But when they take the kitty home and he isn’t as friendly or cuddly or sedentary as they had hoped, the cat may be returned to the shelter. That’s because when people are choosing a cat, they may make assumptions based on coat color about how that cat will behave in the home. “But there are serious repercussions for cats if people believe that some cat colors are friendlier than others,” Mikel Delgado, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. The data for black cats, however, was a bit muddier and no clear trends emerged.ĭespite people’s perceptions that there are links between coat color and how a cat will behave, there is little hard evidence that such a connection is real. And bi-colored cats–which could have been any color, really, in the participants’ minds–were thought to be friendly. Or am I betraying my own bias here?) Tri-colored cats rated high in aloofness and intolerance, and white cats were also considered aloof, as well as shy and calm. (They were also considered more trainable than were white cats, although the idea that anyone considers a cat trainable is kind of funny. Orange kitties were perceived as friendly and rated low in the aloof and shy categories. They asked the participants to associate 10 personality terms (active, aloof, bold, calm, friendly, intolerant, shy, stubborn, tolerant and trainable) with five cat colors–orange, tri-colored (tortoiseshells and calico cats), white, black and bi-colored (white and anything else).
In a new study published in Anthrozoos, researchers from California State University and the New College of Florida set out to discover our hidden kitty biases with an Internet-based survey of nearly 200 people.
Some shelters even suspend adoptions of black cats and white cats around Halloween in fear of what misguided people might do with the kitties. And that’s true even when it comes to cats. As much as we might not like to admit it, humans make snap judgments based on appearances all the time.
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