The Animal Self - part 2


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."

.

Loading