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Personality Traits and Producer Behavior: The Influence of Individual Differences in Human Social Foraging
Iván Uribe1, Laurent Ávila-Chauvet1, Diana Mejía1
1Department of Psychology, Sonora Institute of Technology (ITSON), Ciudad Obregón 85000, Mexico.
Brain Sciences
|February 27, 2026
Summary
Human personality traits like openness and agreeableness influence social foraging strategies, particularly when resource acquisition is easy. However, these personality-driven behaviors may decrease when conditions are unfavorable for preferred strategies.
Area of Science:
- Behavioral Ecology
- Social Psychology
- Evolutionary Psychology
Background:
- Social foraging involves distinct strategies: producing (resource acquisition) and scrounging (resource exploitation).
- The Producer-Scrounger (P-S) Game models strategy distribution within groups.
- Human studies on personality's role in the P-S Game are limited.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the association between personality traits and social foraging strategies in humans.
- To explore the influence of Big Five personality dimensions and psychopathy traits on producer-scrounger behaviors.
- To examine how environmental costs affect the expression of these associations.
Main Methods:
- Forty-five participants completed the Guaymas Foraging Task (GFT) under low (0s) and high (8s) production cost conditions.
- Participants also completed the Big Five Inventory and the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD).
- Statistical analyses examined correlations between personality traits and the producer's index.
Main Results:
- Openness, agreeableness, extraversion, stability, and plasticity traits correlated with higher producer's indexes, but only under the low-cost condition.
- No direct correlations were found between the producer's index and psychopathic traits.
- Individuals scoring above the APSD cutoff scrounged more in the low-cost condition.
Conclusions:
- Individual personality differences are linked to distinct social foraging strategies.
- The expression of personality traits in foraging behavior is context-dependent, diminishing in unfavorable environments.
- Environmental factors significantly modulate the relationship between personality and social foraging strategies.
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