Evolutionary Personality Psychology

THIS CHAPTER IS divided into four principal sections. The first reviews several major current evolutionary psychological theories of personality. The next two cover empirical evidence for these theories in human and nonhuman animal personality research. Because little empirical research examining personality has been done within evolutionary psychology, the data go outside the evolutionary literature for empirical confirmation or disconfirmation of evolutionary theories. The final section reviews the methodological merits and limitations of the research with a focus on methodological approaches that might best test evolutionary theories of personality explicitly. The material presented is neither exhaustive nor conclusive. Instead, we offer a template of a systematic approach needed to bring theory and data in evolutionary personality psychology together. To that end, we apply the method of multiple working hypotheses (Chamberlin, 1897) and strong inference (Platt, 1964). This procedure specifies plausible alternative hypotheses and then obtains empirical data to help decide among them.