• DOI:10.1111/1467-6494.00053
• Corpus ID: 18008231

Adaptive Individual Differences

@article{Buss1999AdaptiveID,
  title={Adaptive Individual Differences},
  author={Davie M. Buss and Heidi Greiling},
  journal={Journal of Personality},
  year={1999},
  volume={67},
  pages={209-243}
}

• D. M. Buss, Heidi Greiling
• Published 1 February 1999
• Psychology
• Journal of Personality

Individuals differ in innumerable ways, some adaptive, some maladaptive, and some neutral. Personality theories, we argue, can profit from distinguishing among these importantly different types of individual variation. This article outlines a taxonomy of origins of individual differences—environ- mental sources of adaptive differences(e.g., early environmental calibration), heritable sources of adaptive differences (e.g., adaptive self-assessment of heritable qualities), nonadaptive sources of individual differences(e.g., inciden- tal by-products of adaptive variation), and maladaptive sources of individual differences (e.g., epigenetic trauma). The second section outlines empirical procedures for confirming or falsifying the differing conceptions of individual differences, with a special focus on empirically distinguishing adaptive individ- ual differences from those that are maladaptive or nonadaptive. The final section highlights the importance of individual differences for solving social adaptive problems. Scientists since Darwin (1859) have known that members of single species show marked differences from one another. A coherent theoreti- cal understanding of the origins and possible functions of individual