Human and animal behaviour exhibits complex but regular patterns over time, often referred to as expressions of personality. Yet it remains unclear what personality really is: is it just the behavioural patterns themselves, something in the brain, in the genes or perhaps all of these? Here we offer a set of causal hypotheses about the role of personality, integrating psychological and neuroscientific approaches to personality in a testable framework. These hypotheses clarify the causal and constitutive relations that personality has with genes, environment, brain, mind and behaviour, and we suggest specific experiments that can adjudicate amongst the different hypotheses. We focus on a set of models that propose that personality is instantiated in the brain, distally caused by genes and environment and, in turn, causing the overt behaviours from which it is often inferred. We argue that articulating and testing such models will be essential in a mature science of personality.

人和动物的行为随着时间的推移表现出复杂但规则的模式，通常被称为人格表达。但是，尚不清楚人格究竟是什么：仅仅是行为模式本身，大脑中的某种东西，基因中的某种东西，还是所有这些？在这里，我们提供了有关人格角色的一组因果假设，在可测试的框架中整合了人格的心理学和神经科学方法。这些假设阐明了人格与基因，环境，大脑，思维和行为之间的因果关系和本构关系，我们建议可以在不同假设之间进行判断的具体实验。我们关注于一组模型，这些模型提出人格在大脑中被实例化，是由基因和环境引起的，而反过来，导致经常从中推断出明显的行为。我们认为，阐明和测试这种模型对于成熟的人格科学至关重要。