Does your dog look like you?
You often hear dogs look like their owner.
Does your dog look like you?
I was wondering about that very question myself and, wondered if it was actually truth to it, if there were any scientific proof/view for that.
Also,I wondered if people choose the dog that looks most like themselves unconsciously.
According to BBC news article written by David Robson, Michael Roy at the University of California, San Diego was one of the first psychologists to put the idea to the test.
He went to three dog parks, and he photographed the dogs and the owners separately, and then asked a group of participants to try to match them up.
Despite no additional cues, he found that they were able to match them up with reasonable accuracy.
Similar look especially with eyes seems to be one of the cue that could helped participants to match up better.
The eye seem to be one of the key.
According to the Huffington post article written by
Just like Michael Ray, he carried an experiment in 2009 where he ask people to match up dog and an owner simply by looking at the pictures.
He reported that people were, at a rate significantly higher than chance, able to match dogs and their owners simply by looking at photographs of their faces.
His findings were similar, to those of previous studies.
He told The Huffington Post that the evidence from his and other scientists’ research shows that the popular belief in dog-owner physical resemblance is empirically valid.
Nakajima then conducted another experiment that sought to determine if the pet-human resemblance could be traced to a specific facial feature.
For the experiment, more than 500 people were shown two sets of photographs. One set showed pictures of real dog-owner pairs, while the other set had random pairings of people and dogs.
The participants were randomly assigned to one of five different “masking” photo conditions: no-mask (in which the human’s and the dog’s faces were unobstructed), eye-mask (the human’s eyes were blacked out), mouth-mask (the human’s mouth was blacked out), dog-eye-mask (the dog’s eyes were blacked out), and eye-only (where just the eyes of the human and the dog could be seen).
The participants were then asked to select the dog-owner pairs that physically resembled each other.
participants who were shown the unobstructed photos correctly identified the dog-owner pairs most of the time. (In this case, their accuracy rate was up to 80 percent.) When the owners’ mouths were concealed, participants were correct 73 percent of the time.
But when the eyes of either the humans or the dogs were blacked out, the participants’ accuracy fell to the level of random chance — around 50 percent either when the human’s eyes were blacked out, or when the dog’s were.
When participants were shown only the eyes of the dog and the human, their accuracy rose to 74 percent.
From this experiment, you could feel the eyes really matter to pick the correct pair of dog and the human.
why do people pick the dogs who are like them?
Nakajima told HuffPost that “a major reason of the dog-owner facial resemblance is the so-called ‘mere exposure effect (we human like things that are familiar.),’” or the idea that a person might choose to get a dog who looks similar to themselves because of a preference for the familiar.
To read the huffington post article, please click here.
I can see people see the similarity in the dog-human pair with eyes, but people pick the dog just by similar familiar look is the only reason?
When you think about it, people do not choose group of friends just by look. As David from BBC article writes, we also tend to be around people who share similar personalities too.
With that in mind, Borbala Turcsan at Eotvos University in Budapest decided to test whether the same was true of our canine soulmates.
Previous tests they done shown that human traits such as extroversion can correspond to objective measures of the dog’s behavior.
Turcsan found that the dogs and their owners both tended to show similar personality profiles.
Interesting thing is that, she found that it was actually higher than the similarity found in married couples and friends.
They did not think dog has copied the personality of their owners considering the amount of time the dogs and their owners had spent living together.
They thought that the personality seemed to be part of the dog’s appeal in the first place; thus result in picking up the one most compatible to you..
To read the full article written by David for BBC website, please click here.
What is your take on this topic?
I have seen the article saying people choose dogs who got similar look not just eyes but overall appearance made bt their hair.For example…
One of the article came across said women with longer hair covering their ears tended to prefer the Springer Spaniel and the Beagle, rating these breeds higher on the dimensions of likeable, friendly, loyal and intelligent.
Women with shorter hair and visible ears tended to rate the Siberian Husky and the Basenji more highly on these same dimensions.
I personally feel that hair would not be so much effect on selecting the breed of choice or particular dog to become one of your family member.
I am more sold for eye theory and personality theory. With both theories, I would think it is good possible answer to the question why we human choose the dog who look like us.
I do not know about eye similarity with Palette for me, but she has, I feel like, a bit similar personality.
How about you and your dog?
Jun 28, 2016 | 1 | Miscellaneous (dogs)
July 4th, 2016 at 6:59 pm
That made for some interesting reading to be sure!! I’m sure there’s far more science in these things than we realize! We chose Rugby because he had many of the criteria I was looking for, and I couldn’t have a Corgi at the time. Our home had very steep stairs, and lots of them, so I didn’t want to injure my dog’s back in the process!! Rugby has very long legs, and a shorter back, so he was able to navigate stairs with ease. 😀