>In the Disney animated film *101 Dalmatians*, there’s an amusing sequence in which lookalike pairs of people and their dogs parade across the screen, the resemblances between human and canine in both shape and facial expression comically exaggerated. It’s funny because it plays off the impression many people have that pets look like the owners who care for them.
>But what’s really behind this impression? Do we just think that dogs resemble their owners because we only tend to notice and remember such extraordinary instances, and ignore it when they don’t look alike? This is called the “availability heuristic.” We forget what’s unremarkable.
>Psychologist Yana Bender and her colleagues at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany decided to try to find out. They recently conducted a systematic review of studies probing for similarities in dog-human dyads and found that people actually resemble their dogs more often than chance would predict, not just in physical characteristics but also in personality and behavior. Their research, which analyzed 15 studies, was [published](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886924003441) in the journal *Personality and Individual Differences*.
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>In the Disney animated film *101 Dalmatians*, there’s an amusing sequence in which lookalike pairs of people and their dogs parade across the screen, the resemblances between human and canine in both shape and facial expression comically exaggerated. It’s funny because it plays off the impression many people have that pets look like the owners who care for them.
>But what’s really behind this impression? Do we just think that dogs resemble their owners because we only tend to notice and remember such extraordinary instances, and ignore it when they don’t look alike? This is called the “availability heuristic.” We forget what’s unremarkable.
>Psychologist Yana Bender and her colleagues at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany decided to try to find out. They recently conducted a systematic review of studies probing for similarities in dog-human dyads and found that people actually resemble their dogs more often than chance would predict, not just in physical characteristics but also in personality and behavior. Their research, which analyzed 15 studies, was [published](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886924003441) in the journal *Personality and Individual Differences*.