Chimpanzee Personality

Carli Arango
11/18/12
Tutorial
Paper 4

Chimpanzee Personality Across Different Settings

Intro
Chimpanzees are known to be humans’ closest relatives, sharing about ninety eight percent of our DNA (King & Figueredo, 1997). This intriguing fact has propelled various studies that analyze the personalities of these close relatives of ours (King & Figeredo, 1997; King, Weiss,& Farmer, 2005). Weiss et al. (2007) have conducted one of the latest studies on chimpanzee personality. In their study, the issue of whether chimpanzee personality structure and development generalizes across two different settings, a zoo and a research center, is addressed. Their findings indicated that personality structure and development are generally constant across diverse environments.Although there were some inconsistencies in reliability and testing errors, Weiss et al. (2007) did an excellent job of analyzing the data that they were given, which was shown through their numerous visual and numerical data representations and the different, extensive sections they dedicated to various topics.
Summary
By using the Chimpanzee Personality Questionnaire (CPQ) from the King andFigueredo (1997) study, Weiss et al. (2007) were able to compare chimpanzee personalities in the zoo and in the research center. This 43 adjective questionnaire, which was based off of the Five-Factor model, was used on 202 zoo-housed chimpanzees and 175 chimpanzees living in the research center. Weiss et al. (2007) found that the mean interrater reliabilities of the adjective rating were higher forthe zoo chimpanzees. They also discovered that dominance, extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness generalized in both surroundings. On the other hand, neuroticism and openness did not generalized in the two settings. The age and sex effects were constant across the settings except for the dominance and agreeableness factors in the age trends. By combining all of these results, Weiss etal. (2007) concluded that chimpanzee personality structure and development are generally similar among different surroundings.
Analysis
One of the main issues found in the Weiss et al. (2007) article was the difference in the reliability of the raters across both settings. Weiss et al. (2007) stated in their methods section that, for the most part, the raters in the research center were lessfamiliar with the chimpanzees than the raters for the zoo chimpanzees. Also, the number of raters for the zoo chimpanzees was greater than the number of raters for the research center. These rater differences added more error of variance since it inserted another variable to the experiment other than the two different types of settings. By having the same number of raters and the same amount ofexperience with chimpanzees in both settings, the results would more clearly represent the effect of the environment on personality instead of possibly signifying the effect of rater differences.
Another weakness found in the Weiss el al. (2007) was the limitation of the Chimpanzee Personality Questionnaire. In the King and Figueredo (1997) article, the questionnaire was shown to have only 3adjectives that correlated with neuroticism and 2 adjectives for openness while the other factors had at least five adjectives to represent them. The four factors with more adjectives to characterize them were the ones that ended up generalizing across the two different settings. On the other hand, neuroticism and openness did not generalize in the two environments. This was interesting becausethese two factors are found throughout a great amount of species (Gosling 2001). Knowing this, Weiss et al. (2007) concluded that this lack of generalization was due to a testing error and decided that adding more markers to the neuroticism and openness domains would be useful in future studies in order to have a higher chance of generalization in these two factors.
While there were some...