What Your Dog Says About You

Displaying agreement among red and blue states, Bella is the most popular doggie name::

Far beyond politics, we can learn a lot from our canine friends.

What a Dog Says About You

Names

Decades ago, we called our dog Buddy. Now she is Bella and so too is our child. We could say that when pets’ names changed, so too did their family slot (and where they slept):

Breeds

We could cite a correlation between apartment dwellers and small dogs based on New York City’s statistics:

The NY Times also suggests that the arrival of designer pups in a neighborhood can predict rising rents. Below, you can see that Yorkshire Terriers, Shi Tzus, and Chihuahuas outnumber the city’s big breeds:

Still, Manhattan has a disproportionate number of large dogs. The reason could be the multi-room apartments that belong to a more affluent cohort.

Correspondingly, according to the NY Times, between 2012 and 2016, more poodles migrated to downtown NYC neighborhoods. Typically, as Upper East Side dogs from posh addresses, the poodles had names like Bentley or Valentino. However, their downtown “cousins” were called Duke or Nacho.

Our Bottom Line: Signaling

We can pull all of this together through the behavioral economics idea of signaling. Defined as a shortcut message, a signal can convey information about our values, our affluence, even unarticulated instructions for a job we want done. Nobel Economics Laureate Michael Spence described signaling in labor markets. We show a diploma to prove we had the discipline to survive four years of a rigorous educational institution. The learning might not matter. It’s the diploma that sends the signal.

Similarly, this hybrid owner is sending a signal:

So, to find out what a dog says about you, just look at the signals.

My sources and more: Still relevant, during 2018, the NY Times had an article about NYC dogs that gave us today’s springboard. Next, for an update, this website has more than you could ever want to know about NYC’s dogs (and it is interesting). Then, searching for more, I discovered data from Pew Research and  US News while econlife looked at pet spending and conspicuous conservation.

Our featured image is from Yahoo.com.