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The Evolution of Personality and Individual Differences PDF

422 Pages·2010·3.26 MB·English
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The Evolution of Personality and Individual Differences 2011 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. 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

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Capturing a scientific change in thinking about personality and individual differences that has been building over the past 15 years, this volume stands at an important moment in the development of psychology as a discipline. Rather than viewing individual differences as merely the raw material upon
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