Animals and Personality

I have long wondered whether humans would ever actually be able to communicate with animals.
It is has always struck me as odd that we didn't acknowledge that animals have
their own verson of family and society. So the NYTimes did this article and some
of the quotes are fantastic.

You'd expect animals to be doing smart stuff," Sih told me
one evening over dinner. "The whole tradition in most of evolutionary ecology
has been to emphasize adaptation where organisms do smart things. But I've been
making the case for a while that the most interesting behaviors are actually the
stupidest."

It's typically the males of a given species that seem to figure most prominently in the stupid-behavior department - the militant, mayhem-causing water striders and sticklebacks, for example, or
fierce male Western bluebirds, who spend so much time defending nests or
courting females that they completely neglect their own offspring. But perhaps
the most glaring instance of dumb-animal doings is to be found in the female
North American fishing spider. Studies have shown that a good number of female
fishing spiders are from a very early age highly driven and effective hunters.
It is a trait that serves them well most of their lives, particularly in lean
times, but it wholly backfires during mating season, when these females can't
keep themselves from eating prospective suitors.

We humans, on the other hand, tend to think of our personalities as protean, mutable entities that, unlike our physical selves, we can shape to suit shifting circumstances. Sih disagrees. He says he thinks that our behaviors, no matter how complex the human social contexts that help to shape them, are not nearly as pliant as we believe them to be.