7 - (3-MIN 1) Personality Traits and Producer Behavior: The Influence of Individual Differences in Human Social Foraging

During social foraging, individuals typically adopt one of two mutually exclusive strategies: producing, which involves actively searching for resources, or scrounging, which involves exploiting resources discovered by others. The distribution of these strategies is described by the Producer–Scrounger (P–S) Game. Although individual differences have been linked to foraging strategies in non-human species, evidence in humans remains limited.

This study examined the relationship between social foraging strategies and personality traits in human participants. Forty-five individuals completed a multiplayer foraging task under two conditions differing in the cost of producing: no delay and an eight-second delay. Participants also completed measures of the Big Five personality traits and psychopathy-related traits.

Results showed that openness, agreeableness, extraversion, and higher-order metatraits were associated with greater producer behavior, but only when the cost of producing was low. Similarly, individuals scoring above the psychopathy cutoff engaged in more scrounging, again only in the low-cost condition. These associations disappeared when producing became costly.

These findings suggest that personality-related tendencies influence social foraging strategies in humans, but their behavioral expression depends strongly on environmental constraints. Individual differences appear to matter most when conditions allow strategic flexibility.