On the coevolution of social responsiveness and behavioural consistency

Recent research focuses on animal personalities, that is individual differences in behaviour that are consistent across contexts and over time. From an adaptive perspective, such limited behavioural plasticity is surprising, since a more flexible structure of behaviour should provide a selective advantage. Here, we argue that consistency can be advantageous because it makes individuals predictable. Predictability, however, can only be advantageous if at least some individuals in the population respond to individual differences. Consequently, the evolution of consistency and responsiveness are mutually dependent. We present a general analysis of this coevolutionary feedback for scenarios that can be represented as matrix games with two pure strategies (e.g. hawk-dove game, snowdrift game). We first show that responsive strategies are favoured whenever some individual differences are present in the population (e.g. due to mutation and drift). We then show that the presence of responsive individuals can trigger a coevolutionary process between responsiveness and consistency that gives rise to populations in which responsive individuals coexist with unresponsive individuals who show high levels of adaptive consistency in their behaviour. Next to providing an adaptive explanation for consistency, our results also link two key features associated with personalities, individual differences in responsiveness and behavioural consistency.