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Social Mammals

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

  • 378 Accesses

Synonyms

Individual differences; Social factors; Temperament

Definition

The examination of the relationship between social factors and animal personality.

Introduction

Research on animal personality has blossomed over the past few decades with a variety of species being studied. While the genesis of animal personality is debatable, many would agree that social factors play a role. Therefore, social mammals make especially good subjects for personality research as they are presented with many opportunities for individual variation within contexts such as mate choice, parenting style, competition, and cooperation. Additionally, a given personality trait can be adaptive to the presenting individual, the entire social group, or both. For instance, the trait of boldness can lead to an increase in mating success for the presenting individual (e.g., Godin and Dugatkin 1996; Nettle 2006), whereas an especially creative individual may develop a novel solution to a problem from which other...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, FL, USA

    Lauren Highfill

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS, USA

    Erin Frick

Authors
  1. Lauren Highfill
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  2. Erin Frick
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lauren Highfill .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Virgil Zeigler-Hill

  2. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. University of North Carolina-Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

    Charlie Reeve

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG

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Highfill, L., Frick, E. (2016). Social Mammals. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1001-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1001-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

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