Do canines have character? As this ScienCentral News video reports, according to one psychologist, personality testing is going to the dogs.
It's a Dog's Life
Ask most dog owners, and you'll find no doubts that their canine companions have personalities. But many scientists have typically dismissed this idea.
"Scientists have been very mixed in their response to the idea of animal personality," says Sam Gosling, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin currently on sabbatical at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. "If somebody says 'Rover is friendly,' what scientists believe, I think, is that we're learning more about the owner than we are learning about Rover, and therefore they think that such a description such as 'Rover is friendly' is not the correct type of information that a serious scientist should be using."
Gosling set out to show these skeptics are barking up the wrong tree by providing them with hard data in the language they normally use: He adapted a standard human personality test, called the five-factor model, to canines. The test is based on the idea that five broad dimensions comprise personality: extroversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, neuroticism, and conscientiousness. Extroversion is marked by being talkative and social; agreeableness, being warm and supportive; openness, being interested in new and different experiences; neuroticism, being prone to worry and anxiety; and conscientiousness, keeping commitments and being responsible.
"We thought it would make sense to start off with the personality framework that had been most widely used, which is the human five factor model," says Gosling. "So we took the human instrument, we took human methods, and we transferred those from humans to dogs." With one exception: conscientiousness. "In our previous research we found there's very little evidence for a separate conscientiousness dimension in any other species than humans and chimpanzees," explains Gosling. In the canine version of the test, the four qualities became intelligence, energy level, anxiety level, and how affectionate they were.
Gosling tested 78 dogs, both purebred and mixed. The first stage of the test was to have owners describe their dogs' personalities. "This is a direct application of human methods," he explains. "If I wanted to learn about your personality, I would ask people who know you well to tell me about you." The second stage was to have someone else who also knew each dog to describe it. The third stage was to have strangers observe the dogs' behavior. "We were trying to get these dogs to perform all the different personality dimensions which we think they might exhibit, and these reflected the four dimensions that we were trying to test," says Gosling.
In the anxiety test, dogs watched their owners walk other dogs; in the intelligence test, dogs were observed to see how long it took them to find a treat placed under a plastic cup; in the affection test, owners encouraged dogs to display cuddly and affectionate behavior; and in the energy test, owners encouraged dogs to display energy by running and playing.
What Gosling found might just teach old science dogs some new tricks. "We found that agreement between observers, and agreement between what the observers had said and how the dogs performed in the behavioral tests, was very strong," Gosling says. "How strong was it? About as strong as you would expect the ratings of humans. And that's the essential point, is that all of the tests for personality judgments of dogs met the criteria that we expect for personality judgments of humans. So if you want, you could say, 'Well, dogs don't have personality.' But if you do say that, you're also forced to say that humans don't have personality either."
Gosling also found that dog personalities vary within breeds, and believes one application of his research is to help determine which dogs have the personality to become good service or police dogs.
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