Animals Have Personalities? Science
Finally Says Yes!
By Forrest Stone |
http://www.education-world.com/At_Home/student/student017.shtml |
Ask
almost any dog or cat owner if their pet has a personality, and you'll get a
"yes" answer.
Scientists,
on the other hand, have been more careful about saying that animals have
"personality." This is because scientists want to study things, well,
scientifically. They don't want to put human ideas on non-human subjects.
There
is a word for that: anthropomorphism [an-throw-poh-MORF-izm]. It means looking
at non-human things and thinking about them in human terms. In poetry, it might
be useful to talk about an "angry sky," but in predicting the weather, it's
best to focus on high and low pressure systems.
In
the 1970s, however, scientists realized that the only way to explain some
animal behavior was to say that different animals have different personalities.
Scientists started using the same terms used in human psychology, such as
"aggressive" and "passive." Scientists also started watching and measuring
personalities in animals.
A
1993 paper in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, called "Personalities of
Octopuses," was, according to the New York Times, the first time the word
"personality" was used to describe animal behavior in a major professional
psychology journal.
Now,
"animal personality studies" include some pretty amazing discoveries. The
African gray parrot can not only count but can understand the concept of zero.
Think about that! The ancient Roman numbering system failed to include zero,
which made it impossible for that system to develop higher math!
Chimps
teach their young some kinds of tool use. There is individual face recognition
in sheep. Recently it's been discovered that bees can tell the difference
between two human faces. Rats laugh.
In
fact, studying animal personalities has helped scientists ask more and more
interesting questions not only about animals but also about humans and about
all life. Why, for example, would it make sense for any species to have members
that are not aggressive? Isn't being the most aggressive animal what evolution
is all about?
Well,
it turns out, no. Imagine a species where all the members are aggressive, say,
fish that all charge out along the sea floor to hunt for food. Well, what
happens if a group of bigger fish comes along and eats them all up? With no
"shy" members of the species hiding among the shells and coral, well, that
would mean extinction.
So
scientists believe that each species really needs a mixture of "personality
types" in order to give that species the best chance at surviving in a variety
of changeable circumstances.
Another
thing about studying personalities in animals is that scientists can look at
the whole life cycle of a group of animals in a relatively short time.
Octopuses, for example – the subject of the 1993 paper – only live three or
four years, so over the course of a 20-year study scientists can observe
several generations.
So,
the next time a dog owner talks about what an amazing personality his or her
dog has, you can agree without feeling unscientific! You can also tell them
that a particularly funny dog might have a chance at making a rat laugh.
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