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  Good scientists try to be on the lookout for alternative explanations, even if they crush our pet ideas. In 1924, the managers of the Hawthorne Works, a factory outside Chicago, hired a group of psychologists to determine what types of changes in the work environment would make the biggest differences in worker productivity. The psychologists systematically instituted a series of small modifications. First, they increased the lighting on the factory floor, then they made a small change in the pay system. They monkeyed with the work schedule and the length of rest periods. The researchers found that nearly every change they made was followed by a temporary uptick in performance, even when it involved simply undoing a previous change. They concluded that the increases in worker productivity were not due to better lighting or better pay or longer breaks per se. They were just temporary improvements caused by a change in routine.

  Could something like the Hawthorne Effect—simply having a new experience—explain the improvements seen in patients undergoing dolphin therapy? Think about it. In addition to hanging out with some of the most appealing creatures on Earth, you travel to beautiful places, spend time floating in tropical seas, and live for a while in a supportive environment where your expectations for success are high.

  How can we separate the real effects of interacting with dolphins from all the other neat things that can happen during two weeks at dolphin camp? Fortunately, there are methods to help tease out the actual effects of treatments from those caused by unconscious biases that can creep into our experiments.

  In order to take a cold, hard look at whether the benefits of interacting with dolphins are due to more than just temporary feel-good, we need to use a Consumer Reports–type approach. What, for example, does the research really show about the effect of ultrahigh-frequency dolphin sounds on handicapped children? A group of German researchers carefully observed sessions in which dolphins interacted with groups of mentally and physically handicapped kids in a dolphin therapy program in the Florida Keys. They found that most of the dolphins ignored the children, and there was not much ultrasonic dolphin talk going on. In fact, the children were exposed to an average of only ten seconds of dolphin ultrasounds during each session, not nearly enough to be beneficial. The researchers concluded that the kids would have been better off playing with dogs.

  But what about the dolphins’ purported ability to heal through good vibes, a healing smile, and mysterious electric fields? Careful analyses of these claims have been conducted by several researchers. Among them are Lori Marino and Scott Lilienfeld at Emory University. Lori is an animal person. She spends her Saturdays trying to find homes for rescued cats. But her real love is dolphins. She was originally attracted to the unusual anatomy of their brains when she was a graduate student in neuroscience. She has now been studying dolphins for nearly twenty years and was the first scientist to show that they have the ability to recognize themselves in mirrors (a trait shared with humans, apes, elephants, and magpies). Scott is a clinical psychologist who has made a career out of taking on some of psychology’s most sacred cows, such as whether those Rorschach inkblots reveal much about your personality (they don’t).

  Given Lori’s expertise with dolphins and Scott’s ability to cut through psychobabble, they were the perfect team to assess whether dolphin therapy has a demonstrable effect on troubled bodies and minds. Lori and Scott carefully evaluated the methods of published studies claiming that dolphin therapy is effective for disorders such as depression, dermatitis, mental retardation, autism, and anxiety. They found that every one of them was methodologically flawed: small sample sizes, lack of objective measures of improvement, inadequate control groups, inability to separate the effects of the dolphins from an increased feeling of well-being that comes from doing new things in pleasant environments, and researcher conflicts of interests.

  Lori and Scott contend that there is no valid scientific evidence that dolphin therapy is an effective treatment for any of the disorders that its advocates claim. They think it is all pseudoscience. Not content with blowing off dolphin therapy as scientific mumbo jumbo, Lori and Scott want to put the industry out of business. They call it a dangerous fad. I can see the fad part, but why is it dangerous? If you can afford it, why not let kids with too little joy in their lives frolic with Flipper for a couple of weeks? Seems harmless.

  Lori doesn’t agree. She points out that this “therapy” poses risks for both humans and animals. Dolphins can be aggressive, even to the children they are supposed to be healing. A recent study found that half of over 400 people who worked professionally with marine mammals had suffered traumatic injuries, and participants in dolphin therapy programs have been slapped, bitten, and rammed (the latter resulting in a broken rib and a punctured lung). You can even contract skin diseases from these animal therapists.

  Dolphin therapy also raises pesky ethical issues. Clinical psychologists choose to become therapists. Dolphins do not. While most animals used in dolphin therapy programs in the United States are born in captivity, in other countries they are usually captured in the wild, often in massive roundups. Lori says that seven dolphins die for each one that makes it to a cetacean Guantanamo, where it will spend the rest of its life swimming circles in a concrete pool.

  Do we have the right to capture intelligent animals with complex social lives and sophisticated communication systems and turn them into therapists for autistic children? I suppose the practice might be justified if these animals really did possess special curative powers. But I would need rock-solid evidence that dolphins can transform the isolated autistic child, or that a couple of hours of dolphin play could add fifteen points to the IQ of a girl with Down syndrome, or that dolphin electric fields could jolt the middle-age depressive out of his debilitating funk. But that evidence does not exist.

  Dolphin therapy is an unregulated industry that is not certified or approved by any recognized psychological or medical professional organization. In 2007, the British Organizations the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society and Research Autism called for a ban on all dolphin therapy programs. Even a pioneer in the dolphin therapy movement has joined the cause. Betsy Smith was an anthropologist at Florida International University in the 1970s when she began bringing dolphins and mentally handicapped children together. At first, the results looked good, and she quickly became a proponent of dolphin therapy. Not any more. In a letter released by the Aruba Marine Mammal Foundation, Dr. Smith wrote that “the primary motive of all captive programs is money.” Ouch.

  According to my friends who have done it, swimming with dolphins is fun. But marine mammals are not magic bullets. A week of dolphin therapy won’t straighten the spine, heal the troubled mind, or prevent epileptic seizures. Save your money; save a dolphin.

  DO PEOPLE LOOK LIKE THEIR DOGS?

  When people find out I study human-animal relationships, they often tell me, “Oh, you should talk to my friend ____. She is crazy about her ____.” When my sister told me I should talk to Paulette Jacobson, I took her up on it. Paulette lives with a Shih Tzu named Miss Bette Davis (Missy for short) on Bainbridge Island near Seattle. Missy is a rescue dog who was severely neglected by her previous owner. Now she lives a life of luxury that includes home-cooked meals, boat rides on Puget Sound, and a fancy wardrobe. Paulette gets a kick out of dressing Missy up. Missy has a raincoat and sweaters, sunglasses and goggles. Sometimes Paulette and Missy dress alike and ride around Bainbridge on their motor scooter. They make a cute couple. People wave and stop to take their picture. A pet boutique is opening on the island, and Paulette can’t wait to see the new lines of doggy fashions they will offer. She adores Missy. Paulette told me, “She is everything I want in a dog.” But Missy is more than a companion for Paulette. “Missy is my alter-ego. I think of her as a fashion accessory.”

  Nicole Richie took the idea of her pet being an extension of herself literally when she had hair extensions that matched her own hair color attached to the coat of her dog, Honey Child. That people resemble their do
gs is an enduring piece of folk psychology—that’s psychology-speak for conventional wisdom. You know the stereotypes—burly bikers with jailhouse tattoos go for pit bulls; leggy fashion models stroll down Park Avenue with pairs of lanky Afghans. But do people really look like their dogs?

  University of British Columbia psychologist and dog expert Stanley Coren thought the idea was not that far-fetched. After all, social psychologists have found that people are attracted to romantic partners who are about as attractive as they are. Why shouldn’t picking an animal you want to live with follow the same principle? Coren reasoned that if people were attracted to animals that looked like themselves, women with short haircuts that exposed their ears would prefer breeds with sharp prick ears—huskies and basenjis, for example—while women with long hair would prefer floppy-eared breeds like beagles and springer spaniels.

  To test his hypothesis, Coren asked women with different hairstyles to rate pictures of four dog breeds that differed in the shape of their ears. Each of the women rated how they liked each dog’s looks, how friendly the dog seemed, how loyal it would be, and how smart it appeared. Just as he predicted, Coren found that women with long hair liked the springer spaniels and beagles better and women with short hair preferred basenjis and huskies. In addition, short-haired women rated the prick-eared dogs friendlier, more loyal, and smarter. Coren argued that people like a certain look. They like it on themselves and on the dogs they are attracted to.

  Interesting. However, Coren did not actually prove that people tend to look like their dogs. That task was taken on recently by psychologists Michael Roy and Nicholas Christenfeld. While reading from storybooks to his kids one night, Christenfeld noticed that dogs in the books often looked like their owners. He wondered if this were the case in real life. And, if so, why?

  The researchers came up with two possible reasons why people might look like their dogs—convergence and selection. The convergence theory is that owner and pet actually grow to look more alike over the years. On the surface, the idea seems nutty. However, there is evidence that couples who have been married for a long time do in fact converge in the way their faces look. Plus, obese people tend to have overweight dogs. If the convergence idea is true, the researchers figured that there should be a relationship between how long people live with their dogs and how much they look like them. The selection theory, in contrast, holds that we unconsciously seek animals that look like us when picking a pet. Roy and Christenfeld predicted that if this idea is correct, there should be more dog-owner similarity in purebreds than in mutts. This is because it is harder to know what a mixed-breed puppy will look like as an adult.

  To test these ideas, Roy and Christenfeld hung around dog parks and took pictures of owners and their pets. The researchers then made sets from these photographs consisting of a picture of the owner, his or her dog, and a photo of a different dog. They asked college students to try to match the owner with the right dog. If only random chance were operating, the students should make the right match about 50% of the time. But, if the dogs tended to resemble their owners, the judges should do better than that. The researchers thought that the selection theory was a better explanation of owner-dog appearance matching than convergence. Thus they predicted that matching would occur only in purebreds and that there would not be any relationship between how long people lived with their dogs and how similar dog and owner looked.

  The researchers were right on all counts. The students correctly matched owners and their purebred dogs two-thirds of the time. This was a significantly better hit rate than would be expected if they were just randomly guessing. And, just as predicted by the selection theory, the students were not successful at matching owners of mixed breeds with their pets. Finally, as predicted by their selection theory, there was no evidence that people grew to look more like their pets the longer they lived with them.

  Like most scientists, I have a skeptical streak. I was not at all convinced when I first read Roy and Christenfeld’s article. But I have become a believer. Research groups in Venezuela, Japan, and England subsequently found that people can match pictures of owners and their dogs at better than chance levels. While not everyone resembles their pets, the scientific support for the idea that a lot of people do tend to look like their dogs is surprisingly strong. Go figure.

  DO DOG PEOPLE AND CAT PEOPLE HAVE

  DIFFERENT PERSONALITIES?

  My friends Phyllis and Bill have a mixed marriage. She is a cat person; he is not. Phyllis has had cats since she was in college, usually two or three at a time. I once spent a month housesitting for her and agreed to give one of her cats, the foul-tempered Chris, two pills every day, one for epilepsy, the other for depression. It was a daily struggle that I won only part of the time. In recent years, Phyllis has forked out thousands of dollars to veterinarians for patching up Chipper, her gray tabby, who has a penchant for going into full battle with stray tomcats and raccoons.

  What does Phyllis like about cats? She claims it’s their nicely balanced need for both affection and independence, a mix that she also likes in her husband. She thinks dogs are suck-ups.

  Bill, on the other hand, does not particularly like animals. He never has. His parents didn’t have pets when he was growing up, and Bill never felt the slightest desire to live with one himself. But then he married Phyllis and he was suddenly living with cats. Over time, his attitudes toward the cats in his home have shifted slightly, from indifference to tolerance. He admits that he enjoys letting one of them lie on his belly at night when he watches the news. But he doesn’t feed the cats and he never asks how they are doing when he talks to Phyllis on the phone when he is away. Bill says that if he were living by himself, he would not have a pet at all.

  Phyllis is a psychotherapist, a good one. Given her clinical expertise, I asked if she saw a difference between cat people and dog people. I was surprised when she said no, that it was not personality but serendipity that determines the types of pets people fall for. A cute kitten simply shows up in your backyard or you happen to grow up in a family that has dogs or you want an animal companion that will get rid of the mice in your basement.

  I am almost certain that you think of yourself as either a dog person or a cat person, probably a dog person. That’s because, if asked, most people will instantly put themselves into one of these categories. And according to a recent Gallup poll, 70% of Americans say they are dog people. This aspect of pet demography is paradoxical as there are more cats than dogs in American homes. (Mary Jean and I, by the way, are both dog people, even though we live with a cat.)

  But is it true that dog people and cat people have different personalities, or is this yet another piece of common sense that proves to be wrong?

  This question was taken on by Sam Gosling, a psychologist at the University of Texas who studies individual differences in people and in animals. His research on human personality (which is described in his fascinating book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You) has shown that while some of our personal preferences reveal aspects of our personality traits, others do not. He can, for example, tell a lot about you from knowing what music is loaded on your iPod, how messy your bedroom is, and whether you hang inspirational posters on your office wall. On the other hand, he has found that the contents of your refrigerator say nothing about what you are really like.

  But before we can answer the question of dog people versus cat people, a brief lesson in the psychology of personality is in order. Psychologists have been arguing about the nature of human personality for a hundred years. One issue they fight about is how many personality traits there are. While there are a few holdouts, most psychologists agree that we can get a good description of a person’s personality by measuring five basic traits. (Technically this is referred to as the Five Factor Model; psychologists usually just call it the Big Five.)

  The Big Five traits are:

  Openness Versus Closed to Experience

  Conscientiousness Versus Impulsiveness

/>   Extroversion Versus Introversion

  Agreeableness Versus Antagonism

  Neuroticism Versus Emotional Stability

  Sam and an anthrozoologist at Cambridge University named Anthony Podberscek wondered if the personalities of pet owners were different from non–pet owners. They scoured the scientific literature, located dozens of studies comparing the two groups, and found a hodgepodge of results. For every study reporting that pet owners were more extroverted or more emotionally stable or less independent than non–pet owners, there was another one that found no difference between the two groups. They concluded that there was no evidence that pet owners were different from non–pet owners in their basic personalities.

  Is this also true of the dog person/cat person dichotomy? Sam maintains an online version of the Big Five Personality Test that thousands of people have taken over the last ten years. (You can take it yourself by going to www.outofservice.com/bigfive.) In 2009, he temporarily added an item in which participants were asked if they considered themselves to be a dog person, a cat person, neither, or both. In a little over a week, 2,088 dog people and 527 cat people had taken the personality test.

  Here are the results:

  Dog people are more extroverted.

  Dog people are more agreeable.

  Dog people are more conscientious.

  Cat people are more neurotic.

  Cat people are more open to new experiences.

  So, in this case, folk psychology is right—there is a difference between dog people and cat people, and most of the differences are along the lines that you probably would have predicted. But in science, there is often a catch. In this case, the catch is that the differences in their personality scores were relatively small. (The exception was extroversion, which was in the moderate size range). The bottom line is that whether you call yourself a dog person or a cat person tells us something about your personality—not as much as the contents of your iPod, but more than the state of your refrigerator.