We have long suspected people reveal who they are by what they choose to surround themselves with. Yet beyond friends and associations, attire, or artwork, functional necessities may be more telling than we realize.

We have heard the jokes about dogs resembling their owners. Is that by chance—or did the owners have something to do with it? The same question can be asked about cars. Stefan Stieger and Martin Voracek (2014) studied the extent to which cars resembled their owners.[i] They began by recognizing that research has established that people are able to match dogs with their owners at rates that are above chance, even after controlling for factors such as amount of hair or size, and then conducted three studies demonstrating that an owner-resemblance effect generalizes to cars.

Stieger and Voracek showed study participants sets of one picture of the front view of a car, and frontal headshots of six possible owners. Raters matched car owners with front views of their cars at rates better than chance. They were not able to attain such success,........

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