Examining Cognitive Dissonance in Dutch Dog Owners When Selecting A Dog

Examining Cognitive Dissonance in Dutch Dog Owners When Selecting A Dog

Ophorst, S., Aarts, N., Bovenkerk, B., Hopster, H. Not All Puppies and Sunshine: How Dog Keepers Cope with Dog-Related Problems in Dutch Society. Animals 3, 1038 (2023).

Link (open-access): https://doi.org/10.3390/ani13061038 

This study explored the coping strategies owners used when discussing dog-related problems in times of cognitive dissonance. The information from this study can help provide information on why owners make certain choices about where to get their dog from, and how people talk about issues when faced with conflicting ideas or values.

Background

Many issues that affect both dog and human welfare are thought to relate to where people acquire their dog from. This study used focus groups to identify the coping strategies dog owners use in times of cognitive dissonance (the discomfort you feel when different ideas contradict each other) when talking about their choice of what kind of dog to get and where to acquire a dog from.

Data & Methods

Participants in this study had to live in the Netherlands and have a dog associated with any of the following:

• Biting incidents: people with “high-risk” breeds (according to the Dutch government, including Rottweilers, Staffordshire Bull Terriers, Akitas, Bullmastiffs, and Anatolian Shepherds)
• Zoonotic imported diseases: people with dogs adopted from foreign shelters in Southern or Eastern Europe
• Health problems in pedigree dogs: people with pedigree dogs
• Illegal dog trafficking: people who reported buying their dog from a puppy trader (puppy broker) or puppy farm (puppy mill)

Participants were split into 8 different focus groups, with 2 focus groups for each category. Focus groups were conducted online in group video calls and were then transcribed for analysis.

Each focus group discussion had four phases:

1. Facilitator encouraged the participants to talk about their relationship with (their) dogs;
2. Facilitator steered towards the way in which participants acquired their dogs and their motivations at the time;
3. Facilitator confronted participants with dilemmas related to their (type of) dog and to other problems related to dogs;
4. Facilitator asked participants how and what their next choice of dog would be and on what considerations they would base their decision.

Data were analyzed using a “coping strategies framework”. This means the researchers looked at the ways people talked about the topics and justified their decisions in times of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the feeling of discomfort you get when you are faced with information, beliefs, or values that contradict each other. The table below shows examples of the difference coping strategies the researchers looked at:

Results

Participant Demographics:

• They collected data from 36 different dog owners
• 92% of the dog owners were female
• They had a difficult time recruiting participants for the “Puppy Farm Dogs” group, so the Puppy Farm focus groups were significantly smaller than the other 3 groups (5 participants in total, while the others had 10-11 participants)

Overview of Coping Strategies Used:

Some Interesting Insights:

• The “adding consonance” strategy was by far the most common coping strategy used, and was most common when discussing why participants chose where to get their dog and why they chose their particular dog. “Consonance” means the agreement or compatibility between your options or actions. For instance, owners of “high-risk dogs” frequently emphasized the importance of “knowing what type of dog you are getting”. 
• The “detachment” strategy was not used very commonly, but when it was used, participants often used it to distance themselves/their dogs from the “problematic part” of their group. For example, a pedigree dog owner talked about “[t]hose French Bulldogs with flat faces that keep getting flatter”. In the “puppy farm dogs” group, owners detached themselves from “the younger, ignorant self”.

• People in the “Pedigree Dogs” and “Puppy Farm Dogs” focused on the compatibility of dogs to the wants/needs of their owners, while the “High-Risk Dogs” and “Foreign Shelter Dogs” groups focused more on the compatibility of owners to the needs of the dogs.
• In the “Puppy Farm Dogs” group, people talked about spending time thinking about what breed and personality of dog they were interested in, but the decision to choose their specific dog was often “made quite suddenly, fueled by coincidence, circumstances, and feelings”

Discussion

This was a pretty small study, so it’s difficult to draw any hard and fast conclusions from the data collected. One interesting thing to note, though, is that every one of the focus groups had some element of cognitive dissonance. Looking at the different ways participants justified their opinions and decision with choosing what kind of dog to get can help breeders, trainers, and veterinarians gain a better understanding of why people may choose the dogs they do, even if, to some people, their decision may appear unwise or problematic.

The use of focus groups in this study may have helped to produce more naturalistic discussions compared to more traditional research methods, like surveys, so the ways people talked about why they made the choices they did may have been more accurate to what they really think and feel. This could make focus groups a data collection method to use for future studies. On the other hand, collecting enough data from focus groups can be tricky. Each focus group required participants to be able to meet at a specific day and time and required someone to facilitate the discussion live and then someone had to transcribe what everyone said, and it can be difficult to analyze the data in a systematic way. A survey, in comparison, is pretty much hands-off once the surveys are sent out and so data can be collected at a higher volume, but offers a relatively rigid and inflexible way of gathering data.

The ways researchers talked about different groups of dogs may have limited their study pool. People who got their dogs from “puppy mill”-type breeders may have not felt comfortable talking about why they got their dog from the source they did to other people. Additionally, calling certain dog breeds “high risk breeds” may have made people feel that researchers were negatively judging their breed choice and may have made these owners less likely to want to take part in the study.

Finally, it is important to note that people in the different focus groups in this study were overall pretty similar, so the results might not generalize well to other kinds of people. Almost all of the participants (92%) were female, and all the participants lived in the Netherlands, a relatively wealthy country with a high density of companion dogs. Future research could strategize on how to increase the number of participants and to recruit a more diverse pool of participants.

This focus-group-based study shows different dog owners’ reasonings for why they chose what kind of dog to get, and demonstrates how owners of dogs from different breeds and sources discuss information or beliefs relating to their dog that are in conflict. In times of cognitive dissonance, the most common coping strategy owners used was adding/amplifying consonants (essentially: restating or expanding upon their way of thinking). By developing a greater understanding of how owners choose what kind of dog to get, we can better understand how to change their behavior in a way that improves both human and dog welfare.

This work by the Functional Dog Collaborative is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.