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I was just watching the Youtube video The Science of DOGS by the channel AsapSCIENCE. It was a pretty interesting video, but something that really stuck out to me was said in the first 10 seconds of the video. The video's narrator says

In fact, studies have shown that men are three times more likely to get a girl's phone number if they have a dog by their side.

I looked in the sources part of the video description, but I could not find the studied that this was referencing to (it may be because of a paywall, but I'm not sure how likely that is).

So, is this claim true? Have there been actual studies on this subject? Are dogs awesome wingmen?

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    I'm guessing this is one of the studies - does anyone with access to the full study want to answer the question?
    – Oddthinking ♦
    Aug 8, 2015 at 1:24
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    "Researchers proposed that in today’s society, a man having a dog signals that he has the resources and the willingness to care for someone else, even if other evidence of his mating behavior says otherwise" per a Slate article-slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/02/….
    – pericles316
    Aug 8, 2015 at 8:21
  • Keep in mind that correlation does not imply causation.
    – gerrit
    Aug 10, 2015 at 9:50
  • A female over the age of 18 is a woman. A girl is under-age. Is the dog-wielding man trying to get the phone numbers of children? Children are very attracted to animals, so it would be a good strategy.
    – RedSonja
    Aug 12, 2015 at 8:33
  • OK, I know what my next startup is... Renting dogs to dudes to ask women out.
    – user5341
    Sep 1, 2015 at 22:12

1 Answer 1

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Are dogs excellent wingmen?

According to the study, yes. Three times more women gave their phone number to the man when he was accompanied by a friendly dog.

As Oddthinking worked out, it was one of the studies

Domestic Dogs as Facilitator in Social Interaction: An Evaluation of Helping and Courtship Behaviors

Experiment 4 ... In this experiment, the participants were selected following a random assignment in which the confederate was instructed to approach the first young woman in the relevant age group (18 to 25 years) who was walking alone in the pedestrian zone where the experiment was being carried out. As in the previous experiments, when soliciting the young women the confederate kept his dog on a lead in the experimental condition, whereas he was not accompanied by his dog in the nodog control condition. The same verbal solicitation was made by the confederate in both the control and the experimental conditions:

“Hello. My name’s Antoine. I just want to say that I think you’re really pretty. I have to go to work this afternoon, but I was wondering if you would give me your phone number. I’ll phone you later and we can have a drink together someplace.”

...

Results and Discussion The dependent variable in this experiment was the number of participants who agreed to the courtship request. The results showed that 28.3% (34/120) of the women approached complied with the request when the confederate was with the dog, compared with 9.2% (11/120) of women when the confederate was not with the dog. This difference is significant (² (1) = 14.47, n = 240, p < 0.001; r = 0.25)...

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