2. Empirical applications in humans and other
species
Behavioural, cultural and evolutionary research
In empirical projects conducted in interdisciplinary and international
collaborations, I
apply these foundations to investigate humans
of different ages and sociocultural backgrounds
as well as individuals of various species of nonhuman primates, especially great apes, capuchin monkeys and
macaques. Nonhuman primates are particularly interesting for comparative
research given the variability in their social systems and behavioural ecologies and in their
degree of phylogenetic relationship to
humans.
The broad perspective taken in my research offers unique opportunities
for studying social, societal, biological and ecological processes that are associated with
the emergence of individual-specificity ('personality') and their
promotion by the development of semiotic representations (everyday
psychology of 'personality'). This perspective may also be illuminative with regard to
evolutionary research questions, in particular to the age-old question of what actually makes humans unique amongst
all the species that exist
today.
|
Individual-specific behaviours identified
with observational methods
A central approach to comparative psychology are behavioural
studies because behaviours can be studied in humans and other
species alike, whereas judgements can be obtained only from humans. To identify individual-specific behaviours, I employ a broad
portfolio of behavioural research methods, including
live observations in real-life settings, behavioural experiments, and audiovisual and computerised methods for the detailed recording of behaviours.
My empirical studies have shown that individual-specificity ('personality') occur in a broad range of behaviours across the behavioural repertoires of great apes
(Uher, Asendorpf, & Call, 2008)
and various monkey species, such as capuchin monkeys (Uher,
Addessi, & Visalberghi, 2013a), crab-eating macaques (Uher, Werner, &
Gosselt, 2013b).
Interestingly, sex differences were less pronounced in crab-eating macaques (Uher et al.,
2013b) and largely absent in capuchin monkeys (Uher et
al., 2013a), mandrills, toque macaques and rhesus macaques (Uher, 2015e). This contrasts
with the pronounced gender differences
that young
children displayed in their behaviours in kindergarten settings, indicating cultural but not necessarily evolutionary influences (Uher & Collard, in prep.).
Further information: primate-personality.net
|
Observations versus assessments: Unravelling attribution biases
Exploring humans' impression formation and their assessments of individuals from other species
that are phylogenetically related yet have different social and behavioural systems
can make attribution biases derived from sociocultural beliefs about human
individuals particularly apparent. My multi-method studies have shown substantial coherence between
personality ratings on different types of items and individual-specific behaviours
measured in behavioural tests and observations (Uher, 2011b; Uher &
Asendorpf, 2008). But they have also revealed complex attribution biases related to
the raters' stereotypical beliefs about age, sex, social position and early life history
(Uher & Visalberghi, 2016; Uher, Werner, &
Gosselt, 2013b).
Further information: primate-personality.net
|
Evidence-based explorations of the psychical processes
during personality assessments
The TPS Paradigm and the cutting-edge methodologies and video-based technologies of
Subjective Evidence-Based Ethnography (SEBE; Lahlou,
2011; Uher, 2016a) are applied
to how people perceive individual behaviours of adults in everyday contexts and
how they judge the personality of other persons. A specific focus lies on possible
biases derived from stereotypical beliefs about gender and ethnicity,
focussing on "Black" and "White" as prototypical categories of
ethnicities that are at the centre of many social conflicts worldwide.
A further aim is to investigate the psychical processes
involved in standardised 'personality' assessments. The aim
is to systematically deconstruct the requirements that
standardised assessment tasks impose on respondents and to reconstruct
the social knowledge and the psychical processes involved therein. These
processes are still largely unknown despite the fact that standardised
questionnaires have become the primary tool of investigation in many
fields of psychology and the social sciences.
Further information: id-research.org
|
|