Brent W. Roberts (Personality Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
»Looking at personality development through the lens of a cross-species, meta-evolutionary architecture«
What can personality research on non-human animals teach us about human personality development? In this talk, I will revisit the sociogenomic model of personality, which was inspired by research on animal personality that has emerged over the past two decades. I will show how research about behavioral development in non-human animals is remarkably consistent with what is known about personality trait development in humans, namely that stable individual differences co-exist with plasticity. I will also provide an overview of what we are learning about the proximate causes of the development of behavioral variation from biological studies in non-human animals, and to put this literature on the radar of psychologists studying human development. I will then report on phenotypic research inspired by non-human animal work and discuss the findings and their impact on my current understanding of personality psychology. This research will show that 1) childhood personality is not very predictive of adult personality; 2) personality trait measures fluctuate dramatically over short time periods; and 3) contextualized, social cognitive measures are just as consistent as personality traits over long periods of time. I will discuss implications for personality psychology and end with more questions than answers.
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