Not all octopuses react the same way This octopus appears quite bold whereas others might be timid and swim away STUART WESTMORLAND GETTY IMAGES
5 1 Same but Different Personality in Animals Scientist Jennifer Mather opened the lid of the aquarium She leaned over the tip of her nose almost touching the surface of the water She peered down and looked straight into the eye of an octopus The octopus's black slit of a pupil grew large The octopus crawled along the bottom of the tank its eight suckered arms stretching curling and uncurling Mather watched until it came to rest in a far corner She lowered a prickly test-tube brush into the water and gently touched one of the octopus's arms POOF An explosion of black ink The dark cloud dissolved and the octopus was nowhere to be seen Mather knew it was hiding in a black plexiglass box on the bottom of the aquarium She set the test tube brush on the table beside her and wrote some notes EIGHT-ARMED INDIVIDUALS What was Mather doing besides annoying an octopus She was giving it a personality test The first part is the alert test As we just saw you open the lid of the aquarium and lean over so the octopus can see you
6 Octopuses such as this one have shown evidence that they have their own personality JACKIE HILDERING THEMARINEDETECTIVE.COM How does the octopus react Does it crawl away Change color Dip its head down Or something else Next is the threat test where you gently tap one of the octopus's legs with a brush Again what does the octopus do Does it squirt a cloud of ink Does it zip away by jet propulsion Some octopuses grab the brush with their arms Finally there is the feeding test where you drop a crab into a corner of the tank Does the octopus eat the crab right away How does the octopus approach and attack it In the early 1990s Mather gave this personality test to many octopuses She found that some octopuses are more active than others some act more anxiously and others are calmer Some are bold and approach new things whereas others avoid them With her colleague Roland Anderson Mather organized these personalities into three components activity reactivity and avoidance At the time these components were not much different from the ones that were used to describe the differences between human babies If octopuses have individual personalities what about other animals If you have a pet like a cat dog or bird I'm sure you can easily describe what they're like But can we call our descriptions personalities WHAT IS PERSONALITY Personality refers to how each human tends to behave over time and in different situations Each person is different but we can see similarities in people's behavior too For decades psychologists puzzled over the question What is the best way to describe all the individual differences people show In the 1930s psychologists gave people long
lists of adjectives that describe traits such as talkative brave patient and messy Then they asked them to rate to what degree each adjective described themselves on a scale from extremely inaccurate to extremely accurate Later in the 1980s psychologists determined that these traits could be best organized into five groups or factors The names they gave to these five factors are extroversion agreeableness conscientiousness openness and neuroticism This theory of personality has stood the test of time and the questionnaire based on it is famously known as the Big Five The main idea is that every person's unique personality can be described using these five factors Each factor is on a spectrum you can be high you can be low or you can be somewhere in between The combination of where you are in each of the five factors describes who you are To help remember the names of the Big Five the first letters can be arranged to spell ocean or canoe LOOKING FOR PERSONALITY IN ANIMALS Unfortunately we can't ask animals to answer a series of questions about themselves or rate adjectives I wish I could ask my dog or bumble bees questions from the Big Five like Do you make friends easily Do you like to tidy up Do you dislike change However we can give animals a series of tests and see how they react This lets us see individual differences in behavior We saw this earlier with the octopuses We can also watch animals over time in their natural environment and see if there are patterns in how each individual behaves in different situations Another strategy is to ask people who are familiar with the animals like zookeepers and pet owners to fill out a questionnaire like the Big Five for each animal they know My friend Leann has a beautiful fluffy cat named MacGyver MacGyver is cautious when meeting new people but then he can be quite affectionate MacGyver certainly seems to have his own personality LEANN HARVEY 7
