Personality and Dominance Behaviour in Stumptailed Macaques V J. Nash and A.S. Chamove 1 Primatologists working in both laboratory and field settings have acknowledged the role of dominance and its influence on primate social behaviour. They have however largely ignored the role of personality in an individual's behaviour. This paper presents briefly some findings from experimental research which attempts to do both, to determine the effect of being in a particular dominance pOSition on behaviour and to discover if there are patterns of behaviour characteristic of individual monkeys regardless of dominance position. Initially we performed a factor analysis on the behaviour of a group of 13 labora- tory-born stump tailed macaques over a variety of situations, which yielded a strong first factor of "dominance", emphasising the pervasiveness of this phenomenon. In brief, dominant animals (as determined by standard measures such as priority of access to preferred items, etc.) exhibited the following characteristics: Dominants (1) showed more positive social behaviour, (2) did less visual monitoring, (3) were more disturbed when removed from the rest of the group, and (4) exhibited more self -aggressive behaviour. The question arose as to whether these characteristics were a function of their dominance position or their personality. The early work on personality in animals in the 1930s involved selective breeding which resulted in the identification of strains of rats which were characteristically different: Hall's "hi/lo" emotional rats (Hall 1934), Tryon's "maze-bright/maze-dull" rats (Tryon 1930), and Hall and Klein's "aggressive/non-aggressive" rats (Hall and Klein 1942). More recent studies on primates have used factor analyses of social behaviour in an attempt to parallel the work on human personality. Van Hooffs (1970) component factor analysis on the behaviour of a semi-captive group of chim- panzees yielded four factors: (1) a "socially positive" factor, (2) a "play" factor, (3) an "aggression" factor, and (4) a "submission" factor. Similarly, Chamove et al. (1972) in their factor analysis on laboratory-born rhesus social behaviour identified (1) a "sociable" factor, (2) a factor, and (3) a "fear" factor, which they state "are not dissimilar to those which gave rise to the three major factors in research on human personality - extraversion/introversion, psychoticism and neuroticism" (po 502). A principle components analysis on ratings oflaboratory rhesus monkeys by Stevenson-Hinde and Zunz (1978) produced three main components: (1) Confi- dent - Fearful, (2) Active - Slow, (3) Sociable - Solitary. In summary, all of these 1 Department of Psychology, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4 LA Scotland A. B. Chiarelli et al. (eds.), Primate Behavior and Sociobiology © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1981