ArticleScientific reports2019
Males have more aggressive and less sociable personalities than females in semi-captive Asian elephants.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 40 citations in OpenAlex.
- Gender and sex interactions are intrinsic components of cancer phenotypes.Nature reviews. Cancer · 2025Review
- Tusks, testosterone and personality in male Asian elephants (Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Biased birth sex ratios of mammals and birds in zoos.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Wild elephants vary in their attraction to novelty across an anthropogenic landscape gradient.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Consistent Individual Differences Drive Collective Movements in a Tibetan Macaque Group.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Consistency and flexibility of character in free-ranging male African elephants across time, age, and social contexts.PloS one · 2024Article
- Adaptive significance of affiliative behaviour differs between sexes in a wild reptile population.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Context-specific variation and repeatability in behavioral traits of bent-wing bats.Zoological letters · 2023Article
- Problematic utilization of online social networking site in Chinese college students: prediction of personality and dynamic mediators.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2022Article
- Personality and social environment predict cognitive performance in common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus).Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Early life adversity has long-term effects on sociality and interaction style in female baboons.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Amylin-Calcitonin receptor signaling in the medial preoptic area mediates affiliative social behaviors in female mice.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Childhood social isolation causes anxiety-like behaviors via the damage of blood-brain barrier in amygdala in female mice.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2022Article
- Sociality and self-awareness in animals.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Pandemic Leadership: Sex Differences and Their Evolutionary-Developmental Origins.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Sexual Dimorphism in Language, and the Gender Shift Hypothesis of Homosexuality.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Faecal Glucocorticoid Metabolites and H/L Ratio are Related Markers of Stress in Semi-Captive Asian Timber Elephants.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2020Article
- Mahout Perspectives on Asian Elephants and Their Living Conditions.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2019Article
- Future Directions for Personality Research: Contributing New Insights to the Understanding of Animal Behavior.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2019Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Personality, i.e. consistent between-individual differences in behaviour, has been documented in many species. Yet little is known about how males and females of long-lived, highly social species differ in their measures of personality structure. We investigated sex differences in the mean, variance, and covariance of three previously reported personality traits (Attentiveness, Sociability, Aggressiveness) in 150 female and 107 male Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) from a semi-captive population in Myanmar. These three personality traits were obtained by performing exploratory factor analysis on 28 behavioural items that had been rated by experienced elephant handlers. We found that males scored significantly higher on Aggressiveness and tended to score lower on Sociability than females. However, no sex difference was found in the mean scores of Attentiveness. Variances for the three personality traits did not differ between the sexes, suggesting that male and female elephants share the same range of personality variation. Likewise, trait covariances were similar between the sexes. While both sexes show complex sociality in the wild, female Asian elephants typically live in highly social family units, whereas male elephants' social bonds are weaker. Males usually form dominance ranks by aggressive interactions, especially during musth. Our results on a large sample of individuals living in their natural environment are thus in agreement with elephant life-histories and parallel the findings of sex differences in other long-lived highly social species with similar life-histories.
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