People can guess pretty successfully what breed of dog a person might own just by looking at the owner, a new study finds. A group of 70 people who do not own dogs were asked to match photos of 41 dog owners to three possible breeds - Labrador, poodle or Staffordshire bull terrier. They matched the owners to the dogs more than half the time. Yet given three choices, they should have been right only about a third of the time. ‘This suggests that certain breeds of dogs are associated with particular kinds of people,’ said study leader Lance Workman, a psychologist at Bath Spa University in the UK. It’s no secret that people are obsessed with pets. Two-thirds of American households have at least one, and dogs are the top choice (though by sheer numbers, fish win out). And dog owners are particularly so, suggests a study in 2007 that found when a pet goes missing, dog owners contact and visit shelters much sooner than cat owners. The analysis runs deep: Those who don’t own dogs used stereotypes to match the dogs to their owners, Workman figures. ‘These stereotypes persisted into judgments of the […]