Do Animals Have Personalities?

The personality of an individual is one of their defining characteristics and involves certain patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior that are unique to the individual. Therefore, studies on the fascinating topic of personality traits have been conducted in human beings for at the very least, a century. However, the study of personalities in animals has been a relatively recent phenomenon. These have uncovered a range of diverse organisms including sea anemones, birds, fish, rodents, spiders, lizards, and many more that demonstrate personality traits.

Interestingly, these behavioral types are believed to be important in different contexts. A common example of this would be overly timid and aggressive individuals in a bird population. While the bold can take on the task of colonization of new territories, their lesser aggressive counterparts prefer to remain close to home. Due to this, the aggressiveness of some males may sometimes be misdirected towards potential mates, causing the calmer males to have greater parental instincts and better fecundity in comparison. This suggests that both personality traits are essential for a population and are seen to fluctuate depending upon the situation. This phenomenon called fluctuation selection has thus been shown to have some evidence from studies of non-human personalities.

Sleepy lizards, also commonly known as Shingleback lizards have also been used for the study of various male personalities and how they perform in a social scene. Similar to humans, to an extent, they found that the more bold and aggressive male lizards interact more with other males while their female interactions are limited. On the other hand, the meek lizards have more contact with females than males. Furthermore, there was evidence that some individuals form groups while others like to be left alone.

Thus, there is a good amount of evidence that animals do display various personalities, that are similar to humans. This would explain why some cats have more sass than perhaps most humans!