One of the most counter-intuitive research results I’ve come across is regarding dogs. I grew up with them: As a kid, my family owned a Dachshund and a Weimaraner. They didn’t only differ in size, but also in personality. Where the Dachshund was often grumpy and wanted to be left alone, the Weimaraner was gregarious and eager to please. Whenever this came up, people said, yes of course, those breeds are known to be like that.
Turns out, breed is a bad predictor of dog personality. In a paper that surveyed the owners of 18,385 dogs and sequenced 2,155, Morrill and coworkers found that dog breed isn’t particularly predictive of personality traits. For some traits, including biddability (responsiveness to direction and commands), breed has some predictive power, but for most, including human sociability, it doesn’t. Even for biddability, there are big individual differences between dogs that aren’t explained by breed.
Something the paper doesn’t go into, but which Temple Grandin covers in Animals in Translation, is how a dog’s sex and purebred status affects its aggression. Most dog bites are due to male dogs, and due to purebred dogs. If you want to minimize the chances of your dog biting someone, get a female mutt.
Nehaveigur 