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Waspishness in Wasps and Boldness in Spiders

ALTHOUGH psychologists can argue endlessly over definitions of personality, most of those definitions contain some version of individuals showing consistent differences in how they feel and behave. Someone who is aggressive today will be aggressive tomorrow, and aggression in the boardroom means aggression on the basketball court. We also talk about temperament, the predilections that seem to be present when we are born and that shape the formation of personality later on; a fussy infant may become an anxious adult. Sam Gosling, a psychologist at the University of Texas who studies personality in animals, notes, "In some cases, the word temperament appears to be used purely to avoid using the word personality, which some animal researchers associate with anthropomorphism."

It is true that having a personality seems to imply that one has emotions, a slippery slope when referring to animals, although many early researchers, including Charles Darwin, had no trouble with making the leap. Darwin wrote an entire book on the topic, titled The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, and while he concentrated mainly on mammals and whether, for example, baring the teeth in dogs had its counterpart in human sneers, he did not exclude insects: "Many insects stridulate by rubbing together specially modified parts of their hard integuments. This stridulation generally serves as a sexual charm or call; but it is likewise used to express different emotions. Every one who has attended to bees knows that their humming changes when they are angry; and this serves as a warning that there is danger of being stung."

Far be it from me to contradict the founder of evolutionary biology, but I don't see it this way. Just because a beekeeper—or Darwin—can predict that a bee is going to sting doesn't mean said bee is flooded with rage. It just means that the beekeeper is skilled at reading the bee's signals, like a weather forecaster knowing when a storm is coming because of the quality of the wind and clouds. Animist beliefs and poetic license aside, we don't conclude that the storm is angry either.

Like most modern biologists, I think insects have personality but think it is presumptuous, not to mention anthropomorphic, to claim that they have humanlike feelings. It is simply too hard to know what is going on inside another being's mind, even when that being is another human, and it seems safe to say that whatever an ant is feeling, it probably isn't the exact same thing humans feel. We are particularly hampered by the lack of facial mobility in many animals, including insects, which makes them even harder to identify with. It's hard to look into the eyes of a butterfly and feel a connection with the being within. Reading expressions is key to our assessment of mood and, hence, personal characteristics, so the absence of frowns and narrowing eyelids in many species (not to mention the eyelids themselves) means that we must use other cues in assessing animal personality.

But as I do with so many other aspects of insect life, I find the absence of humanlike emotions both challenging and soothing. Challenging because if insects lack feelings, where do their personalities come from? Insects make us ask more and more exacting questions about them, keeping us from sloppy generalizing that assumes they are just like us. And soothing because the insects exist, complete and lovely, in their own world that works just fine without the rules and assumptions that govern human behavior. We think—we know—we would be horrific shadows of ourselves without emotions, and we assume that our personalities stem from the way we feel. But if insects can have personalities without emotions, we have to look harder for the source of those characteristic differences among individuals. Maybe personalities are just collections of traits, like body shape; one is viewed as heavyset or sylphlike because of the shape of one's limbs, the size of the joints, length of the fingers all working together to give an impression