What’s better than an online personality test? An online cat personality test.
Researchers in Australia are now administering them, and they’ve found something interesting: Cats are not too different from us.
Many psychologists subscribe to the theory that all people have five broad personality traits, known as the “Big Five”: extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness and neuroticism. And cats, the team at the University of South Australia has found, have their own Big Five.
They drew this conclusion after administering personality tests to about 2,800 domestic cats in Australia and New Zealand. Needless to say, the tests were completed by the felines’ owners, who ranked their pets on a scale of 1 to 7 for each of 52 behaviors and traits, including “clumsy,” “reckless” and “vocal.”
By aggregating the responses about those micro-traits, a computer analysis revealed five broad feline personality dimensions, and it gave the cats scores for each one. Three of the “Feline Five” traits correspond to those in humans, said Philip Roetman, who leads “citizen science” projects for the university, including the cat research.
