17 Comments

As an applied ethologist, I’m additionally very interested in the KINDS of questions in the survey. I participated at the time and reviewed the questions two days ago. Frankly it’s logical to me that even without the NOISE you describe, that we would not expect to observe much difference between breeds in the behaviors asked about in the study, because the vast majority (literally almost all) off the questions aren’t targeting behaviors that had selective pressure on them. Dogs are different because of the selective pressure humans have put on their behaviors historically for functions- so questions that get at THOSE distinctions are what I would expect to demonstrate the variations in answers. The questions they did ask about breed/clade specific motor patterns (especially relative to modifications to the predatory sequence) DID demonstrate variation. But that was brushed over in the conclusions. Since there was no selective pressure on behaviors like paw crossing, circling before pooping, licking a bowl after a meal, or being scared of strangers (no one ever bred dogs to display these behaviors deliberately) - why would we expect to observe variation? Had the questions targeted the meaningful differences we know about between genetic groups of dogs, I think we would have seen much greater trends in the data even with the noise you mention. Can’t wait for your full piece!

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Informative as always Stuart! As an aside your (very sweet looking) dog is almost identical to my pal Tommy’s dog, which I believe is a cockapoo as well.

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I am enjoying your critiques, careful and thorough as they are. I also have noticed the trend among news reports (and much of Twitter!) to hype or misread papers. It is imperative to read the original article.

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hiya subscribing as also write perhaps good about definitely terrible science. here is my latest on the rabbit hole we've fallen right down into with Alice. We seem to be sitting at a mad virologists tea party https://georgiedonny.substack.com/p/spikes-and-knobs?s=w

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Lab assessment might indeed be better for behavioral measurements, but the poor performance results of in-shelter assessments make me wonder if that would really be the case.

At any rate, thank you for devoting attention to this!

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I linked this post on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/genetics/comments/ug2iur/humans_cant_quit_a_basic_myth_about_dog_breeds/

and got this:

---Stuart misrepresents major sections, for example the ANOVA was also performed on the ~6,500 sample 'candidate breed' sample and found the same results (actually about 30% lower). He also ignores the analysis of admixture in mutts using the lmer approach. Both give extremely concordant results.

---Pretty much every large study of dogs uses survey responses from owners, even the dissenting and much worse paper that Ritchie cites.

I am sure you could address these critiques of your critiques.

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I’m a smidge less skeptical than you about how much noise you’d expect in the owner surveys. At least my priors are that people have a pretty clear sense of how their dogs differ from other dogs, so I’m prepared to believe a carefully designed survey needn’t have so much noise that you’d miss a main effect of breed on personality at those cell sizes.

But I can’t find a power estimate in the paper, so who knows. What surprises me a bit more is I also can’t find any controls for early socialization (e.g., age of pet adoption). Intuitively I wouldn’t expect to detect much effect of breed on personality before accounting for that variation. (I’m thinking back to those 90s Michael Meaney epigenetic studies with the rodent adoptions influencing personality.) Maybe there wasn’t much variation in socialization among the purebreds.

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