Abstract
Researchers increasingly view animal personality traits as products of natural selection. We present data that describe the personalities of 128 eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) currently living in or who lived their lives in the Kasekela and Mitumba communities of Gombe National Park, Tanzania. We obtained ratings on 24 items from an established, reliable, well-validated questionnaire used to study personality in captive chimpanzee populations. Ratings were made by former and present Tanzanian field assistants who followed individual chimpanzees for years and collected detailed behavioral observations. Interrater reliabilities across items ranged from acceptable to good, but the personality dimensions they formed were not as interpretable as those from captive samples. However, the personality dimensions corresponded to ratings of 24 Kasekela chimpanzees on a different questionnaire in 1973 that assessed some similar traits. These correlations established the repeatability and construct validity of the present ratings, indicating that the present data can facilitate historical and prospective studies that will lead to better understanding of the evolution of personality in chimpanzees and other primates.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 170146 |
| Journal | Scientific Data |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Research at Gombe National Park is conducted with the permission and support of the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology, The Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute, and the Tanzania National Parks. We thank Dr Jane Goodall for granting us permission to work with the long-term data. We are very grateful to the Gombe Stream Research Center staff and several graduate students for data collection, Joann Schumacher Stankey and Ian Gilby for data management, and numerous undergraduate research assistants for extracting and digitizing data. We are also grateful to the field assistants who rated the chimpanzees, to Bernadetha Tungu for help in collecting these data, and to Lexy Smith and Claire Allott for entering these data. We also wish to thank Paul T. Costa, Jr. for helping to support this project. This study has been funded by numerous sources over the decades (Goodall 1986), particularly the Jane Goodall Institute. Additional major funding was provided by National Science Foundation grants #BCS-9021946, #BCS-0452315, #BCS-0648481, #BCS-9319909, #IIS-0431141, #IOS-1052693 and #DGE-1106401, National Institutes of Health grant R01-AI058715, Harris Steel Group, University of Minnesota and Duke University. Personality data collection by A.W. was made possible by a Small Research Grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, and he was supported as a Sabbatical Scholar by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), NSF #EF-0905606.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2017.
