The funny part about this article is that they're discussing how animals have personalities.
The fascinating part is that people didnt know that animals had personalities before dudes in lab coats told them. Its just funny what science had to prove before peopel accept it as fact. It's sort of endearing actuallly. Like an autistic boy...anyway, this article chronicles some amazing squid stories and talks about the history of the recognition on an "official" (read: superego) level.
"Personality theory started showing up in the writings of Ivan Pavlov and Sigmund Freud as a somewhat vague, broadly drawn concept. It has only been in the last 60 years or so that the modern science of human personality began to emerge, a system of assessing distinct personality traits that has its roots in World War II, when the U.S. government assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of today's C.I.A.) the task of identifying which individuals had the right traits to be spies.
"A number of different personality-mapping methods and traits-assessment tests have been developed over the years, all of them pivoting around the principle that certain traits can be consistently observed in individuals across time and different situations. The most widely applied test today uses the categories defined by what is known as the Five-Factor Model (F.F.M.): openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Under each of these broad dimension headings are so-called clusters of recognizable traits: an extroverted person, for example, is more sociable, outgoing and assertive; a neurotic one, more anxious, moody and stressed."
According to the article personality has to not only be distinct reactions to stimuli, but also the consciousness of those reactions. "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."
Interestingly enough, "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...animal studies figured prominently in standard human psychology textbooks well into the 1940's. And then, steadily, the animals began to disappear."
And now they're back. So there's this 60 year lull in which animals were not considered worthy of individuality. Maybe that corresponds with the rise in factory farming or something? Industrialization?
In addition, " 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."
This is a great quote from a paper from the 60's: "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."
Posted by bluprnt at January 29, 2006 06:22 PM