Terminology use in animal personality research: a self-report questionnaire and a systematic review

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.2259. This is version 3 of this Preprint.

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Authors

Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar, Maria Moiron, Petri Toivo Niemelä

Abstract

Whether animal personality studies provide insights of broader evolutionary and ecological relevance to the field of behavioural ecology is frequently questioned. One of the sources of controversy is the vast, but often vague terminology present in the field. From a statistical perspective, animal personality is defined as among-individual variance in behaviour. However, numerous conceptual definitions of animal personality are available in the literature. Here, we performed 1) a self-report questionnaire and 2) a systematic literature review to quantify how researchers interpreted conceptual and statistical definitions commonly used in animal personality research. We also compared whether data obtained from the questionnaire matched with data from the literature review. Among the 430 self-reported researchers that participated in our questionnaire, we observed discrepancies in key questions such as the conceptual definition of animal personality or the interpretation of repeatability. Furthermore, our literature review generally confirmed the global patterns revealed by the questionnaire. Overall, we identified common disagreements within the field of animal personality and discussed potential solutions. We advocate for adopting a terminology that avoids ambiguous interpretations and helps to make more explicit the widespread connotations implicit in the label “animal personality”.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.32942/osf.io/9srpy

Subjects

Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Keywords

behavioural consistency, behavioural syndrome, coping style, individual differences, intraclass correlation coefficient, phenotypic variation

Dates

Published: 2021-04-22 00:03

Last Updated: 2021-12-15 06:43

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License

CC-By Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International