Your pet is (probably) not a genius, and that’s OK.

Earlier this year, I wrote about dogs with an unusual talent. Although many dogs can master basic commands, these animals had amassed enormous vocabularies, learning the names of hundreds of toys. It was, the story noted, a rare skill in the canine kingdom; in years of searching the globe, scientists had identified very few of these “gifted word learners.”

And yet, as soon as the story was published, I began to hear from readers who said that their dogs were linguistic prodigies, too. And while a few of the dogs did indeed sound gifted, it seemed statistically unlikely that they all were. Many sounded as if they were perfectly normal dogs, who had learned to recognize a handful of words that mattered to them, like “walk” or “dinner.”

As the emails streamed in, I began to wonder whether I was witnessing a canine version of the better-than-average effect, a cognitive bias in which people tend to overestimate their own abilities, and those of their loved ones, relative to those of other people. (It is also sometimes known as the Lake Wobegon effect, named after Garrison Keillor’s fictional town where “all the children are above average.”)

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