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Tigers have personality traits similar to human extroverts and introverts, researchers say

Apr 9, 2023, 02:43 IST
Business Insider
Researchers identified two distinct personality groups among Siberian tigers – "majesty" and "steadiness."Getty Images
  • Tigers have personality traits similar to human extroversion and introversion, researchers found.
  • The traits are described as "majesty" and "steadiness."
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New research has identified two distinct personality groups among Siberian tigers. These are "majesty" and "steadiness," which loosely correlate to introversion and extroversion, as seen in humans.

"If I were to choose which of these human dimensions resemble our tiger dimensions most, I would probably compare majesty to extraversion and steadiness to the opposite of neuroticism," Abdel Abdellaoui, a joint-first author of the research from the University of Amsterdam, told The Guardian.

Tigers that score higher on "majesty" are healthier, eat more live prey, have higher group status, and mate more often, according to the research published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

Rosalind Arden, a joint-first author of the research from the London School of Economics, said it shows tigers "do tend to have some dispositions, just as in humans you get people who are very extrovert or very introvert."

The findings came after Chinese researchers compiled a list of about 70 words to describe tigers' temperaments and created a tiger-personality questionnaire for feeders and vets that worked with 248 Siberian tigers — the largest tiger subspecies — in two wildlife sanctuaries in northeast China.

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An average of more than three people rated each tiger, and researchers found that the words fit into two clusters, which they called "majesty" and "steadiness."

Tigers that scored high for "majesty" were highly rated on words including "dignified," "confident," and "fierce" and placed low on terms including "withdrawn" and "feeble."

High ratings for "steadiness" in tigers were associated with words like "friendly," "gentle," and "loving" but ranked low for words such as "aggressive" or "cruel."

Abdellaoui told The Guardian that the words were all initially Chinese, and some of their meanings might be harder to translate.

The researchers also noted that all of the tigers studied were semi-captive and living in fenced-in swaths of forests or snowy grasslands in China, and that results could be different for tigers living in the wild.

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