Facebook reinforces stereotypes about cat people and dog people

Congratulations, Facebook!

You've single-handedly managed to reinforce a whole bunch of age-old stereotypes about spinsters and crazy cat ladies.

Facebook researchers recently dug their claws into the profiles of about 160,000 Americans who shared photos of cats or dogs (or both) on the social network.

They divided them into two groups "cat people" and "dog people" and discovered that about 30 per cent of people from Team Cat were single, compared to 24 per cent of people on Team Dog.

• Are you a cat person or a dog person? Defend your pet preferenceinthe comments section.

"Looking at the Facebook research, I think it tends to find what it wanted to find," HeatherMarcouxtold theCalgary Eyeopener.

The freelance pet writer from Red Deer,Alta.,is referring to the findingspublished in thisblog.

While this implies that cat people are more likely to be single than dog people, Marcoux said it could also just be that people who are single choose to adopt cats because "they're a lot easier to take care of."

"Dogs are super needy and sometimes it just makes sense to adopt a dog when you've got somebody else in your life to divide all that walking with."

Dog people more outgoing

Facebook looked at how many friends both groups had and found that, on average, dog people have 26 more than cat people.

"Like their extroverted pets, dog people make more connections online," Facebook data scientists said.

However, cat people are better at expressing their feelings online.

"They're talking about when they're tired, when they're happy and when they're grumpy," said Marcoux."Whereas the dog people are kind of like dogs in the sense that they're just mostly posting updates about feeling excited."

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By measuring Facebookpage likes, researchers found that cat people are "especially fond of fantasy, sci-fi and anime, while dog people like love stories and things about, well, dogs."

The Facebook research did not look at the personality traits of big dog people (think golden retriever or poodle) and little dog people (think shih tzu or chihuahua) or people with multiple pets.

Marcoux owns two cats and two dogs. So what does that say about her?

"Well, it says I also own, like, four vacuums."

Calgary Eyeopener6:19Cat or dog lover?

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With files from the Calgary Eyeopener