Do People Really Choose Wheels Reflecting Themselves?
We have long suspected people reveal who they are by what they choose to surround themselves with.
Yet beyond friends and associations, attire or artwork, functional necessities may be more telling than we realize.
Are You What You Drive?
We've heard the jokes about dogs resembling their owners.
Is that by chance — or did the owners have something to do with it?
The same question can be asked about cars. Stefan Stieger and Martin Voracek (2014) studied the extent to which cars resembled their owners.
They began by recognizing that research has established that people are able to match dogs with their owners at rates that are above chance, even after controlling for factors such as amount of hair or size, and then conducted three studies demonstrating that an owner-resemblance effect generalizes to cars.
Stieger and Voracek (ibid.) showed study participants sets of one picture of the front view of a car, and frontal headshots of six possible owners.
Raters matched car owners with front views of their cars at rates better than chance.
They were not able to attain such success, however, when having participants match car owners to side or back views of their cars.
Regarding the explanation, they ruled out stereotypes such as sex-based beliefs that some cars appear to be more masculine or feminine.
And as if these findings weren’t interesting enough, Stieger and Voracek (supra) discovered that cars resembled both their owners and the owners’ dogs — if the dogs were purebreds.
Stieger and Voracek (supra) also noted that the novel effect they discovered did not depend on rater sex or age.
They note that it is possible some personality stereotypes might be at play, their results seem to go beyond this explanation.
They recognize their findings as consistent with a study conducted in Austria and Ethiopia (Windhager et al., 2012) finding vertically stretched cars attributed to child-level maturity, high femininity, and low dominance, and horizontally stretched cars linked with adult levels of maturity as well as enhanced masculinity and dominance.
As with their own study, they note that such results cannot be explained by marketing strategies or owner stereotypes (believing for example that a Mercedes is usually driven by a man so its front view is masculine) because they note that in Ethiopia, residents have limited experience with cars and would thus not be familiar with specific stereotypes.
Similarly, Stieger and Voracek (supra) note that in their own research, stereotypes are unable to explain why raters could not accurately match cars to their owners by only seeing the side or back views.
They point out that vehicle types are still recognizable from these alternate views so should evoke stereotypes as other research has demonstrated.
My Car, My Dog, Myself
Regarding cars resembling their owners’ purebred dogs, Stieger and Voracek note that unlike human faces, dog faces are not differentiated by sex, so they lack sex-specific cues that might help an observer identify the correct car belonging to the dog’s owner.
And if the results were due to stereotypes, participants should have been able to match cars to owners’ dogs when the dogs were nonpurebreds.
Stieger and Voracek (supra) note that their findings may implicate the role of egotism, described as "self likes self."
They cite an example of implicit egotism through "the name-letter effect," referring to a preference for letters comprising one’s initials or even the letters in one’s name, over the rest of the alphabet.
They suggest that similar methodology may be in play when a person buys a car.
Choosing a car whose front view resembles their face, prospective buyers may view the car as enhancing self-evaluation.
Stieger and Voracek note that although further research is needed, it appears that people may acquire both cars and dogs that resemble their own faces.
If people choose surroundings based on their view of themselves, becoming acquainted with others within their personal space or environment may provide a more complete view of who they are, a snapshot of the sense of self beneath the surface.
This article was originally published in Psychology Today.
Wendy L. Patrick, JD, MDiv, Ph.D., is an award-winning career trial attorney and media commentator. She is host of "Live with Dr. Wendy" on KCBQ, and a daily guest on other media outlets, delivering a lively mix of flash, substance, and style. Read Dr. Wendy L. Patrick's Reports — More Here.
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