Personality in featureless environments
Is behavior just dictated by your situation rather than anything innate (personality or character)? A subset of social psychologists may work as if this is the case, but let us turn our attention to fruit flies and prisoners of the future.
This comes from the work of Björn Brembs, who asks a simple question about the generation of behavior. Is behavior the result of a simple map from sensory input, disrupted only by random noise at each juncture in the system, or there an internal initiator of spontaneous behavior?
Brembs walks you through the experiment showing how flies behave in a completely featureless environment. With constant visual sensory input, they still attempt to turn and roll about in the air.
we detected a non-linear signature in the fly behavior. Such a signature can only be found in systems whose indeterminate behavior is not due to noise but originates in their design.
If you found yourself in such an environment, what would you do (think of the prison in THX 1138). There is no sensory feedback, although you can still attempt to move around. Would you sit down, run, jump. Cry? Squeal (in delight)? Is there any chance of finding robust individual differences in what humans would do in this interesting although ecologically invalid environment?
Maye A, Hsieh C, Sugihara G, Brembs B, 2007 Order in Spontaneous Behavior. PLoS ONE 2(5): e443. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.00004433
