No tags yet.
Every day, while I take Millie down the park, I see walking around dogs that exactly look like their owners. No doubt you’ve had the same thought wherever you live. These thoughts are far by being new. They have been inspiring many dog/owner look alike photographic projects and a solid amount of scientific analysis.
Several studies have probed the psychological mechanisms at work and have confirmed that we do indeed resemble our dogs. Look here and here if you are still skeptical about that.
Emblematic is the work of Swiss photographer Sebastian Magnani.
In his groundbreaking Underdogs, Mangnani manipulates images of dogs to appear as if they’re wearing their owners’ clothes, and then places the animal portraits alongside shots of the humans. Magnani creates his human-dog composites by taking a photo of the canine and the owner, then combining the two shots in Photoshop.
So, why we look like our dog?
I have done a bit of research on the topic and I have come up with 5 main reasons.
1. We prefer things that are familiar
Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, argues that we tend to like better things that we are accustomed to and we are particularly enamored of our own faces. This subconsciously predisposes us to pick a dog with similar hair and facial characteristics. “If the general features of one breed of dog's face look something like the general features of our own face,” he writes, “then, all other things being equal, that breed should arouse a bit more of a warm and loving response on our part.” Coren performed a study looking at the relationship between a woman’s hairstyle and the type of dog she preferred. He found that “in general, 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. The reason for this result may have to do with familiarity effects on liking.” Sadahiko Nakajima, psychologist at the Japan's Kwansei Gakuin University, confirms Coren’s argument on dog-owner resemblance. An experiment Nakajima conducted in 2009 showed that people, when shown a photo lineup of random people and random dogs, were able to match the pets with their owners at a rate greater than chance simply by looking at photographs of their faces.
At first, researchers thought some more obvious reasons could have been the justification of it. For example, men are more likely than women to own large breeds, for example, and women to own toy breeds. Or women with long hair are more likely to own dogs with floppy ears rather than perky ears. Or perhaps obese people overfeed their dogs, and thus we’d expect fat owners to have fat dogs. However, the way in which the research was structured ruled that out and the results showed that “individuals make decisions on dog-owner resemblance primarily by comparing features of the eye region between dogs and owners".
This proves that people are surprisingly adept at knowing which pooch goes with which person on the basis of their facial appearance.
Beside physical resemblance, what other underlying psychological reasons made you choose that little pup that is now sitting next to you?
2. We tend to choose dogs which are compatible with our lifestyle
This one is pretty obvious but I wanted to include it anyway as every responsible owner should choose a dog that perfectly fit with its lifestyle. Apartment size, level of exercise, incomes, time spent with the dog are all must criteria when making such a crucial decision. Online you can find several quizzes that tell you what would be the best match based on your lifestyle.
.
3. We tend to choose dogs as a reflection of our own personality traits
If your puppy’s active or lazy, smart or dull, chances are decent you share some of those attributes.
Dr. Sam Gosling has conducted few studies that determined the personality of the pets was what their owners projected on them and had specific personality traits that were identifiable. Thus an active extroverted owner might make the choice when he is first acquiring a dog to pick out an active sociable canine companion like himself.
Gosling conducted a survey based on the 5 personality traits of : openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (measure of anxiety). Findings show that there is correlation between the type of dog and the owner’s personality. The conclusion was that owners of gun dogs, labs. retrievers and toy dogs were the most agreeable, the most emotionally stable people owned hounds, beagles and Retrievers and the toy dog owners were the most “imaginative”. The findings in general were that dog owners gravitate naturally to dogs breeds that fit not only their lifestyle, but their personalities.
4. Our interaction with the dog can change the dog’s personality
It is easy to imagine how an anxious and neurotic owner could raise the neuroticism level of his dog by acting inconsistently, showing exaggerated emotions toward and around their pet, or being overprotective. If living with an owner with a particular personality shapes the dog's personality then the dog should appear to be more similar to the owner the longer the human and canine live together.
I came across a quite complex article which investigates this issue.
It’s a study by Enikö Kubinyi, Borbála Turcsán and Ádám Miklósi of Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary. They analyze the relationships between four personality traits (calmness, trainability, dog sociability and boldness) of dogs and dog and owner demographics on a large sample size with 14,004 individuals. Briefly, here are some of the most interesting findings.
Calmness - how reactive a dog is to events occurring around him
Dogs owned by men seem to be calmer than dogs owned by women, and dogs that live in a house with several other dogs are also calmer
Trainability
The more formal training a dog is given the more trainable the dog becomes.
Playing with a dog on a regular basis seems to increase their trainability.
Dogs owned by women are more trainable than those owned by men, and dogs that live in households with a large number of humans seem to be less trainable.
Sociability
Sociability of the dog is increased by the amount of time that the owner spends with the dog. The most sociable dogs are those whose owners spend at least three hours a day with, and those dogs which the owner actively plays with on a daily basis.
It is interesting that the owner's education is also a factor. Owners with only primary school education report the least sociable dogs and those with a university education report the most sociable dogs
Boldness
Dogs owned by females being less bold then dogs owned by males.
If an animal is the only dog in the household it appears to have higher boldness scores than dogs who live in households with two or more dogs. The authors speculate that this may be because dogs in a multiple pet household form dependency relationships with each other and therefore are less confident when they are out and about by themselves.
5. Over time our pets tend to act like us
Not only do some dogs look like their dogs, now scientists studying imitative behavior have found that, just like people, dogs learn quickest by automatic imitation.
In this this study, researchers trained ten dogs to open a sliding door using either their mouth or paws. They then asked the owners to open the door using either the mouth or hand, and gave the dogs food rewards if they opened the door using the same method (compatible group) or the other method (incompatible group).The results showed that the dogs in the compatible group were able to gain the reward much more easily and with fewer trials than those who had to counterimitate their owners. This strongly suggests that dogs, like humans, learn by automatic imitation.
Several other experiments using a similar approach were conducted and the results were consistent: dogs who had been in the incompatible group fared worse than those in the compatible group, making more errors.
The researchers say this suggests that dogs learn through associative learning and that imitation in dogs is shaped more by their interactions with people than by their evolutionary history of domestication. Also, dogs have a tendency to automatically imitate their owners, even when it proved costly to do so.
So now these are the questions that I am throwing back at you:
Do we also act like our dogs?
Do we use same facial expression, same voice tones, same portament but, mostly, do our dogs made us change the way in which we relate and interact to people?
If your pooch doesn't have good feeling about someone, doesnt make you question about that person?
Millie never liked my ex. She is a socialbe baby and likes everybody but with him, she would barely get close to him and ofter prefering to remain outside. Almost a year later, wehn I got to know him better, I understood that Millie negative feelings toward him were absolutely spot on.
On the other end, If Antropomorphism exists, and this article is the proof, why denying the opposing theory of Dogmorphism? :)
I will leave it for now, BUT PLEASE GET IN TOUCH!!!