• Question: Do the pets you like indicate things about your personality?

    Asked by XandyisBAE to Stéphane, Matt, Gemma, David on 14 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Stéphane Berneau

      Stéphane Berneau answered on 14 Mar 2018:

      To a certain extent, yes. I tend to think that I prefer dogs to cats for the special fact that I don’t like sassy persons (Cats are amazing characters in a household).

      I don’t think you will be able to say more.
      The opposite example is Hitler. There was widespread support for animal welfare in Nazi Germany and he took a variety of measures to ensure animals were protected. Surprising with all horrors that he committed for a belief.

      Moreover, each animal has a different personality:

      A quick personality test to make the Ask zone more fun ! Comment.

    • Photo: Gemma Chandratillake

      Gemma Chandratillake answered on 15 Mar 2018:

      My gut says “yes”, but I’m struggling to find clear evidence that this is clearly the case, part of the difficult comes in measuring personality. Dogs and cats have evolved to live with humans as pets, and there are a lot of studies about the effect of having pets in the home, and the effects on children with respect to, say, empathy.
      These studies suggests that there has been some work on looking at things like this. The numbers in the studies are small and I haven’t really checked the statistics, but, regardless of the conclusions that they come to, it suggests that people have at least looked at pet preferences and personality measures to some extent: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2752/089279306785593801, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1983.52.3.719.
      If you want to find more about this, and see what work has been done, the best way to search is using Google Scholar. Here is the search I would use to get you started: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=pet+preferences+owners+personality&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5
      You can select by date, and also you can see whether the article has been quoted (cited) by other people. Pick newer articles, and ones that have been followed up and confirmed as they will be more reliable.
      Interesting question!

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