The study of human behavioural diversity has flourished across different fields including psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, psychiatry, genetics and sociology.

As entry points to the debate, I use the personality trait model from personality psychology and the human value model in sociology and social psychology to describe individual differences in behavioural predispositions and motivations. These approaches have assumed general stability in phenotypic structures which have led to a quest to identify genetic and brain correlates. At the same time, anthropological and cultural psychology have pointed towards variability in trait and value structures across human populations; providing a significant challenge to universalistic descriptions tied to neurobiological theories that presume universality of personality structures and a common human biology. In this presentation, I am using a consilience approach to propose an integration across these different levels of explanation. I argue that a limited number of neurobiological systems are expressed in situation-contingent traits and values, depending on the resources available and the culturally engineered environment.