Personality in nonhuman primates: What can we learn from human personality psychology?

Personality in nonhuman primates is a rapidly growing field with promising potentials for illuminating and fascinating insights into the origins of individual and species differences in behavior. The change in perspective from the average individual to differences between individuals entails a number of puzzling methodical challenges. Individuals are unique and comparable at the same time; they are characterized by consistent behavioral patterns but show low consistency across situations; some individuals express traits with behaviors that other individuals never show; personality is temporally stable by definition, but equally incorporates long-term change and development. These are all déjà-vus from human personality psychology. This chapter, primarily meant for a primatological audience, introduces basic theories, methods, and approaches from human personality psychology, and explains fundamental principles of personality measurement exemplifying empirical results from nonhuman primate research. Moreover, it presents methodological approaches to identify a species’ most important personality variation and derives systematic approaches for sound cross-species comparisons from analogous solutions of cross-cultural psychology