One of my all time favourite topics is that of animal personality. In fact my PhD was centred around animal personality, using some nifty new technology to explore the phenomenon. Most of my papers are about how personality affects the lives of cows.
Don’t laugh. That’s genuinely what my PhD is in.
There are actually plenty of production and welfare reasons to study this in cattle, but today I want to talk to you about one of the basic concepts of personality.
Let’s Talk Science
You’ve heard people talk about personality traits or dimensions (I’ll use traits for the rest of this article), but what do you know about personality traits? I’m going to give you a very complicated sciency sounding sentence here, and by the end of this article, I think you’ll understand it.
Are you ready?
Are you sure?
Personality traits are a statistical construct based on the behavioural variation displayed number of individuals sampled.
Let me explain . . .
