Dog owners usually consider their pets to be the most charming and attractive, if not in the whole world, then certainly in their own yard.
Australian researchers led by Pauline Bennett (Pauleen Bennett) at Charles La Trobe University (Australia) decided to study the attachment of people to pets. In particular, they wanted to find out how important the dog’s character traits and its charm are for the owners.
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To do this, they had to assess the personal characteristics of the dog and the degree of affection of the owner. This part was easy, as Pauline Bennett’s team had previously developed standardized tests for this purpose. For dogs, an analogue of the “big five” human personality traits (extroversion, goodwill, conscientiousness, emotional stability, intelligence) is proposed. But what about charm? Until now, there were no tools to measure how cute a dog was, so they came up with their own. Dog owners should rate their pets on a 6-point scale, where 1 means “not at all charming” and 6 means “most charming.”
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The study asked 668 Australian dog owners (90% of them women) to complete two questionnaires and a personality test.
It was found that the charm of the dog and his character weakly correlated with the attachment of the owner to his dog. The traits of the dog’s character that had the greatest influence on the strength of attachment were intelligence, reliability, and trainability. But charm turned out to be more important for the owner than any of the five main character traits. The authors of the study concluded that dog owners show stronger affection if they find the dog attractive.
However, they were interested in whether the character of the dog affects the rating of dog charm. For example, do owners of intelligent dogs with moderate temperaments find them more likable? They also wanted to know if the dogs seem more charming to their owners than they are.
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Then another 873 people who did not participate in the experiment were asked to evaluate the charm of dogs from photographs sent by the owners. In addition, they filled out a questionnaire assessing the dog’s temperament.
As one might expect, the owners considered their dogs much more charming than those to whom these animals did not belong. Interestingly, the researchers did not find any correlation between the charm ratings provided by dog owners and those compiled by outsiders.
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People tend to endow cute dogs with more attractive personality traits. At the same time, the strength of attachment affects how charming owners consider their dogs. In other words, charm was found “in the eye of the beholder”.
However, the study has its weaknesses. Its authors named two factors that could influence the results. The first part of the experiment involved mostly women, and they are usually more attached to their pets. At the second stage, the charm rating was compiled from photographs: that is, the participants did not see dogs in everyday life.
See more at editions of Psychology Today.