What am I studying? What the hell are you studying? Personality and behavior
One of the most disappointing critiques of animal personality research is that the ratings we use are "subjective" (I prefer the term impressionistic) and that we are just not very clear about what it is we are studying.
Personality is not behavior, which is good, because ethologists don't particularly agree either on what they mean by behavior.
how is ‘behaviour’ defined, and how should it be defined? We outline what characteristics we believe a scientific definition should have, and why we think it is important that a definition have these traits. We then examine the range of available published definitions for behaviour. Finding no consensus, we present survey responses from 174 members of three behaviour-focused scientific societies as to their understanding of the term. Here again, we find surprisingly widespread disagreement as to what qualifies as behaviour. Respondents contradict themselves, each other and published definitions, indicating that they are using individually variable intuitive, rather than codified, meanings of ‘behaviour’.
We offer a new definition, based largely on survey responses: behaviour is the internally coordinated responses (actions or inactions) of whole living organisms (individuals or groups) to internal and/or external stimuli, excluding responses more easily understood as developmental changes.
This is relevant to personality:
While behaviours necessarily rely upon internal information processing by the individual (e.g. cognition and endocrine signalling), we do not consider the processing alone to be a response, and therefore do not include it as behaviour. Shettleworth (1998, page 5) defines cognition as ‘the mechanisms by which animals acquire, process, store and act on information from the environment’. In behaviour, we include the action, but deem the processing as necessary but not sufficient. While this runs counter to the views of 80% of our respondents, we think it is illogical to include cognitive processing while excluding other forms of internal information processing such as genetic expression cascades or endocrine feedback. Information processing may be a necessary substrate for behaviour, but we do not consider it a behaviour by itself.
How you feel about something and how you act on it are both related to personality, but only the later outcome is generally considered to be behavioral.
photo cc-by godogo
