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Table 1. Three main ways how personality differences can affect social functioning and social structure at different levels of social
organisation
Aspect
Social responsiveness,
behavioural coordination
and social competition
Problem-solving ability
Social structure
Implications
Personality differences select for socially responsive individuals. The presence of socially responsive
individuals, in turn, is predicted to
(i) increase the levels of behavioural coordination within groups and populations,
(ii) increase the social competition within groups and populations, thereby giving rise to social outcomes
(e.g., high levels of cooperation) that differ substantially from those achieved in the absence of socially
responsive individuals.
(i) Pool of competence hypothesis: the more diverse a group, the more likely it is to harbour the specialist
for any given problem.
(ii) Personality differences are associated with differences in experience, information acquisition and/or
information use. Such differences can promote the ability of groups to make use of swarm intelligence.
(iii) Personality differences can give rise to communication problems and in-group/out-group
categorization processes hampering group performance.
Personality types differ in the number and the frequency of interactions with others, the responsiveness to
previous social experiences and their preferred social interaction partners. As a consequence of these
differences, the composition of personality types within a group or population can have substantial
consequences for the emerging social fine structure.
Problem-solving ability
Secondly, personality differences can be expected to affect
the problem-solving ability of groups. Different personality
types often differ in their relative ability to solve different
ecological problems. In fish, birds and rodents, for example,
proactive types tend to outperform reactive types under
stable environmental conditions, whereas reactive types
outperform proactive types under changing environmental
conditions [5]. Analogous context-dependent differences in
the relative performance of personality types can be
expected to be present in many other contexts. Consequently, for any given ecological problem, the more diverse
a group, the higher its chance that it harbours the specialist for that problem (pool of competence hypothesis [6]). If
a group can capitalize on this pool of abilities (e.g., via
social learning), more diverse groups should thus be better
problem solvers than less diverse groups; first evidence in
birds is in line with this hypothesis [6].
The presence of personality differences might also affect
the ability of groups to develop swarm intelligence (aka
collective intelligence and wisdom of the crowd). In brief,
swarm intelligence occurs whenever for a given cognitive
problem a group can outperform even the best of its
members [7]. Importantly, many of the mechanisms underlying swarm intelligence require that individuals differ
in their experience and/or in the way they acquire or
evaluate information [7]. Put simply, whenever individuals
within a group are too similar, the swarm intelligence
potential is diminished. Personality differences can be
expected to be an important source of this required between-individual variation, since different personality
types often differ systematically in experience, information
acquisition and information use [5]. The presence of different personality types within a group might thus be a key
factor promoting the ability of that group to make use of
swarm intelligence. To the best of our knowledge, this link
between personality differences and swarm intelligence
remains largely unexplored in the animal literature.
Before moving on, we stress that the existence of personality differences might not only have positive effects on the
problem-solving ability of groups. In humans, for example,
between-individual diversity can give rise to communication
problems and in-group/out-group categorization processes,
Refs
[24]
[68]
[911]
hampering group performance [8]; similarly, between-individual diversity might weaken group cohesion in many nonhuman species, thereby decreasing performance in tasks
where cohesion is important.
Social structure
Thirdly, personality differences can be expected to be an
important factor underlying the emerging social fine structure (i.e., social interaction network) within groups and
populations. Personality types differ in the number and
the frequency of interactions with others, the responsiveness to previous social experiences, and their preferred
interaction partners [1,5]. As a consequence, the composition of personality types within a group or population can be
expected to be a key determinant of its emerging social fine
structure. To date, few studies in the animal literature have
explicitly addressed this potentially important relationship
between personality types and social fine structure.
In one of these studies, bold sticklebacks, Gasterosteus
aculeatus, have been shown to have fewer interaction than
their shy conspecifics, but to distribute these interactions
more evenly across all group members [9]. Shy individuals,
in contrast, associated preferentially with a small number
of other group members. As a result, groups composed of
bold individuals were characterized by a relatively low
number of interactions and a uniform distribution of these
interactions whereas groups of shy individuals were characterized by more long-lasting associations between individuals and highly non-uniform interaction distributions.
Different personality types differ consistently in their
responsiveness to previous social experiences. Whether or
not individuals in a group or population respond to previous social experiences (e.g., via breaking interactions), and
how frequent such responsive individuals are, can have
substantial consequences for social network dynamics and
the emerging social fine structure. For example, in an
experiment with humans, when given the chance to break
interaction links, compared to a situation where individuals could not break interaction links, highly clustered
networks emerged which, in turn, promoted high levels
of cooperation [10].
Personality types might also differ in their preferred
social interaction partners. Homophily, for example, refers
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to the observation that humans tend to associate with
others that are similar to themselves. Such systematic
differences in partner preferences, in turn, can give rise
to non-random mixing of individuals in social networks and
assortment based on personality types, a phenomenon that
has been observed in a wild population of Trinidadian
guppies, Poecilia reticulata [11].
To sum up, we have discussed three main ways in which
the existence of personality differences can affect the social
functioning and the social structure of groups and populations. While certainly not being comprehensive, the above
discussion highlights the broad and significant consequences that personality differences can have for social
processes and we hope that our article serves as a starting
point for a research focus that aims at a systematic understanding of these consequences.
Acknowledgments
We thank Paul Craze and two anonymous reviewers for constructive
criticism and valuable comments, we also thank the participants of the
Symposium Personality: causes and consequences of consistent behavioural variation and the Volkswagen Foundation for funding this
Symposium. This work was part of the B-Types project funded through
the Leibniz Competition (SAW-2013-IGB-2).
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