3. Personalities - adaptive humanity

                The model of emotions presented in 2B generalizes beyond humans to all organisms with the cognitive capacity to consider the past and the future.  However, as Robert Burns put to words in his famous poem To a Mouse, many believe that this consideration of past and future is a rare trait, bestowed on humans and maybe a select few “higher” organisms.  So let me revise, focusing on the result rather than the mechanism: any organism that learns, changing its behaviour based on past success or failure, likely uses the same cognitive processes which we experience as emotions.  They may not experience emotions in the same way as humans, but parsimony (things are more likely to change a little than a lot) suggests that in a general sense learning organisms probably have a similar experience to humans.  So, to understand the specifics of human emotions we have to move up one step to personality.  While our emotions characterize how we feel it is our personalities while characterize what we feel in a given situation.

 

In 2b I stated the rules determining the path you follow along the emotion decision tree.  For example, if you feel trust towards a target you will go down a path leading to invest-or-request as opposed to fight-or-flight.  Whether you feel trust or disgust though is, at the very least, a product of your naïve level of trust, your past experience with the target and similar targets, and how much weight you put on different types of experiences.  While traits like your naïve level of trust or the weight you put on direct versus indirect knowledge will change over time, they must have starting values, what I will call the base personality.  It is this base personality, the genetic component (the nature in “nature vs. nurture”) which natural selection shapes.  While there are clearly differences within species (just look at the range of personalities amongst children) there are larger differences between species.  It is these differences that lead to the young of social animals being playful rather than aggressive and predators being more curious than their cautious prey.  So what is the base personality of humans and, more importantly, what factors have lead to our current state?  This is the question I will attempt to answer in this series.