| Abstract: | Identifies several key issues in personality psychology, focusing on the distinction between approaches emphasizing species-typical tendencies and those emphasizing systematic variation around those tendencies. Typological and population approaches in evolutionary biology are discussed, highlighting the alternative aims, assumptions, methods, and limitations of each. Genotypic universality, automaticity, and adaptation are examined as potential criteria for identifying important species-typical characteristics; and heritability, inclusive fitness, sexual selection, and assortative mating are evaluated as criteria for designating important individual differences. Suggestions are made for resolving some of the conceptual and operational difficulties entailed by implementing these criteria. It is argued that, although substantial problems remain, evolutionary biology can provide a means for identifying relations between individual differences and species-typical characteristics. (92 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
