The Psychology of Dog Show Judging
It’s Not Just About Breed Standards

As a person who has been involved in AKC conformation dog shows for more than four decades, I have often pondered the decision-making process that goes into judging.  If you are involved in this sport, you have seen and most likely have been affected by a judge’s decision that appeared to be antithetical.  The emotional fallout from such of loss can be anger or even depression. From a psychological perspective, the angst that we all feel when affected by a decision that appears to be a “contradiction,” is caused by “Cognitive Dissonance,” which is the refers to the mental conflict that occurs when a person’s behaviors and beliefs do not align. Cognitive Dissonance is considered one of the primary causes of both anxiety and depression. 

My goal in writing this brief article is to highlight a few issues in decision making that can affect how dog show judges make their selections:  and in doing so reduce some of the discomfort when you are affected personally by a judge’s decision.   On the other hand, if before reading this article you believed that judge’s decisions are entirely based on breed standards, you may learn that this is not necessarily the case, nor is it true in most cases where reason should guide decisions. We don’t have to look too far in our everyday world, to see that reason is not our principal guide and that most of us are more like Star Trek’s emotionally driven James T. Kirk than we are the rational even-tempered Mr. Spock. This is true because our “cognitive machinery,” the brain and the information that makes up its operating system, has evolved to make decisions quickly and almost unconsciously. This ability enhances our ability to survive in a world where we are thrown into rapidly changing situations.

To examine this topic effectively, we must first understand one precept that should be obvious but is often ignored or forgotten: not only in dog shows, but every time someone makes a decision.  This is that “perception,” or the way we see the world, is subjective and individual and based upon the sum of our experiences and our learned knowledge.  The biases that we carry into any situation stem from a  lifetime of  programing and are reflected in our decision-making.

To pull an example from this past weekend’s dog shows, I was watching two very nice bitches compete relatively large open class compete for winner’s bitch. A coin toss might have settled this adequately, but a keen observer, who knew the judge for many years, speculated that the judge was a Parson Russell Terrier breeder and preferred longer necked dogs.  It was indeed a possibility but acknowledging that we all do far more speculation than we probably should, I watched her judge some other breeds and it could just be happenstance, but she did appear to prefer longer necked dogs.  We all have our quirks, and this includes judges, we all prioritize and focus on different things, whether we realize it or not, movement, coat, bite, feet, fronts, rears, toplines, color, patterns… there are a ton of variables that are prioritized differently by each judge every time your dog walks into the ring.

Beyond the individual subjectivity of one’s personal experiential and cognitive reality, there are decision making factors that lay at the core of our wiring, that affect our decision making in most situations. Any of these encoded biased decision-making mechanisms developed over our evolution to aid us in making rapid decisions that encourage the survival of the species. The term given to these biased decisions is “Heuristics”.

“A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows an individual to make a decision, pass judgment, or solve a problem quickly and with minimal mental effort. While heuristics can reduce the burden of decision-making and free up limited cognitive resources, they can also be costly when they lead individuals to miss critical information or act on unjust biases.”

Reading the definition, one might ask, why would a judge or a person who is making a critical decision use “mental shortcuts” when making what should be a rational decision? We don’t do it consciously, but we do it all the time. We only have limited cognitive resources and it would be impossible to judge a group of dogs without heuristic thinking in under three minutes per dog, while running the entire breed standard through one’s head. There are a variety of heuristics that bias our decision making: for the sake of brevity, I will focus on one a common heuristic that is often found in dog show judging: Representativeness Heuristic.

Representativeness Heuristic is a bias caused by the mind’s tendency to group like things and events together in the process of making decisions. Since this is a process that can apply to almost every decision that we make, it is not hard to find examples in dog show judging. Let me share a few examples that most of us can relate too.  In one of the breeds that I pay extra attention to, the dogs come in wide variety of colors and patterns. Is it mere coincidence that the last top-winning dog and the current dog that is rising to the top of the breed ranks have almost the same exact markings? In another example “Handler A” has historically bred and shown the top winning dogs in their breed, they continue to win with these dogs over all commers: are their dogs unmatched or is there a possible cognitive bias at work? What is ironic about this very human behavior is that we all engage in playing “the mental match game” and make decisions based on our personal experiences.  One of the reasons we do this is to “reduce cognitive load, which brings us to our next topic cognitive ease.

“Cognitive Ease” is a principle that states we prefer to make decisions in the simplest manner possible, using rules of thumb or heuristic strategies rather than doing the “mental heavy lifting” that might produce the best decision. Every decision we make uses up part of our limited mental resources. When we are forced to do intense thinking to solve a problem, we experience cognitive drain, anxiety, and pain.  If you have ever taken a college statistics course, you can probably relate to the mental strain it causes for most students. While we expect a judge to mentally access the entire breed standard, hold the standard in their “working memory,” and award each dog according to their merit: it is almost impossible. Studies have shown that an individual can only hold between three and four items in their “working memory,”.  Breed standards have far more than four variables as well as the judges need to assess movement and presentation, so a judge is forced to use the available data, alongside heuristic strategies to make their best decision. While we would all like to think that the dog that is the best dog should win, I have given you some food for thought to see why this is not true.

 I can tell you from my interactions with judges, most are consciously engaged in making the best decision possible. However, as I have related in this article, it is not an easy task and there are a ton of variables that affect each decision. Keep in mind judging is fundamentally a subjective enterprise.  All that we can do to influence the outcome is do the best job with our individual dogs is to present a dog in such a manner that it looks like a good representation of the breed standard, groomed appropriately and shown well.  If you’re not certain about any aspect of how to do that, find a person in your breed who is willing to give you fair and objective advice so that you can present your dog in the best way possible. I can only hope that the little insight I have provided will possibly mitigate some of the negative emotions that we experience when things do not go your way. I understand that nobody exhibits a dog with the intention of losing and nobody likes losing. Control the variables that you can, do your best job and have fun.