Do humans have better personalities than “animals”?

by | May 6, 2012 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

Humans have long thought that they are smarter than other animals, although that could depend on one’s perspective. A New Scientist article on this topic quoted Douglas Adams: ‘Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for preciesely the same reasons.”

Rather than join the debate about the relative intelligence of humans and other animals, I want to explore a related but new topic: Do humans have better personalities than other animals? Let’s use the Big 5 personality characteristics to boil down personality to conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, openness to experience, and emotional stability and say that high levels of these characteristics are good.

On conscientiousness, we lose to social insects such as bees. No bee ever claims to be as busy as a human. Lions, however, sleep about 20 hours a day and in the other few hours do little other than eat and procreate. So let’s call conscientiousness a draw.

Wolves seem more agreeable with each other than humans are with each other. Tasmanian devils, however, act like devils with each other. Another draw.

Magpies seem quite extraverted compared to humans; butterflies and dolphins too. Put the platypus and the mole in the introvert category. A third draw.

Animals don’t seem much interested in the arts or pleasure travel or learning for the sake of learning. Chalk openness up for humans.

Animals can have low emotional stability. If they are cooped up (by humans), they may become distressed and bite themselves. Humans show similar reactions to being cooped up. In their natural state, humans, however, also show many other negative emotions that are rare in animals — jealousy, envy, disappointment, rage, embarrassment, shame, etc. So give this one to animals.

So we end with humans and animals tied for best personality. But we have combined many species in the animal category. What if we picked one single species to represent animals?

Let’s choose chipmunks — because they are cute. Chipmunks — hiding those nuts for winter — seem more conscientious than humans. Chipmunks don’t seem as agreeable — chipmunks do their own thing. Chipmunks seem extraverted — but no more than humans. Chipmunks show no interest in music or literature — we have the edge in openness. Humans are ahead going into the category of emotional stability. There we lose again — chipmunks are happy-go-luck creatures. So no matter what way you cut it, humans have personalities on a whole that are no better or worse than animals.

At least, that is my conclusion. What do you think?

John Malouff, PhD, JD
Assoc Prof of Psychology

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