Ecological Approaches to Personality

This chapter reviews the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that individual variation in personality and behavior is shaped by a combination of: frequency-dependent niche-splitting, developmental plasticity, genetic diversification, directional social selection, and behavioral flexibility. It argues that extant theory and data are inconsistent with the aim of assigning the evolution of individual differences to any one selective pressure to the exclusion of all others. Instead, the ecological conditions intrinsic to the social circumstances of many species, including humans, favor a combination of these shaping pressures. Thus, the only single superordinate category that includes most of theseconvergent and divergent selective pressures is social selection.