Really resemble their owners? Nicholas Christenfeld and Michael Roy, psychologists at the University of California San Diego conducted a study to find out just that. They discovered that pure bred dogs can often be matched to their owners by strangers. But the same does not hold true for mutts. One theory suggests that we choose dogs that remind us of ourselves, or perhaps we are more sympathetic to similarities, and mutts are a wild card, their future appearance is often a mystery.