Dogs show huge differences in personality and that intrigued University of Texas professor Dr. Sam Gosling enough that he developed a test to assess canine character.
He has figured out a way to rate dogs on four key traits with positive and negative extremes, report the BBC News, Britain's Independent, and Nature. What's more, he says pets should be matched with owners who have similar personalities.
"We used approaches used to assess human personality and applied them to dogs," Gosling explained to BBC News reporter Paul Rincon. "You do find personality differences between breeds. Indeed, many have been bred on that basis. But you also find enormous [personality] differences within the breeds themselves." For example, not all pit bulls were aggressive and not all golden retrievers were affectionate.
To assess a dog's personality, Gosling first asked the owner to rate the dog on four personality traits, which were adapted from a test for human personality that measured extroversion, agreeableness, emotional stability, openness to new experiences, and conscientiousness, which is the ability to control impulses. He then asked total strangers to rate the animal on the same characteristics.
The four dog personality factors were:
- Energetic-slothful
- Affection-aggression
- Anxiety-calmness
- Intelligence-stupidity
Anxiety-calmness was assessed by the dog's reaction when its owner walked away with another dog, while the ability to retrieve a biscuit from beneath a cup was used as a measure of intelligence. "We found the tests usually correlated very well with what the owners said about their dog's personality," Gosling told the Independent. "The evidence that dogs have personality is as strong as the evidence that humans have personality."Dog owners have long known that their pups have personality, but scientists haven't been so quick to agree. When Gosling first suggested to colleagues that he measure dog personalities in the same way as human beings, he met strong resistance. "I had people yelling at me that I was bringing the field into disrepute," he said. Why? It's easy for scientists to agree that animals and humans share a similar physiology, but it's harder to acknowledge that we share personality traits, too. "Some see it as one more blow against the special status of humans," Gosling told Nature. He argues that personality traits are just as likely to have evolved in animals as did physical traits.
But more than anything else, this dog personality test may help reveal the biology of animal and human character. The results were presented to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Poll
