Confirming dog owner suspicions, a new study reveals that dogs have personalities, and that these character traits can be identified as accurately as similar personality attributes in humans. The paper, published in the current Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is the first cross-species personality study between a human and another animal. Dogs (Canis familiaris) were chosen because of their wide availability, the fact that they safely and naturally exhibit a wide variety of behaviors, are understood well by many humans, and can travel to research sites with ease. Experts, however, suspect that many other animals also possess unique personalities. The dog research consisted of three studies. For the first, 78 dog owners were recruited from dog parks to evaluate both themselves and their dogs using criteria common to human personality studies: extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism and openness. Each owner then identified another person familiar with the dog who performed the same evaluation of the owner and dog.

For the second study, independent observers rated owners and dogs in a field-testing enclosure. For the final study, photographs of human and animal participants were rated by a new set of independent observers. After the three tests, Samuel Gosling, lead author of the study and professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and his colleagues determined that the judgments made for the dog personalities were as accurate as those made for the human personalities. While there wasn't 100 percent agreement for either human or dog evaluations, the responses of owners, peers, and independent judges all followed a similar pattern of consistency, which the researchers were able to chart mathematically.

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