Abstract
For the past decade, the study of personality has become a topic on the frontier of behavioral ecology. However, most studies have focused on exploring inter-individual behavioral variation in solitary animals, and few account for the role that social interactions may have on the development of an individual’s personality. Moreover, a social group may exhibit collective personality: an emergent behavioral phenotype displayed at the group-level, which is not necessarily the sum or average of individual personalities within that group. The social environment, in many cases, can determine group success, which then influences the relative success of all the individuals in that group. In addition, group-level personality may itself evolve, subject to the same selection pressures as individual-level behavioral variation, when the group is a unit under selection. Therefore, we reason that understanding how collective personalities emerge and change over time will be imperative to understanding individual- and group-level behavioral evolution. Personality is considered to be fixed over an individual’s lifetime. However, behavior may shift throughout development, particularly during adolescence. Therefore, juvenile behavior should not be compared with adult behavior when assessing personality. Similarly, as conditions within a group and/or the local environment can shift, group behavior may similarly fluctuate as it matures. We discuss potential within-group factors, such as group initiation, group maturation, genetic make-up of the group, and the internal social environment, and external factors, such as well as how local environment may play a role in generating group-level personalities. There are a variety of studies that explore group development or quantify group personality, but few that integrate both processes. Therefore, we conclude by discussing potential ways to evaluate development of collective personality, and propose several focal areas for future research.
Highlights
The study of personality has become a topic on the frontier of behavioral ecology
They develop into the generation of queens that do not engage in colony tasks but instead conserve their energy to overwinter (Hunt, 2007; Suryanarayanan et al, 2011a). When this drumming is artificially delivered to nests later in the colony cycle, developing larvae react to the vibrational interactions by developing less fat stores, a physiological trait more similar to that of workers (Suryanarayanan et al, 2011b). In both the termite and wasp examples, the differential interactions that adults have with developing juveniles, both behaviorally and nutritionally, can affect a large change in collective behavior, and possibly the collective personality observed at the colony-level
Our understanding of how collective behaviors emerge and how group-level differences are maintained has provided a strong platform with which www.frontiersin.org hypotheses can be drawn and tested
Summary
The development of collective personality: the ontogenetic drivers of behavioral variation across groups. DEFINING AND EVALUATING COLLECTIVE PERSONALITIES Non-human personality, e.g., inter-individual differences in behavior that are consistent through time, has become an increasingly popular area of study in the past decade (Koolhaas et al, 1999; Sih et al, 2004; Stamps and Groothuis, 2010; Dall et al, 2012, 2004). The flexibility of some personality traits and the persistence of others may signal that some traits may be adaptively fixed, while others are plastic so as to respond to age-specific situations (Petelle et al, 2013)
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