K/r-Selection and Personality Type

• K-Selection and r-Selection: Profound or Trivial? by James Brody, 6/28/97
  
  

r-Selection is not politically correct. It is a style that adapts to volatile environments, where the strategies of rapid breeding, exploration, and variegation, and reproduction with little parental investment seem to pay. The tactic, briefly, is occupy territory, exploit resources, reproduce, and move on before things collapse. Although Wilson describes r-Selection in volatile settings, it's possible to get the impression of a species invading a newer setting, volatile or not, one with abundant resources that are exploited more rapidly by r styles.

These are K days. Limited natural resources, population approaching the carrying capacity (the K) of our niche, greater investment in the young, decades of school, (even rearing young who are physically larger), and greater consideration of our impact on other people(s) in business and recreation. You see these patterns often. More cautious drivers on the NJ Turnpike are encouraged to report the aggressive ones. K-selection shows up in ever the finer sorting of teacher specialties and ever more school. One friend claims that she is required to have 4 years of college to operate a preschool daycare program. Mental health is highly refined with definitions and distinctions. There is currently a 50% oversupply of therapists nationally; another 50% of the total available psychologists are still in training! Competition does drive diversity, short of speciation, whether meadowbirds or hungry therapists.

Unfortunately, I've always been an r-type. I did better working for agencies in periods of expansion. I rarely formed alliances and even more rarely kept one for an extended time. I had a great belief in my ability, in doing things my way. I did well with projects and with publications so long as I did not have to compete for resources. Telephone use was limited as was cross checking for other people's occupying the same territory.

Intervals of shrinking resources changed contingencies. My peers spent more time nurturing alliances, checking with each other before undertaking an initiative, and sharing staff. I think less of value was accomplished during these phases; still, my peers survived longer while I burned out from lack of success.

Similar phases occurred in graduate school and during a postdoctoral. Times with less supervision, plenty of rats, and a lot of personal responsibility were correlated with publications, including one that brought 1300 reprint requests. Those were days of "go for it" with respect to thinking and making experiments dovetail systematically to pursue some large point rather than an obscure one. I was paid to grade papers and teach labs; the 18 hour days of rat running were not compensated; I graded the papers and took the money so that I could throw some pcpa in a rat and watch him run a bit faster, react to lights and sounds differently, and drink a bit less quinine water when his serotonin was low. The chance to work with no boundaries was so intoxicating that money was irrelevant.

It's 30 years later and I'm still an r-type. I'm happy working for myself professionally; the internet is an r-setting. This column has again offered the chance to "go for it" with respect to ideas and building models. The old charge is there, of searching, perhaps being the first to note a pattern, or rearrange conceptual blocks. You could pay me not to do this; but it would cost you and depress me. I know other guys, in Rotary and sometimes in my practice, who have adaptations for committees and local government, for the glacial pace imposed by opposing interests, guys who think in decades' goals, and monitor their perimeters carefully. I used to want the head of the table but no longer; I'm miserable in K-roles, things happen too slowly and too incrementally. It was the wrong place for me.

Perhaps someday we'll consider K/r-Selection when we assess our clients.

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