Facebook knows how much you love your pets. And now, it knows all about what tends to define dog people vs cat people.
“We dug our claws into aggregate, de-identified data from a sample of about 160,000 people in the United States who shared photos of cats or dogs (or both) on Facebook,” the social media giant recently posted on its blog.
The company used “object recognition technology” to identify cat posts and dog posts to learn a thing or two about dog people and cat people.
The result: “The stereotypes are true.”
Here are some of them.
Dog people, Facebook concludes, are more outgoing. Dog people have 26 more Facebook friends than cat people. However, cat people tend to be invited to more events.
There’s also something to the birds of a feather theory. Cat people also tend to be friends with other cat people; Dog people befriend other dog people.
And, bad news cat people: Cat people are more likely to be single than dog people. Relationship status updates show 30 per cent of cat people are single compared with 24 per cent of dog people. And, it doesn’t matter the age or gender. So much for the crazy cat lady theory.
Cat people also like to huddle indoors than dog people with a disproportionate number of likes for books, TV shows and movies.
Dog people, meanwhile, tend to live in rural areas, which may be why they are outside more than cat people, who tend to live in cities, according to Facebook’s analysis.
And, how do pet owners generally feel?
“Cat people are indeed disproportionately likely to say they’re feeling tired, but also happy and loved,” the Facebook team notes. “On the other hand, dog people are more likely to express excitement or pride.”
So there you have it. The stereotypes are true, except when they’re not.
