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 such as behavioral flexibility and exploratory tendencies, few studies have yet explored this relationship in humans. Objective: The present study aimed to examine the association between social foraging strategies and personality traits in human participants, using the Big Five dimensions, their higher-order metatraits, and psychopathy traits from the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD). Methods: Forty-five participants completed the Guaymas Foraging Task (GFT), designed to simulate a social foraging scenario under two conditions lasting four minutes each: one in which the cost of producing was 0 seconds, and another in which it was 8 seconds. Participants also completed the Big Five Inventory and the APSD. Results: The openness, agreeableness, extraversion, stability, and plasticity traits were associated with higher producer indexes. However, these correlations emerged only under the low-cost condition. Similarly, participants above the APSD’s cutoff score scrounged 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 isn’t favorable for their preferred strategy.