Niche Diversity Predicts Personality Structure Across 115 Nations

On Personality Measures and Their Data: A Classification of Measurement Approaches and Their Recommended Uses

We employ a new approach for classifying methods of personality measurement such as self-judgment, mental ability, and lifespace measures and the data they produce. We divide these measures into two fundamental groups: personal-source data, which arise from the target person's own reports, and external-source data, which derive from the areas surrounding the person. These two broad classes are then further divided according to what they target and the response processes that produce them. We use the model to organize roughly a dozen kinds of data currently employed in the field. With this classification system in hand, we describe how much we might expect two types of measures of the same attribute to converge-and explain why methods often yield somewhat different results. Given that each measurement method has its own strengths and weaknesses, we examine the pros and cons of selecting a given type of measure to assess a specific area of personality.

Agent-based models of the cultural evolution of occupational gender roles

The causes of sex differences in human behaviour are contested, with 'evolutionary' and 'social' explanations often being pitted against each other in the literature. Recent work showing positive correlations between indices of gender equality and the size of sex differences in behaviour has been argued to show support for 'evolutionary' over 'social' approaches. This argument, however, neglects the potential for social learning to generate arbitrary gender segregation. In the current paper we simulate, using agent-based models, a population where agents exist as one of two 'types' and can use social information about which types of agents are performing which 'roles' within their environment. We find that agents self-segregate into different roles even where real differences in performance do not exist, if there is a common belief (modelled as priors) that group differences may exist in 'innate' competence. Facilitating role changes such that agents should move without cost to the predicted highest-rewards for their skills (i.e. fluidity of the labour market) reduced segregation, while forcing extended exploration of different roles eradicated gender segregation. These models are interpreted in terms of bio-cultural evolution, and the impact of social learning on the expression of gender roles.

Evolutionary Psychology and Normal Science: in Search of a Unifying Research Program

Why are there so many controversies in evolutionary psychology? Using a couple of concepts from philosophy of science, this paper argues that evolutionary psychology has not reached the stage of mature, normal science, since it does not currently have a unifying research program that guides individual scientists working in the discipline. The argument goes against claims made by certain proponents and opponents of evolutionary psychology, and it is supported by discussion of several examples. The paper notes that just because evolutionary psychology has not reached the stage of normal science, the discipline is nevertheless a source of many progressive theoretical developments and interesting empirical discoveries.

Evolutionary psychiatry: foundations, progress and challenges

Evolutionary biology provides a crucial foundation for medicine and behavioral science that has been missing from psychiatry. Its absence helps to explain slow progress; its advent promises major advances. Instead of offering a new kind of treatment, evolutionary psychiatry provides a scientific foundation useful for all kinds of treatment. It expands the search for causes from mechanistic explanations for disease in some individuals to evolutionary explanations for traits that make all members of a species vulnerable to disease. For instance, capacities for symptoms such as pain, cough, anxiety and low mood are universal because they are useful in certain situations. Failing to recognize the utility of anxiety and low mood is at the root of many problems in psychiatry. Determining if an emotion is normal and if it is useful requires understanding an individual's life situation. Conducting a review of social systems, parallel to the review of systems in the rest of medicine, can help achieve that understanding. Coping with substance abuse is advanced by acknowledging how substances available in modern environments hijack chemically mediated learning mechanisms. Understanding why eating spirals out of control in modern environments is aided by recognizing the motivations for caloric restriction and how it arouses famine protection mechanisms that induce binge eating. Finally, explaining the persistence of alleles that cause serious mental disorders requires evolutionary explanations of why some systems are intrinsically vulnerable to failure. The thrill of finding functions for apparent diseases is evolutionary psychiatry's greatest strength and weakness. Recognizing bad feelings as evolved adaptations corrects psychiatry's pervasive mistake of viewing all symptoms as if they were disease manifestations. However, viewing diseases such as panic disorder, melancholia and schizophrenia as if they are adaptations is an equally serious mistake in evolutionary psychiatry. Progress will come from framing and testing specific hypotheses about why natural selection left us vulnerable to mental disorders. The efforts of many people over many years will be needed before we will know if evolutionary biology can provide a new paradigm for understanding and treating mental disorders.

Exploratory preferences explain the human fascination for imaginary worlds in fictional stories

Imaginary worlds are present and often central in many of the most culturally successful modern narrative fictions, be it in novels (e.g., Harry Potter), movies (e.g., Star Wars), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda), graphic novels (e.g., One Piece) and TV series (e.g., Game of Thrones). We propose that imaginary worlds are popular because they activate exploratory preferences that evolved to help us navigate the real world and find new fitness-relevant information. Therefore, we hypothesize that the attraction to imaginary worlds is intrinsically linked to the desire to explore novel environments and that both are influenced by the same underlying factors. Notably, the inter-individual and cross-cultural variability of the preference for imaginary worlds should follow the inter-individual and cross-cultural variability of exploratory preferences (with the personality trait Openness-to-experience, age, sex, and ecological conditions). We test these predictions with both experimental and computational methods. For experimental tests, we run a pre-registered online experiment about movie preferences (N = 230). For computational tests, we leverage two large cultural datasets, namely the Internet Movie Database (N = 9424 movies) and the Movie Personality Dataset (N = 3.5 million participants), and use machine-learning algorithms (i.e., random forest and topic modeling). In all, consistent with how the human preference for spatial exploration adaptively varies, we provide empirical evidence that imaginary worlds appeal more to more explorative people, people higher in Openness-to-experience, younger individuals, males, and individuals living in more affluent environments. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the cultural evolution of narrative fiction and, more broadly, the evolution of human exploratory preferences.

Niche diversity effects on personality measurement - evidence from large national samples during the COVID-19 pandemic

We report systematic variability in the psychometric properties of a brief personality inventory during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing upon recent discussions about the universality vs cultural relativism of personality measures, we review and comparatively test theories predicting systematic variability in personality measurement across cultures using an established brief personality measure applied to population samples in 16 nations during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 35,052). We found systematic variation in factor replicability and effective dimensionality. In line with previous theorizing, factors replicated better in contexts with greater niche diversity. Examining possible drivers underlying this association, the investigation of the individual components in the niche construction index suggested that life expectancy and to a lesser degree economic complexity are associated with greater personality structure differentiation. Population-level indicators of acute threat due to COVID-19 did not show credible effects. These patterns suggest that a) investigation of personality structure in population samples can provide useful insights into personality dynamics, b) socioecological factors have a systematic impact on survey responses, but c) we also need better theorizing and research about both personality and culture to understand how niche construction dynamics operate.

Conceptual and methodological issues in the study of the personality-and-culture relationship

Culture-and-personality studies were central to social science in the early 20th century and have recently been revived (as personality-and-culture studies) by trait and cross-cultural psychologists. In this article we comment on conceptual issues, including the nature of traits and the nature of the personality-and-culture relationship, and we describe methodological challenges in understanding associations between features of culture and aspects of personality. We give an overview of research hypothesizing the shaping of personality traits by culture, reviewing studies of indigenous traits, acculturation and sojourner effects, birth cohorts, social role changes, and ideological interventions. We also consider the possibility that aggregate traits affect culture, through psychological means and gene flow. In all these cases we highlight alternative explanations and the need for designs and analyses that strengthen the interpretation of observations. We offer a set of testable hypotheses based on the premises that personality is adequately described by Five-Factor Theory, and that observed differences in aggregate personality traits across cultures are veridical. It is clear that culture has dramatic effects on the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors from which we infer traits, but it is not yet clear whether, how, and in what degree culture shapes traits themselves.

Tracing the evolution of personality cognition in early human civilisations: A computational analysis of the Gilgamesh epic

Assessing evolution of cognitive structures across historical periods has remained challenging in the absence of direct access to humans from the past. Overcoming some of these challenges, we examined shifts in the implicit cognitive structures in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is one of the earliest surviving pieces of literature, circulating in various versions over a period of approx. 2000 years in ancient Mesopotamia. Using a canonical English translation, we applied natural language processing (NLP) and human coding to extract low-dimensional representations of the implicit personality structure in three different historical epochs. We found systematic shifts over time with increasing complexity and increasing resemblance of contemporary personality models in later periods. We discuss how lexical analyses of ancient texts using trait co-occurrence analyses can provide novel insights on the evolution of human behaviour of relevance for contemporary social and behavioural science and the study of ancient societies.

The evolution of personality disorders: A review of proposals

Personality disorders (PDs) are currently considered dysfunctions. However, personality differences are older than humanity and are ubiquitous in nature, from insects to higher primates. This suggests that a number of evolutionary mechanisms-other than dysfunctions-may be able to maintain stable behavioral variation in the gene pool. First of all, apparently maladaptive traits may actually improve fitness by enabling better survival or successful mating or reproduction, as exemplified by neuroticism, psychopathy, and narcissism. Furthermore, some PDs may harm important biological goals while facilitating others, or may be globally beneficial or detrimental depending on environmental circumstances or body condition. Alternatively, certain traits may form part of life history strategies: Coordinated suites of morphological, physiological and behavioral characters that optimize fitness through alternative routes and respond to selection as a whole. Still others may be vestigial adaptations that are no longer beneficial in present times. Finally, variation may be adaptative in and by itself, as it reduces competition for finite resources. These and other evolutionary mechanisms are reviewed and illustrated through human and non-human examples. Evolutionary theory is the best-substantiated explanatory framework across the life sciences, and may shed light on the question of why harmful personalities exist at all.

A Socioecological-Genetic Framework of Culture and Personality: Their Roots, Trends, and Interplay

Culture and personality are two central topics in psychology. Individuals are culturally influenced influencers of culture, yet the research linking culture and personality has been limited and fragmentary. We integrate the literatures on culture and personality with recent advances in socioecology and genetics to formulate the Socioecological-Genetic Framework of Culture and Personality. Our framework not only delineates the mutual constitution of culture and personality but also sheds light on (a) the roots of culture and personality, (b) how socioecological changes partly explain temporal trends in culture and personality, and (c) how genes and culture/socioecology interact to influence personality (i.e., nature × nurture interactions). By spotlighting the roles of socioecology and genetics, our integrative framework advances the understanding of culture and personality.

Person-Culture Personality Fit: Dispositional Traits and Cultural Context Explain Country-Level Personality Profile Conformity

In general, people are influenced by the standards set forth by groups of others; however, the levels of such conformity vary between people and across cultures. Here, we investigated factors related to country-level personality profile conformity (i.e., person-culture personality fit) across ∼5.9 million participants, residing in 57 different countries. We examined how each of the Big Five personality traits and cultural tightness are associated with variation in person-culture personality fit. We found that scoring higher in Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness and residing in a tight cultural context explains increased personality profile conformity, while scoring higher in Openness and Neuroticism and residing in a loose cultural context explains lower personality profile conformity. Furthermore, we found that Openness and Extraversion interact with cultural context to predict levels of personality profile conformity. These findings reveal that both dispositional and cultural factors correspond to the tendency to conform to country-level norms.