Answer to Question #217703 in Statistics and Probability for Khathu

Question

Are single men and single women equally likely to prefer cats and dogs as pets?

Answer 1

Perrine and Osborne published research about this in 1998. They asked 126 participants to describe themselves, their experiences with dogs and cats, and also about the labels "masculine", "feminine", and "dog person" and "cat person". They found that there were no differences between people who own dogs and people who own cats, but they did find differences between people who describe themselves as "dog people" and "cat people". Participants imagined that, for example, female "cat people" are different than male "cat people,"

To sum up, there is no evidence that there are differences, gender or otherwise (masculinity or femininity), between people who own cats and people who own dogs. There are no real empirical differences, but there are the differences that people think they see. This seems to be a cultural myth.