The Adaptive Significance of Personality Traits

It is clear that in order for a trait to have survived, it must have had some degree of functionality. This suggests that shifting environmental pressures, particularly social ones, encouraged a range of variation on a number of traits (Buss, 1991). Furthermore, traits that were at one time adaptive, may be maladaptive in the present environment. We shall now examine the three and five factor models to discuss how they might have been adaptive. Neuroticism is associated with the ability to perceive and respond to environmental warnings associated with impending punishment. Being elevated on this trait makes people more vulnerable to spurious and inappropriate contingencies associated with being too sensitive to future punishment. A person who scores high on this trait, for example, might be more likely to develop a phobia. In some situations persons who score high on this trait would have a reproductive advantage. They might be more likely to avoid dangers. On the other hand, persons who scored low might be more likely to engage in reproductive behaviors that were accompanied by a risk. Males low in neuroticism could also gain reproductive advantage by engaging in high risk behaviors that increased their social status and consequently their level of attractiveness to females. Extraversion or surgency is related to the need for cortical stimulation (Eysenck, 1997). People who are extraverted become more bored more quickly. They also demonstrate faster habituation to a stimulus, especially intense stimuli. Being extraverted might be reproductively advantageous in males by motivating them to mate with many different partners, a quantitative strategy. On the other hand, more introverted males may be likely to develop and sustain more material resources and invest these resources in a single mate which may confer a reproductive advantage by producing high-status offspring, a qualitative strategy. Similarly, psychoticism is related to interpersonal aggressiveness, which conveys a reproductive advantage in adverse social situations and perhaps during war (Zuckerman, 1999). Persons who score high on the measure of psychoticism are more likely to be aggressive with other humans. Their sexual behavior is more likely to be nondiscriminatory, promiscuous, and perhaps forceful (Eysenck, 1976). Their capacity to grab resources, often to the exclusion of others, may give them a reproductive advantage. During war, they may be more likely to benefit from the plunders of an enemy's resources. They may aggress against others in order to mate. There are many circumstances in which psychoticism …