Dog owners are often associated with personality traits of being social and community-oriented while “cat people” are often thought of as introverted and more open-minded, according to .
But if you’re about to raise money for a charity from people with pets, you may want to think about the strategy.
A new Dartmouth study finds that cat owners donate slightly more than dog owners, and also donate more often and more diversely. However, people without pets donate the most.
The findings are published in the journal .
To examine philanthropic behavior by pet ownership, including how personality traits may come into play, the study looked at approximately 63 million donors and 788 million transactions, totaling nearly $70 billion over a 10-year period between 2013 and 2022. The data was obtained from the cloud-computing management company Snowflake.
The study assessed donation amounts between $20 and $100,000 and their frequency, along with the age, gender, race, marital status, number of children, income, education, and partisanship of the donors.
To capture the intricate relationships between the categorical features, a machine learning model called CatBoost, which stands for categorical boosting, was used.
