Just how true is the
observation that dogs and
their owners are often very
similar to each other?
Whether they resemble each
other physically is still up for
debate, but a recent
European study suggests
people and their dogs do
frequently have very similar
personalities.

Earlier studies have found
that dog-human pairings
with similar temperaments tend to be happier, but the question of how to quantify that similarity
hasn’t previously been addressed. Some owners might feel they are very different from their
pets, or very much the same, but how reliable are those assessments?

Researchers in Europe looked at two groups of people and their dogs, one of 178 pairs recruited
from the Clever Dog Lab database in Vienna, Austria, and the other 211 pairs from the Family
Dog Project database in Budapest, Hungary. From the study abstract:

Although there is a popular belief that dogs share similar personality characteristics
with their owners, no studies have yet addressed the topic. Here, we tested for
associations between the dog and owner personality in two countries (Austria and
Hungary) and found significant positive correlations between owners and their
dogs in all the five investigated personality dimensions (neuroticism, extraversion,
conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness). This similarity could not be attributed
solely to the owners’ self-projection, since the similarity in the first four dimensions was
also significant when an independent peer person assessed the dog instead of the owner.

The full study, which also examines the reasons why people select the dogs they do, including
choices about adding multiple dogs to the family, may provide information helpful in matching
adopters with dogs of an appropriate personality type. That, combined with evidence that
humans and dogs with similar temperaments tend to be happier together, could give pet adoption
counselors one more tool to make better matches.

Turcsán, Borbála et al. Birds of a feather flock together? Perceived personality matching in
owner–dog dyads. Applied Animal Behaviour Science (2012).