Evolutionary Perspectives on Personality Psychology

Introduction and Background

In this chapter, we argue that the development, structure, and processes of human personality have been crafted over hundreds of thousands of generations by natural and sexual selection. We argue that there is no scientifically viable alternative framework for understanding the historical origins of human personality and that human personality is thus best conceptualized with the theoretical tools developed in the evolutionary sciences. Personality, from this perspective, represents a meta-category of the output of a suite of species-typical, relatively domain-specific, evolved psychological mechanisms designed in response to the social adaptive problems recurrently faced by our ancestors throughout human evolutionary history. This conceptualization of human personality provides for a novel and valuable reinterpretation of several ...