Animals have personalities, too. That may be biasing studies of them That people have personalities goes without saying. There are the shy, the cruel, the kind, the sceptical. Pet owners will quickly argue that their animals have personalities too. It is hardly uncommon to hear a dog described as friendly or inquisitive, and scientific research has confirmed that dogs do indeed have personality traits similar to those found in people. In dogs, for instance, these are usually referred to as energy-level, affection-aggression, anxiety-calmness and intelligence-stupidity; in people they are extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience and conscientiousness. Yet in spite of all this, rather little has been done to find out if such characteristics exist in wild animals. One such study, published recently in Animal Behaviour, shows not only that some do, but also that the presence of such traits is skewing the way data are collected by researchers. The animals in question are birds-collared flycatchers, to be specific. László Garamszegi, who was at the University of Antwerp at the time of the study (he is now at Doñana Biological Station in Spain), and a team of his colleagues monitored the courtship behaviour of this species. The […]