Why You Look Like Your Dog

Or your dog looks like you. Your pick. A Japanese scientist has found that people do, apparently, look like their dogs. (Which is a finding I’m happy with, because my dog is beautiful.) It’s something in the eyes.

One value of this study is its ability to tell us which physical cues people aren’t using to correctly match dogs with their human owners. It’s not about hairstyles, obesity, gender, height, or even eye color. As Nakajima points out, since all of the human models were Asian dog-owners, they all had similarly dark-colored eyes. Instead, it’s clearly something that’s being conveyed in the shared look about the eyes of dogs and their people. . . .

No one knows why, but the reason must have something to do with

our apparently superhuman (or at least subconscious) ability to extract meaningful psychological cues from eyes. Nakajima is just as stumped as the rest of us about the underlying mechanism. And similar riddles exist, too. The psychologist Nicholas Rule and his colleagues, for instance, have found that naive judges can discern the sexual orientation of strangers from their eyes alone. How they’re going about this remains unclear, however, even to the judges themselves.

We tend to choose dogs that look like us, at least around the eyes, without realizing it. I suspect this applies to all sorts of other decisions as well, the decision for example of which people we  meet we feel drawn to as friends, for example. They may not really be decisions, exactly, at all. Which is fine, but it does suggest that Jesus’ instructions about loving the stranger is even more difficult to fulfill than we thought.