
The science behind why dogs look like their owners may surprise you: ‘I don't think people should feel embarrassed'
Disney fans probably remember the scene in the classic 1961 film '101 Dalmatians' in which the Dalmatian Pongo sits by a window, watching other dogs and their owners walk by outside.
Each dog that goes past looks uncannily like its owner.
Dogs who resemble their human owners has been observed in research, too. In one study, published in 2015, women with long hair tended to prefer dogs with similarly long ears, and women with short hairstyles preferred prick-eared dogs.
Experts say this psychological phenomenon is a result of us humans preferring pets, people or even objects that resemble ourselves. After all, we are exposed to our own faces daily in the mirror. If we choose a dog that resembles what we see in ourselves, it can be comforting. The dog's features may feel familiar.
'Let's say you're at a shelter and you're looking at lots of different potential options. You're not necessarily spending a lot of explicit time trying to figure out what features of each dog you want. It's more of this overall feeling, and when you have those overall feelings, then you've got to understand what drives those. One of the things that drives that feeling that something is desirable, is that it has some familiarity to it,' said Art Markman, a cognitive scientist and senior vice provost for academic affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
'There's lots of ways that something can begin to feel familiar to you, one of which is you might have had a dog just like that as a kid,' Markman said. 'But another thing that could make something feel familiar is that it resembles something that you've encountered before – like, say, yourself.'
The dog may have a mop of hair like yours or the same quizzical look on its face, Markman said.
'Whatever it is, it's something that you recognize,' he added. 'That flash of recognition gives you this feeling that this is something that you resonate with, which can then increase your likelihood of picking something without ever realizing that you've chosen it, in part, because of its resemblance to yourself.'
In another study, published in 2004, strangers who looked at 45 dogs and their owners who were photographed separately were able to match the purebred dogs with their people, based on the images alone.
'Our research showed that people were able to match pictures of dogs and owners together at a rate higher than chance. However, this only worked when the dog was purebred. We think that this is likely because purebred dogs are predictable in both their looks and their temperament. This allows people to pick a dog that best fits them in looks, personality, and activity level,' Michael Roy, an author of the study and a psychology professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, said in an email.
'The resemblance between dog and owner can be at a physical level – they look similar – or at an overall level – this looks like the type of person who would own that type of dog,' he wrote. 'For example, you might match someone that looks outgoing and outdoorsy with Labrador over a Chihuahua.'
Some experts say this is an example of the 'mere-exposure effect,' a psychological phenomenon in which people prefer things that they have been exposed to – and this can go beyond pet dogs. Another example includes people who may be more likely to enjoy a song if they have listened to similar music before.
'Think about it like this: When you go to a rock concert, somewhere during the show, the band plays the song that's been on the radio recently, and the crowd goes wild,' Markman said. 'The crowd goes wild not because that is objectively the band's best song but because it's the band's most familiar song.'
Another study, published in 2014, found that observers were able to match car owners with the front views of their vehicles because they resembled each other. Even with consumer products, people tend to be attracted to something more when they are exposed to it more.
'More we see or hear something, the more we tend to like it. It would not necessarily explain why you might like a specific dog but can explain trends in dog ownership. If most of the people around you have Labradors, your liking of them might grow due to seeing them often, thereby increasing your chances of getting one too,' Roy said in the email.
The phenomenon appears to emerge only when selecting a dog as a personal companion, not when choosing one for an occupation, such as to work with a police department or on a farm, according to researchers. This might be because, for decisions related to occupation, more time and research is put into making the selection process.
'There seem to be these two systems underlying the way we think. One of those systems is a fast, kind of intuitive judgment system, and the other is a slower, more deliberative system,' Markman said.
'These effects, like the mere-exposure effect, tend to influence decisions you make based on that faster, more intuitive system,' he said. 'When you allow yourself to be slower, to be more deliberative, to really write down the strengths and weaknesses of the decision that you're making, and to the extent that you try to rely on other expert opinions, you'll get less of an influence of factors like the mere-exposure effect.'
In some cases, this intuitive attraction toward things that feel familiar or resemble ourselves – characterized as 'self seeking like' – may occur when selecting not only a pet but a human companion too, said Klause Jaffe, a scientist at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Venezuela.
He has researched how humans choose their pet dogs based on a phenomenon known as assortative mating, which has been studied experimentally among various species and even plants. It appears that the principles governing this phenomenon are the same whether applied to human relationships or to those between animals and humans; similarity or familiarity play a key role.
'In order for sexual organisms to be successful, they have to choose a partner that somehow resembles them,' Jaffe said. 'If a donkey tries to mate with a cow, nothing happens.
'Similarly, we attract partners who reflect some of our characteristics, and this happens outside of someone's race, skin color and sexual orientation,' he said. Similarities between partners can range beyond appearance to having familiar mannerisms, experiences, education, similar tastes in fashion or even daily habits.
According to researchers, no matter the intricacies or type of relationship, the theory still appears to apply.
'The relationship we found between dogs and owners is like other relationships. The best indicator for sustained friendships and romantic relationships is similarity,' Roy said. 'We surround ourselves with people that are like us in some way.'
So when faced with that decision of choosing a pet, people shouldn't worry or stress about the role that the mere-exposure effect or other psychological phenomena may play, Markman said.
'If your decision gets driven in part because the pet feels familiar, and that happens because it looks a little bit like you, that's not a bad thing,' he said. 'I don't think people should feel embarrassed that that went into their decision in some ways. I think if that's going to make you love the pet more, hey, more power to it.'
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Best Mary Poppins Behind The Scenes Facts
First, Walt Disney started going after the rights to adapt P.L. Travers' Mary Poppins in 1938, four years after the first book was published. However, Travers repeatedly refused to give over the rights. Over the next several years, Disney continued to send offer after offer to Travers in an attempt to adapt the book. In 1959 — 21 years after starting the pursuit — Travers finally agreed to have Mary Poppins adapted by Disney, but she would have "final say" on the script. According to the documentary, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: The Making of Mary Poppins, Disney personally flew to London in 1959 and met with Travers to once again try to convince her to let him adapt Mary Poppins. Speaking of the meeting, Travers reportedly said that talking to Disney was "like talking to a friendly, charming uncle who took from his pocket a gold pocketwatch and dangled it enticingly before your eyes." After working on adapting the book for two years, P.L. Travers came to Disney Studios and apparently "didn't like anything" that was written. In recordings and sketches from a 1961 meeting, Travers said, "The book should be read very carefully for accuracy." Some of the things she had a problem with were that Mary should "never be impolite to anybody," and she didn't like that the parents would start out harsh and not pay attention to their children so they could eventually have a "change of heart." In the documentary, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: The Making of Mary Poppins, composer Richard Sherman said the "key to the story" was the parents being so preoccupied with their own lives that there was a "need" for Mary Poppins to come, so it was essential that they start a little cold, especially the Travers signed off on the project and was billed as a consultant on the film. Mary Martin, Bette Davis, and Angela Lansbury were all considered for the role of Mary Poppins before Julie Andrews. When Disney did a sequel to the film in 2018, titled Mary Poppins Returns, Lansbury actually appeared as a woman selling balloons in the park. At the time, Martin was best known for her work on stage in South Pacific, Peter Pan, and The Sound of Music. Meanwhile, Davis was fresh off her renowned work in Now, Voyager and All About Eve, and Lansbury had just starred in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Julie Andrews caught the attention of the Sherman brothers and Walt Disney after they saw her in Camelot. After Andrews and Richard Burton performed "What Do The Simple Folk Do?" on The Ed Sullivan Show, Disney flew to NYC to see Camelot on Broadway. In an interview at the Mary Poppins premiere, Disney said, "I went backstage and I tried to convince her that I was capable of making a picture with live actors as well as cartoons. I didn't know what she thought of me." In an interview from 1973, Andrews recalled that Disney "started acting out the whole of the script of Mary Poppins" while visiting her backstage at Camelot. Then, Disney invited Andrews and her then-husband, Tony Walton, to Los Angeles to see the storyboards for the film. Walton, who was a costume and set designer, ultimately ended up working on Mary Poppins, too. Initially, it was unclear if Julie Andrews would be able to star in Mary Poppins because she was the logical choice to star in My Fair Lady, after she played Eliza Doolittle on the West End and Broadway. However, Jack Warner ultimately cast Audrey Hepburn, citing that they needed "a name" to carry the film. Ultimately, Andrews and Hepburn were pitted against each other all awards season, with Andrews winning both the Golden Globe and Oscar for Mary Poppins, and she even thanked Warner in her Golden Globes acceptance speech. In her speech, Andrews said, "Finally, my thanks to a man who made a wonderful movie and who made all of this possible in the first Jack Warner."Looking back on her career with the Hollywood Reporter in 2015, Andrews said the one thing she wished she had was a recorded version of her My Fair Lady to show her grandchildren. She also said that while she understood the decision, getting passed over for the film only reinforced the idea she had in her head that she wasn't "pretty enough" for movies. Dick Van Dyke "begged" Walt Disney to let him play Mr. Dawes Sr., according to Julie Andrews in her memoir Home Work. Van Dyke wanted the role of Dawes Sr. so badly that he reportedly offered to play it for free. Andrew wrote in her memoir, "[Disney] took Dick up on that offer, and also persuaded him to make a $4,000 donation to the California Institute of the Arts, which Walt had recently cofounded." Disney made Van Dyke screentest for the role, too, as a little joke. According to Andrews, "Word flew around the Studios that he had been hilarious, totally persuasive and completely unrecognizable." Dick Van Dyke calls his accent for Bert the "worst Cockney accent [he's] ever done." While filming Mary Poppins, he asked J. Pat O'Malley, an Irish actor who voiced some of the animated characters in the film, to help him with his accent. Van Dyke joked in 2012 that he "made up a story" that it wasn't a Cockney accent, but rather an accent from "a little obscure county in the north of England." He also said that to this day, British people will come up to him and tell him what a horrible accent he does as Bert in Mary Poppins. Artist Peter Ellenshaw hand-painted 100 matte paintings for the backdrops that are seen in Mary Poppins. For the cityscape of London at dusk, Ellenshaw purposefully put little holes in the painting so that lights could shine through the back to make it look like the lights in the city. He said, "The lights would all come on gradually all over the city, or appear to." He previously worked with Disney on Treasure Island and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The first scene they filmed for Mary Poppins was the "Jolly Holiday" sequence, which means it was also the first thing Julie Andrews ever shot for a film in her career. In her memoir, Andrews recalled, "My first filmed scene simply required that I strike a pose, hands on my umbrella, while Bert said, 'You look very pretty today, Mary Poppins!' I then had to walk past him and say, 'Do you really think so?' I was extremely nervous and fretted over how to say that one simple line. I had no idea what my voice would sound like or how to appear natural on film." Bert and Mary walking arm-in-arm during "Jolly Holiday" was also one of the first pieces of choreography Andrews and Dick Van Dyke learned during rehearsals. Andrews said in her memoir, "I performed Mary Poppins's demure, ladylike version of the step — but Dick flung his long legs up so high that I burst out laughing. To this day, he can still execute that step." Over the course of the development of Mary Poppins, the Sherman brothers wrote around 32 songs, with only 14 making the final version of the movie. When they started working on the songs, there wasn't a script yet, so instead they worked off of P.L. Travers' book and used chapters to figure out what a song could be. Walt Disney's favorite song was "Feed The Birds." In one of the stories in the book, Mary Poppins spins a compass, and the Sherman brothers actually wrote songs for each of the places the compass lands on, like "North Pole Polka," "The Land of Sand," and melody for "The Land of Sand" was later used in The Jungle Book for "Trust In Me." Since Mary Poppins flies a lot, most of her costumes had to be duplicated in a larger size to accommodate the harness Julie Andrews had to wear. In her memoir, Andrews revealed, "This was a thick elastic body stocking, which started at my knees and ended above my waist. The flying wires passed through holes in the costume and were attached to steel panels on either hip." She continued, writing, "I literally did a lot of 'hanging around' between takes, and when I was suspended, the steel panels pressed on my hip bones, which became very bruised. Sheepskin was added, which helped, although it was barely enough, since I couldn't look too bulky." Since the penguins, fox, and more animated characters weren't actually on stage with the actors, cardboard cutouts were used in between takes so the actors would know where they should look and have the proper sightline before the cutouts were taken away to film the scene. The merry go round horses were the only things on set most of the time. In her memoir, Home Work, Julie Andrews recalled, "For the tea party under the willows with the penguin waiters, a cardboard penguin was placed on the table in front of me. Once I'd established the sightline, the penguin was taken away, and when cameras rolled, I had to pretend it was still there." In order to add in the penguins that Bert dances with during "Jolly Holiday," it was just Dick Van Dyke alone on the stage, and the animators then had to figure out how to add in the penguins after the footage was shot. Frank Thomas was the lead animator on the penguins. He previously worked on countless Disney animated movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, Cinderella, and more. "When I get over on the stage, I'd say, 'Where am I going to put my penguins?'," Thomas recalled in the documentary, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: The Making of Mary Poppins. He continued, saying, "Because I would get the film of Dick actually doing the dance, here's hit feet flying all around and stepping on my penguins. How are you going to know ahead of time where he's going to be and where Dick Van Dyke's going to be? So I was losing more penguins every day. I had them duck, and I had them jump, and I had them get out of the way anyway they could." The entire "Jolly Holiday" and "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" scenes were created using the sodium vapor process. Instead of having the actors on a blue or green screen, which is common today, the actors were filmed against a white screen that was lit with yellow-hued sodium vapor lights. This process made it easier to isolate Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke, and the other actors from the background so the animators could animate both behind and next to them. Since they didn't film the scene against a blue backdrop, it also didn't put a limit on the colors that could be used in costumes, like Bert's blue bowtie and socks. Since "Step In Time" was such a demanding musical number, it was one of the few that required an extensive rehearsals. Dick Van Dyke revealed that it was a six week rehearsal process because it was "so complicated." He added, "It was amazing, the six weeks of rehearsal kind of got me into shape, and once we started shooting, I was ready." Van Dyke wasn't a trained dancer prior to Mary Poppins. Van Dyke told Conan O'Brien in 2012 that he asked Gower Champion, who was the chroegpraher for Bye By Birdie, which he starred in on Broadway and in the film, to help him learn to dance. He's loved dancing ever since. Mary's magic carpet bag was created by combining footage of Julie Andrews on a soundstage getting fed items up through the bag by a crew member hiding below the table, and footage of Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber reacting to a clear table as Jane and Michael. Dotrice recalled, "We didn't know she was going to pull all of this stuff out of it! We were told to react to what she was taking out of the carpet bag. All of the things she pulled out of that carpet bag were a complete shock." She added, "Our reactions were completely genuine ... It was very exciting." In order to film the moment when Mary, Bert, Jane, and Michael climb the staircase made out of smoke, the crew created what was called "the black sponge stairs." On set, it was a seemingly ordinary staircase, but the stair treads were made of a sponge-like material so the actors' feet would slightly sink in, as if they were walking on the smoke. In a documentary, Karen Dotrice recalled filming the moment, saying, "I don't know how many takes it took to walk up that smoke staircase because we're following Julie holding broomsticks, walking up this smoke screen staircase, but it was like sinking." For the tea party with Uncle Albert, played by Ed Wynn, the sets were recreated a few different ways to help film the moment when everyone is floating and spinning in the air while laughing. The set was tilted 90 degrees in various directions, so the roof would be in a different spot, even with the ceiling being upside down at one point. Depending on the camera angle, the actors were either suspended on wires or sitting on a seesaw on top of a ladder, if it was a close-up. In the documentary, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: The Making of Mary Poppins, Tony Walton recalled, "Walt [Disney] himself came up with the technical approach to achieve the fact that they are laughing, [and] they are all floating about in the air." "Practically Perfect" was a song that was initially going to introduce Mary Poppins; however, it was cut from the film. Instead, the melody was repurposed into "Sister Suffragette," which Mrs. Banks sings. When Glynis Johns was brought in to play Mrs. Banks, she actually requested she have her own musical number, which is how "Sister Suffragette" was born. In a documentary about Mary Poppins, Johns revealed, "I said to Walt [Disney], it might give me incentive, if I could have my own little number." Richard Sherman said that after that, Disney leaned over to her and said they just finished a number for Mrs. Banks, and she'll love it. At the time, Richard and Robert hadn't even written the musical number yet. "The Chimpanzoo" was a song that was originally going to follow "I Love to Laugh" and was going to be sung by Julie Andrews while Mary, Bert, and the children were floating in the air at Uncle Albert's. The whole scene was developed but the number was scrapped the day recording on the song was going to take place. Richard Sherman revealed that Walt Disney felt the sequence wasn't necessary, and instead, after "I Love to Laugh," they all joke while drinking tea and then float down to the floor. And finally, costume designer Tony Walton hid little Easter eggs and details into the lining of Mary Poppins' outfits. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2022, Julie Andrews revealed, "He said, 'You know, you're very prim and proper on the outside, but I think Mary Poppins has a kind of secret life, maybe, and I'm gonna give her, when you open your coat or when you turn and dance, you'll see marvelously-colored petticoats and wonderful linings of your clothes.'" Andrews said Walton's approach to the costumes helped her discover who Mary really was. She told Vanity Fair, "He said, 'Because I think that's what gives her pleasure. Very formal on the outside and a little bit wicked on the inside, so to speak.' And it completely gave me a clue as to her character. Big, big help for me." Is there another Mary Poppins behind-the-scenes fact that you love that isn't mentioned above? Tell us about it in the comments below!