A Walk on the Wild Side: How do we Evaluate Strangers?

Begall, Maria (2025) A Walk on the Wild Side: How do we Evaluate Strangers? Bachelor thesis, Psychology.

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Abstract

Dogs are often described as the humans’ best friend and are valued family members. In human-to-human relationships, this shared identity affects our behavior and unconscious information processing. This study aims to investigate whether this also holds for human-to-dog relationships, more specifically, whether a dog's reaction affects human impression formation of strangers. This is done by presenting the participants with two different framing texts (rational vs. intuitive decision-making), followed by two scenarios where the dog first has a friendly reaction and then a hostile reaction towards the stranger. The stranger will either be wearing a uniform (clear setting) or not (ambiguous). We hypothesized that there would be main effects for all three factors and that the influence would be the strongest in the intuitive, ambiguous scenario with a negative reaction. Due to the combination of the main effects and an interaction effect between the three. The results showed that the reaction of the dog did influence the participants' perception of the stranger, and the influence of an ambiguous situation and the overall interaction effect were supported by a two-way interaction found between the reaction of the dog and Stranger Type. However, there was no significant main effect found for the framing. This shows that the concept of shared identity with animals, more specifically dogs, is not fully understood yet and should be paid more attention to. Thus, one can get a better grasp of how these animals influence us and our relations to other humans.

Item Type:	Thesis (Bachelor)
Supervisor name:	Spears, R.
Degree programme:	Psychology
Differentiation route:	None [Bachelor Psychology]
Date Deposited:	30 Jul 2025 13:53
Last Modified:	30 Jul 2025 13:53
URI:	http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/5770

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