. Theory and Methods in Evolutionary Behavioral Genetics 280

Matthew C. Keller, Daniel P. Howrigan, and Matthew A. Simonson
11. Twin, Adoption, and Family Methods as Approaches to the
Evolution of Individual Differences 303

Nancy L. Segal
12. Evolutionary Processes Explaining the Genetic Variance in
Personality: An Exploration of Scenarios 338

Steven W. Gangestad
13. Are Pleiotropic Mutations and Holocene Selective Sweeps the Only
Evolutionary-genetic Processes Left for Explaining Heritable Variation
in Human Psychological Traits? 376

Geoffrey F. Miller
14. Selection and Evolutionary Explanations for the Maintenance of
Personality Differences 400

Denis Réale and Niels J. Dingemanse
15. Testing the Evolutionary Genetics of Personality: Do Balanced
Selection and Gene Flow Cause Genetically Adapted Personality
Differences in Human Populations? 425

Andrea Camperio Ciani
Part IV: Practical Applications
16. The Problem of Defining Psychopathology and Challenges to
Evolutionary Psychology Theory 451

Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair

Index
481

vi
Contributors

Dok J. Andrzejczak
Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology
Department of Psychology
University of Arizona

Jay Belsky
Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues
Birkbeck University of London

David M. Buss
Department of Psychology
University of Texas, Austin

Andrea Camperio Ciani
Department of General Psychology
University of Padova

Marco Del Giudice
Center for Cognitive Science
Department of Psychology
University of Turin

Niels J. Dingemanse
Department of Behavioural Ecology & Evolutionary Genetics
Max Planck Institute for Ornithology

Bruce J. Ellis
John & Doris Norton Endowed Chair in Fathers, Parenting, and Families
Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences
The University of Arizona

Aurelio José Figueredo
Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology
Department of Psychology
University of Arizona

Steven W. Gangestad
Department of Psychology
University of New Mexico
vii

Paul R. Gladden
Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology
Department of Psychology
University of Arizona

Judith Rich Harris
Middletown, New Jersey

Patricia H. Hawley
Department of Psychology
University of Kansas

Daniel P. Howrigan
Department of Psychology
Institute for Behavioral Genetics
University of Colorado at Boulder

W. Jake Jacobs
Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology
Department of Psychology
University of Arizona

Matthew C. Keller
Department of Psychology
Institute for Behavioral Genetics
University of Colorado at Boulder

Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair
Head of Department
Department of Psychology
Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Geoffrey F. Miller
Psychology Department
University of New Mexico
Genetic Epidemiology Laboratory
Queensland Institute of Medical Research

Daniel Nettle
Centre for Behaviour and Evolution
Newcastle University

Sally Olderbak
Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology
Department of Psychology
University of Arizona

Lars Penke
Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology
Department of Psychology
University of Edinburgh

Denis Réale
Département des sciences biologiques,
Université du Québec–Montréal

Nancy L. Segal
Department of Psychology
Twin Studies Center
California State University

Matthew A. Simonson
Department of Psychology
Institute for Behavioral Genetics
University of Colorado at Boulder

Frank J. Sulloway
Institute of Personality and Social Research
University of California at Berkeley

Pedro S. A. Wolf
Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology
Department of Psychology
University of Arizona
viii
Introduction

He who does not understand the uniqueness of individuals is unable to understand the working of
natural selection.
(Mayr, 1982, p. 46)
Individual differences are indispensable for natural selection. Without heritable variants, natural
selection—the only known process capable of creating and maintaining functional adaptations—
could not occur. This truism is so central to evolutionary biological thinking that life scientists
take it for granted. Selection is typically seen as a homogenizing force. Favored variants tend to
spread throughout populations, leading to species-level characteristics that we all share—human
universals in the case of our species.
The present volume crystallizes a counterpoint to this species-typical view, and captures a
scientific change in thinking about individual differences that has been building over the past 15
years. Rather than viewing variability as merely the raw material upon which selection operates,
the contributing authors provide theories suggesting and empirical evidence supporting the view
that personality and individual differences are central to evolved psychological mechanisms and
behavioral functioning.
This claim may be controversial among some. Some scientists historically have viewed
individual differences as noise or error variance to be controlled for or eliminated by careful
experimental design. Among non-scientists, some believe that something as intimate as
‘personality’ is uniquely human, inherently mysterious, unexplainable, or even Godly. Indeed,
the Oxford
ix

English Dictionary defines personality as “the quality which makes a human being.”
Nonetheless, there are compelling reasons to believe that personality and individual differences
are both created and maintained by selective forces, not simply eliminated in the selective drive
toward species-typical characteristics. First, individual differences, such as those captured by the
five-factor model of personality and the six-factor HEXACO model, show stability over time,
situations, and cultures (e.g., Ashton & Lee, 2001; McCrae & Costa, 2008; Saucier, 2009).
Second, careful cross-species comparisons have revealed important continuities among humans
and non-animals in the architecture of personality (Gosling, 2001). Third, measures of these
personality traits show impressive predictive power in forecasting objectively-measured manifest
behavior (Fleeson & Gallagher, 2009). Fourth, dozens of behavioral genetic studies converge on
the finding that these traits show moderate heritability, which opens the door for an important
role for evolutionary genetics (Plomin, DeFries, McClearn, & McGuffin, 2008; Penke et al.,
2007).
Fifth, and perhaps most important, these stable individual differences have been shown to have
weighty consequences for evolutionarily-relevant components of fitness, such as survival, mating
success, status ascension, offspring production, and parenting (Buss & Greiling, 1999; Nettle,
2006; Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006). For all these reasons, understanding personality and
individual differences within an evolutionary framework becomes a necessary, not an optional,
component for a mature science of evolutionary psychology.
Social relationships and more transient interactions are important features of the adaptive
landscape within which humans evolved, and within which evolved mechanisms must operate.
Thus, whatever their origins, the personality characteristics of others in each person’s social
milieu also play a key role in our solving adaptive problems. When selecting a mate, friend, or an
alliance partner, for example, species typical characteristics (e.g., bipedalism, upright gait) recede
to the background. Instead, humans hone in on how people differ in qualities such as intelligence,
dependability, ambitiousness, and aggressiveness. Because individual differences in others with
whom we associate carry significant consequences for outcomes historically linked with
reproductive success, it is reasonable to hypothesize that humans have evolved adaptations
dedicated to tracking and acting upon these individual differences, that is, “difference-detecting
adaptations” (Buss, 1991, 1996, this volume).
At the same time, stable individual differences also create adaptive problems. If personality traits
afford an increment in predicting who will defer in competition, cheat in social exchange, free-
ride in coalitions, or employ cost-inflicting strategies to get ahead in the hierarchy, then
adaptations designed
x

to assess these traits can offer an advantage in anticipatory problem solving. Personality traits of
others can also interfere with the solution to existing adaptive problems, as when an impulsive or
emotionally unstable man interferes with the success of a carefully planned coalitional raid.
Taken together, all these considerations—the stability of traits over time and cultures, their
continuity with non-human animals, their predictive power in forecasting behavior, their
moderate heritability, their implications for the components of fitness, and their role in creating
and solving adaptive problems—render personality traits and other stable individual differences
prime candidates for evolutionary psychological analysis.
Despite their apparent importance, personality and other stable individual differences surprisingly
have been neglected by the field of evolutionary psychology, with some notable exceptions (e.g.,
Buss, 1984, 1991; Buss & Greiling, 1999; Figueredo et al., 2005; Hawley, 1999; MacDonald,
1995; Nettle, 2006; Wilson, 1994; Wilson, Near, & Miller, 1996). Instead, evolutionary
psychology has been most successful in providing theories about, and evidence for, human
universals such as adaptations for survival, sexual strategies, parenting, cooperation, kinship, and
aggression (e.g., Buss, 2005; Crawford & Krebs, 2008). These theoretical and empirical
successes, however, have been achieved at the level of illuminating species-typical (characteristic
of most or all humans) or sex-differentiated adaptations. Individual differences within each sex—
profound and integral to all human functioning—have been almost entirely ignored.
There are important reasons for this relative neglect, starting with a paucity of powerful
theoretical frameworks that can account for the evolution of personality. Cogent theories exist for
predicting and explaining sex differences (e.g., the theory of sexual selection; Buss, 1995; Geary,
1998) and species-typical adaptations (e.g., kin selection theory, the theory of reciprocal
altruism). Evolutionary psychologists have successfully synthesized these models with principles
of modern psychology to create unique theories such as social contract theory (Cosmides &
Tooby, 2005), theories of morality (e.g., Krebs, 2005), theories of human mating strategies (Buss
& Schmitt, 1993), theories of social conflict (e.g., Kenrick, Sundie, & Kurzban, 2008), and
theories of error management (Haselton & Buss, 2000), which, in turn, have led to important
empirical discoveries (e.g., Haselton, Nettle, & Andrews, 2005). In sharp contrast, comparably
powerful theories that predict and explain personality and individual differences have largely
eluded evolutionary psychologists.
Why have these theories proven so elusive? One reason can be traced at least in part to a
foundational assumption in evolutionary biology—that natural selection tends to reduce or