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March
30, 2004
Study Claims Dogs And Their Owners
Look Alike ---
Suggests People Choose Canines Who Resemble Themselves
By Barry Jagoda
Long the subject
of speculation, a new study says that dogs DO resemble their
owners. At least this is the case with purebred canines, according
to new research conducted at the University of California, San
Diego, by social psychologist Nicholas Christenfeld and his
UCSD colleague, Michael Roy. The full study, Do Dogs Resemble
Their Owners?, appears in the May issue of Psychological
Science, the journal of the American Psychological Society
that focuses on empirical research in psychology.
The UCSD psychologists
found that when people pick a dog, “they seek one that,
at some level, resembles them, and, when they get a purebred,
they get what they want.”
Forty-five dogs and
their owners were separately photographed and judges were shown
pictures of an owner, that owner’s dog, and one other
dog, with the task of picking out the true match. The proof
of resemblance was that a majority of the purebred dogs and
their owners could be identified by the 28 judges called upon
to examine the photographs, with the results showing 16 matches
out of the 25 purebreds. There was no evidence of resemblance
between the mixed breed dogs and their owners.
“This is a project
in which I’ve been interested for a long time because
you hear a lot of casual talk about dog-owner resemblance and
we wanted to see what could be learned by formal research,”
said Professor Christenfeld. Once the researchers were able
to confirm, with randomized photo matching techniques, the high
incidence of resemblance between owners and purebreds, and none
for mixed-breeds, they went on to conclude that the similarity
was due to owner selection at time of acquisition.
Resemblance only among
the pure-breeds and their owners ruled out another possible
explanation, that of convergence--the theory that similarity
might grow with duration of ownership. Not only was there no
correlation between how long a dog and owner had been together,
as to similarity in appearance, but for convergence to be applicable
the mixed-breeds would also have a resemblance to their owners.
Since the similarity was only among pure-breeds, whose future
appearance could be predicted, the study concluded that, in
a majority of cases, owners select dogs who resemble themselves.
To examine whether
people do look like their pets, and to explore the underlying
mechanism, the researchers asked 28 judges (undergraduate college
students) to examine photos of 45 dogs and their owners, taken
at three dogs parks. Owners were approached at random and asked
to help with a psychology experiment. The pictures were taken
so that the background was different for dog and owners. Triads
of pictures were constructed with one owner, that owner’s
dog and one other dog. A dog was regarded as resembling its
owner if a majority of judges (more than 14) matched the pair.
The findings do not
reveal at what level the resemblance between person and pet
exists. It could be a similarity of physical attributes or of
personality traits. The matches seem to be based less on specific
obvious characteristics—the connections were not, for
example, between hairy people and hairy dogs or big people with
big dogs. The data does not reveal how judges were able match
dogs to their owners, but the study concludes, “it does
appear that people want a creature like themselves.”
Media Contact: Barry Jagoda,
(858) 534-8567
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