Personalities aren’t just for people

Why “STRANGE”? In 2010, an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences suggested that the people studied in much of published psychology literature are WEIRD — drawn from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies — and are “among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans.” Researchers might draw sweeping conclusions about the human mind when really they’ve studied only the minds of, say, undergraduates at the University of Minnesota.

A decade later, Rutz and Webster, drawing inspiration from WEIRD, published a paper in the journal Nature called “How STRANGE are your study animals?”

They proposed that their fellow behavior researchers consider several factors about their study animals, which they termed Social background, Trappability and self-selection, Rearing history, Acclimation and habituation, Natural changes in responsiveness, Genetic makeup, and Experience.

https://knowablemagazine.org/article/living-world/2023/animal-personalities-trip-up-science