Personality Traits and Producer Behavior: The Influence of Individual Differences in Human Social Foraging

Background: During social foraging, individuals typically adopt one of two mutually exclusive strategies: (1) producing, which involves searching for, discovering, and acquiring resources, or (2) scrounging, which entails exploiting resources previously discovered by others. The distribution of these strategies within a group is referred to as the Producer-Scrounger (P-S) Game. Although the influence of personality on the Producer-Scrounger Game has been examined in non-human species through measures of individual differences, few studies have yet explored this relationship in humans. Objective: We aimed to examine the association between social foraging strategies and personality traits in human participants, using the Big Five dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, with their higher-order metatraits measured as composite scores: stability and plasticity, and psychopathy traits measured with the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD): callous-unemotional, impulsivity, and narcissism. Methods: Forty-five participants completed the Guaymas Foraging Task (GFT), designed to simulate a social foraging scenario under two 4 min conditions: one in which the cost of producing was 0 s, and another in which it was 8 s. Participants also completed the Big Five Inventory and the APSD. Results: Openness (p = 0.018, R² = 0.124), agreeableness (p = 0.002, R² = 0.209), extraversion (p = 0.019, R² = 0.121), stability (p = 0.022, R² = 0.117), and plasticity (p = 0.007, R² = 0.160) traits were associated with higher producer's indexes. However, these correlations emerged only under the low-cost condition. No correlations were found between the producer's index and psychopathic traits; nonetheless, participants above the APSD's cutoff score scrounged significantly more, but only in the low-cost condition. Conclusions: Individual differences such as personality seem to be correlated with different foraging strategies; nonetheless, the behavioral expression of these traits seems to diminish when the environment is not favorable for their preferred strategy.