Room: CAS 145
A tail of influence: How humans shape pet personality
A Talk by William Chopik Ph.D.
Michigan State University | Department of Psychology
People readily point to their pets as a source of comfort and enjoyment. But any pet owner will readily admit that pets vary from one another--some are friendly, some are shy, some are goofy, and some are aggressive. Herein lies an important methodological problem: How do we assess the dispositions of animals and beings that are unlikely to provide reliable self-reports of their psychological states? And how do we avoid projecting our own traits on animals? This talk will provide a history on efforts to measure the personalities of non-human animals, focusing primarily on cats and dogs. Further, I will provide an overview of how to capture variation in these personality traits and how to quantify how much this variation is attributable to environmental influences. In three studies (N=3,938), despite people’s beliefs about the immutability of pet personality, pet personality differs across the lifespan, according to environmental and owner characteristics, and is linked to important pet outcomes.
BIO
William Chopik Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University. He studies how close relationships—and the people in them—change over time and across situations. Dr. Chopik’s work examines phenomena as broad as how relationships and social institutions shape development and as focused as the mechanisms that underlie the link between close relationships and health. In 2017, William Chopik Ph.D. was recognized as Forbes Magazine’s Top 30 Scientists Under 30 and has since been recognized as a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science.