Clive Wynne, a professor and director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University in Tempe, who was not involved in the research, said the new study offered a “really rich picture” of the overlap among species.

“It’s backing up and reinforcing a number of things that we assume about animal personality that are seldom established with this degree of security in substantial wild-living populations,” said Dr. Wynne, who concurs that dogs, his area of specialty, also have similar personality traits.

Robert Latzman, an associate professor at Georgia State University, who was not involved in the study, said his research with chimpanzees in zoos has always left open the question of whether animals in the wild are somehow different.

“What’s exciting about these data is there’s some suggestion that wild apes look very similar to what we would expect in terms of basic dispositional traits and continuity of those traits — and I don’t mean just to captive chimpanzees, but to humans,” he said. “The work in the wild underscores how similar these animals truly are to humans.”

Alexander Weiss, who led the new study, said he was particularly interested in examining the personality traits of animals in the wild. His findings were in line with previous research he’s done on chimpanzees in captivity.

“The fact that we’re showing this consistency in the wild is nice, because it allows us to draw more general conclusions,” said Dr. Weiss, a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. “It’s not just being in a zoo that’s causing these individual traits to be stable.”

The study’s underlying data will be made publicly available so other scientists can use them in their own research, he said.