> It seems possible to me that it would be advantageous for there to be randomness baked into personality, to avoid things like 'decision making deadlock'. Th

> It seems possible to me that it would be advantageous for there to be randomness baked into personality, to avoid things like 'decision making deadlock'. There is no need for randomness there. This scenario is handled by frequency-dependent selection like the 'hawk and dove' model or the male/female sex ratio. If aggressiveness becomes too common, then it gets selected against until it's driven back down to a frequency where it's neutral. This sort of frequency-dependent selection is one of the behavioral genetics interpretation of why we have personality factors, actually: see "The Evolutionary Genetics of Personality" http://www.unm.edu/~gfmiller/newpapers_sept6/penke%202007%20targetarticle.pdf http://www.unm.edu/~gfmiller/newpapers_sept6/penke%202007%20... , Penke et al 2007; & "The Evolutionary Genetics of Personality Revisited" http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Penke_&_Jokela_in_press_-_Evolutionary_Genetics_of_Personality_Revisited.pdf http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Penke_&_Jokela_in_press_-_Evolu... , Penke & Jokela 2016 (I ran into a nifty mouse study on personality the other day demonstrating this sort of thing: https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/26/5/1285/242100/Temporally-fluctuating-selection-on-a-personality https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/26/5/1285/242100/Tem... )