From wily Shere Khan to exuberant Tony, tigers have often been depicted as full of character. Now research suggests that’s no fiction, with scientists identifying two aspects of their personality.
Experts say that just as five dimensions of personality, including openness and neuroticism, are often used to describe humans – with everyone sitting somewhere on a scale for each trait – Siberian tigers all sit on two scales dubbed “majesty” and “steadiness”.
“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,” said Dr Abdel Abdellaoui, joint first author of the research from the University of Amsterdam.
Dr Rosalind Arden, joint-first author of the research from the London School of Economics, said that while the two scales do not offer a complete description of tigers’ personalities, they do capture some differences. “It shows that [tigers] do tend to have some dispositions, just as in humans you get people who are very extrovert or very introvert,” she said.
Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the team describe how Chinese researchers involved in the study drew up a list of about 70 words that experts working with tigers deemed appropriate to describe the animals’ temperaments, such as adaptive, obstinate, stupid and frank.
“These were all initially Chinese words, so there might be both cultural and language differences that make some of these words harder to translate,” noted Abdellaoui.
A tiger personality questionnaire based on the words was then given to feeders or veterinarians that worked closely with 152 tigers in the Harbin Siberian tiger park and those who worked with 96 tigers living in Hengdaohezi Siberian tiger park, both in China. Each tiger was rated, on average, by more than three people.
The results from Harbin Siberian tiger park revealed the words formed two main clusters when applied to the big cats, with these clusters replicated in the second group of tigers.
The researchers dubbed these clusters “majesty” and “steadiness”. A high score for the former encompassed high ratings for words such as dignified, imposing and agile but low ratings on words like withdrawn or feeble. A high “steadiness” score was associated with high ratings on words like loving, obedient and quiet, but low ratings for words such as aggressive or cruel.
Taken together, “majesty” and “steadiness” accounted for 38% of the differences between tigers’ personality questionnaire scores.
Further analysis revealed tigers that scored highly for “majesty” were healthier, preyed more on live animals, ate more, mated more and ranked higher on group status.
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The team noted that the tigers were all semi-captive, adding the results could have been slightly different if tigers in the wild could have been studied.
However, Abdellaoui said the findings could offer insights that may contribute to the conservation and survival of the big cats, while exploring personality in other species may also foster an emotional connection.
“As we learn more about the uniqueness of each tiger we may inspire greater compassion and understanding from their most significant threat: humans,” he said.