The Evolution of Personality and Individual Differences

Capturing a scientific change in thinking about personality and individual differences that has been building over the past 15 years, this volume stands at an important moment in the development of psychology as a discipline. Rather than viewing individual differences as merely the raw material upon which selection operates, the contributing authors provide theories and empirical evidence which suggest that personality and individual differences are central to evolved psychological mechanisms and behavioral functioning. The book draws theoretical inspiration from life history theory, evolutionary genetics, molecular genetics, developmental psychology, personality psychology, and evolutionary psychology, while utilizing the theories of the "best and the brightest" international scientists working on this cutting edge paradigm shift. In the first of three sections, the authors analyze personality and the adaptive landscape; here, the authors offer a novel conceptual framework for examining "personality assessment adaptations." Because individuals in a social environment have momentous consequences for creating and solving adaptive problems, humans have evolved "difference-detecting mechanisms" designed to make crucial social decisions such as mate selection, friend selection, kin investment, coalition formation, and hierarchy negotiation. In the second section, the authors examine developmental and life-history theoretical perspectives to explore the origins and development of personality over the lifespan. The third section focuses on the relatively new field of evolutionary genetics and explores which of the major evolutionary forces--such as balancing selection, mutation, co-evolutionary arms races, and drift--are responsible for the origins of personality and individual differences. Existing as a seminal work in the newly emerging evolutionary psychology field, this book is a "must-read" for anyone invested in the development of psychology as a field.

Table of Contents:
Patricia H. Hawley & David M. Buss: The Evolution of Personality and Individual Differences: Past, Present, and Future I. Personality and the Social Adaptive Landscape 1. Evolutionary perspectives on the five-factor model of personality 2. Personality and the Adaptive Landscape: The Role of Individual Differences in Creating and Solving Social Adaptive Problems II. Developmental and Life History Perspectives on Personality 3. The Role of Competition and Cooperation in Shaping Personality: An Evolutionary perspective on Social Dominance, Machiavellianism, and Children's Social Development 4. Why Siblings Are Like Darwin's Finches: Birth Order, Sibling Competition, and Adaptive Divergence within the Family 5. Explaining Individual Differences in Personality: Why We Need a Modular Theory 6. The Development of Life History Strategies: Toward a Multi-Stage Theory 7. Toward an Evolutionary-Developmental Understanding of Alternative Reproductive Strategies: The Central Role of Switch-Controlled Modular Systems 8. Ecological Approaches to Personality III. Evolutionary Genetics of Personality 9. Bridging the gap between modern evolutionary psychology and the study of individual differences 10. Theory and methods in evolutionary behavioral genetics 11. Twin, Adoption and Family Methods as Approaches to the Evolution of Individual Differences 12. Evolutionary Processes Explaining the Genetic Variance in Personality: An Exploration of Scenarios 13. Are Pleiotropic Mutations and Holocene Selective Sweeps the only Evolutionary-Genetic Processes Left for Explaining Heritable Variation in Human Psychological Traits? 14. Selection and Evolutionary Explanations for the Maintenance of Personality Differences 15. Testing the Evolutionary Genetics of Personality: Do Balanced Selection and Gene flow cause Genetically Adapted Personality Differences in Human Populations? IV. Practical Applications 16. The Evolutionary Psychology of Psychopathology

About the Author :
David M. Buss: Professor of Evolutionary Psychology University of Texas at Austin. Buss received the American Psychological Association (APA) Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology; the APA G. Stanley Hall Award; and the APA Distinguished Scientist Lecturer Award Patricia H. Hawley: Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Kansas

Review :
The two worlds of genetics -- the species and the individual -- have traditionally gone their own way. This book, with contributions by the top people in the field, brings these two worlds together, creating a synergism that heralds a sea change in the way we think about and study personality. Individual differences within a species are not just noise that is eliminated by natural selection on its way to designing a species type DS evolution creates and thrives on individual differences. This book will be a classic! -Robert Plomin, MRC Research Professor in Behavioural Genetics, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London