Another Look at “Look-Alikes”

Abstract

Popular belief and recent findings suggest that dogs look like their owner - but are such pairs necessarily look-alikes or do we recognize their affiliation based on other information? We asked judges to match automobiles with their owners. They were able to identify the pairs above chance. The correlational analyses of actual information about owners' and automobiles' characteristics and their estimations suggest that stereotypes with respect to external clues about the owner and the automobiles were available to judges. People's appearance and certain characteristics of their possessions apparently carry information beyond physiognomic resemblance and these clues help to make inferences about their affiliation. The different mechanisms that judges might use to make connections between people and their cars are discussed.