Odd Man Out

[...] while selection pressures on personality traits would be acting on individuals, in social organisms they'd more often be acting on the group as a whole, since only some individuals are able to reproduce. Animal personality researchers agree that for the field to move forward, it must develop theoretical models explaining how or why stable individual differences might have evolved.9 One of the first computational models, published by Wolf, Franjo Weissing, and their colleagues at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands posits that individuals differ in their risk-taking behavior, with those that have more to lose, evolutionarily speaking, developing personality traits that could be described as more cautious.