The purpose of this study was to determine the personality structure of eight male gorillas (five silverbacks and three blackbacks) housed at the Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita, Kansas and to determine if personality predicts behavior and subjective well-being in male gorillas living in bachelor groups. We used the Hominoid Personality Questionnaire which contains 54 descriptive adjectives with representative items from the human five-factor model. Rates of 12 behaviors that are broadly defined as agonistic or affiliative were independently recorded and calculated. Principal components analysis yielded three reliable personality factors: Dominance, Extraversion/Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. These results are the first potential quantitative evidence for a Conscientiousness factor in a hominoid other than chimpanzees and humans. This suggests that Conscientiousness originated with the common ancestor of male gorillas and humans around 10 million years ago. These results indicate that humans can reliably assess the personality and subjective well-being of captive male gorillas living in bachelor groups with robust levels of inter-rater reliability and validity. Furthermore, personality can accurately predict behavior (r = 0.79; n = 13) and subjective well-being (r = 0.83; n = 5) in gorillas and provide convergent and discriminant validity for the personality factors. The results advocate for the use of personality questionnaires in the captive management of bachelor gorillas over long-term multi-institutional behavioral studies.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.