What question did this study set out to answer?

To explore the relationship between personality traits and social foraging strategies in humans.

February 2, 2026Open Access

Personality Traits and Producer Behavior: The Influence of Individual Differences in Human Social Foraging

IUIván UribeSonora Institute of Technology LÁLaurent Ávila-ChauvetSonora Institute of Technology DMDiana MejíaSonora Institute of Technology

Key Points

To explore the relationship between personality traits and social foraging strategies in humans.
Forty-five participants completed the Guaymas Foraging Task simulating social foraging.
Participants engaged in two conditions with varying costs for producing resources.
Personality was assessed using the Big Five Inventory and the Antisocial Process Screening Device.
Openness, agreeableness, extraversion, stability, and plasticity were positively associated with producing under low-cost conditions.
No correlations were found between the producer's index and psychopathic traits.
Participants with high psychopathy scores tended to scrounge more in low-cost conditions.

Abstract

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, few studies have yet explored this relationship in humans. Objective: We aimed to examine the association between social foraging strategies and personality traits in human participants, using the Big Five dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, with their higher-order metatraits measured as composite scores: stability and plasticity, and psychopathy traits measured with the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD): callous–unemotional, impulsivity, and narcissism. Methods: Forty-five participants completed the Guaymas Foraging Task (GFT), designed to simulate a social foraging scenario under two 4 min conditions: one in which the cost of producing was 0 s, and another in which it was 8 s. Participants also completed the Big Five Inventory and the APSD. Results: Openness (p = 0.018, R2 = 0.124), agreeableness (p = 0.002, R2 = 0.209), extraversion (p = 0.019, R2 = 0.121), stability (p = 0.022, R2 = 0.117), and plasticity (p = 0.007, R2 = 0.160) traits were associated with higher producer’s indexes. However, these correlations emerged only under the low-cost condition. No correlations were found between the producer’s index and psychopathic traits; nonetheless, participants above the APSD’s cutoff score scrounged significantly 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 is not favorable for their preferred strategy.

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