10 December 2014 Last updated at 10:54
By Adam HartProfessor of Science Communication, University of Gloucestershire
We like to think humans are pretty special.
Given our many achievements (I don't see chimpanzees landing probes on comets in the near future) it's a tendency that's largely justified.
But most of our thoughts aren't consumed with the magnificence or otherwise of our species. If we're honest, most of our thoughts are taken up by us as individuals.
Central to this conceit is the notion of our "personality". However, while we might think that our sparkling personalities are something unique, psychological research tells us that we can assess and measure personality using just five main personality dimensions.
What's more, not only are our personalities not quite as special as we might think, recent animal research tells us that personality is not even something unique to humans.
Research into animal behaviour has usually focused on behaviour across a species, or more accurately, across a sample of that species. The approach has examined "average behaviour" and individuals only featured as data points, with variation between individuals being of far less interest than the description and explanation of the overall behaviours observed.
Recently though, there has been a shift in this view. Inter-individual variation between animals is no longer being dismissed as statistical noise but instead has been embraced and studied.
As you can hear in Frontiers on BBC Radio 4, insights from this individual-focused research have led us to a far more nuanced view of behaviour and the evolutionary processes that have shaped it.
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