Animal Free Will? Their Personalities Are Unpredictable, Just Like Ours

Thursday, October 31, 2013 - 13:31 in Psychology & Sociology

A new paper says that unpredictability is a consistent trait in the animal world, just like it is humans. Anyone who owns a cat knows that, right? Not really. Though animals are known to show consistent individual differences in behavior, and pet owners may refer to it as them displaying 'personality', a new paper refutes prior beliefs and says that some individual animals, just like humans, are consistently more unpredictable than others over time. Unpredictability is a known and accepted aspect of human behavior much like we've always viewed predictable aspects of personality. However, until now it has never been studied in animals, the authors say. read more

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