Theories of Personality 9th Edition

Chapter 15 Buss: Evolutionary Theory of Personality 441

Buss’s model of personality very closely resembles the Big Five trait approach
of McCrae and Costa but it is not identical in structure. Buss argues for essentially
the same five personality dimensions but with slightly different terminology. More-
over, his view is that these behavioral dispositions have adaptive significance:

∙ Surgency/extraversion/dominance

∙ Agreeableness

∙ Conscientiousness

∙ Emotional stability (opposite of neuroticism)

∙ Openness/intellect

Surgency involves the disposition to experience positive emotional states
and to engage in one’s environment and to be sociable and self-confident. A
surgent person is one who is driven to achieve and often tends to dominate and
lead others. It is nearly synonymous with “extraversion.” In ancestral times, these
individuals were high in status and were therefore attractive and desirable mates.
Put into the language of evolution, surgency involves “hierarchy proclivities”;
that is, how people negotiate and decide who is dominant and who is submissive.
The negotiations happen, as they do in many animals, through competition and
power struggles. In ancestral times these competitions were more often than not
physical and aggressive, but could also be verbal and through accumulation of
wealth and resources. Leaders are those who take charge and direct others, and
whether they take charge by force or by persuasion they are acknowledged by
others to be in charge and are in a dominant social position. Because power and
dominance are attractive, these individuals also tended to have more children.
Surgency is also marked by a tendency to take risks and to experience positive
emotion (i.e., be happy) and initiating and maintaining friendships and relation-
ships. People high in surgency are also driven and ambitious.
A second dimension of personality, agreeableness/hostility, is marked by a
person’s willingness and capacity to cooperate and help the group on the one hand
or to be hostile and aggressive on the other. Some people are warm, cooperative,
and group-oriented, but others are more selfish and hostile toward others. Agree-
able individuals are likely to work to smooth over group conflict and form alliances
between people. Agreeable people foster group cohesion and tend to conform to
group norms. They get along and go along with others. In short, agreeableness
marks a person’s willingness to cooperate.
The third adaptive personality system revolves around response to danger
and threat. All animals have alarm systems that warn them of potential danger and
harm. In humans and other animals this takes the form of anxiety as an emotional
state and emotional stability/neuroticism as a dispositional trait. Vigilance or
sensitivity to harm and threat is quite necessary and adaptive. Emotional stability
involves one’s ability to handle stress or not. Some people are calm under stress
while others are high-strung much of the time.
Fear and anxiety are adaptive emotions. Without them we would certainly
die as individuals and as a species. As we discussed in the McCrae and Costa and
the Eysenck chapters, neuroticism is the tendency to experience negative emotion
such as anxiety, guilt, and sadness. The tendency to be sensitive to threats, for
instance, may well have been adaptive in dangerous environments like those in