Association for Behavior Analysis International

There is some confusion in non-human animal behavior research concerning the term “personality.” This is because the term “personality” is used in two independent research domains: ethology uses a phenomenological approach to study the structure of individual differences (what they call personality) in direct comparison with human personality research, and behavioral ecology uses animal personality to predict the conditions surrounding selection of among-individual variation in “repeatable” behavior. The ultimate goal of personality research should be to account for all variables that afford individual differences in order to predict behavioral outcomes. Arguments will be made argue for the importance of including personality concepts in a thoroughgoing science of behavior. On the topic of self, Skinner authored chapters on the subject of self in Science and Human Behavior (Skinner, 1953), About Behaviorism (Skinner, 1974) and in one of his last works Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior (Skinner, 1989). Skinner attempted to address arguments that behavior analysis has neglected the study the topic of self; “It is often said that a science of behavior studies the human organism but neglects the person or self” (Skinner, 1974, p. 184). Other writers (Keller and Schoenfeld, 1950) also discussed this topic in some depth.

There is some confusion in non-human animal behavior research concerning the term “personality.” This is because the term “personality” is used in two independent research domains: ethology uses a phenomenological approach to study the structure of individual differences (what they call personality) in direct comparison with human personality research, and behavioral ecology uses animal personality to predict the conditions surrounding selection of among-individual variation in “repeatable” behavior. The ultimate goal of personality research should be to account for all variables that afford individual differences in order to predict behavioral outcomes. Work by Dingemanse and colleagues (e.g., Dingemanse et al. 2010, Dingemanse 2017) has sought to systematize personality research through their Behavioral Reaction Norm (BRN) approach, which provides operational definitions and clear analyses in an attempt to incorporate these disjointed fields. Here I focus on the history of personality research, its use in the human and non-human animal literature, and argue for the importance of including personality concepts in a thoroughgoing science of behavior.