A 2019 Experiment Challenged The Old Idea That Cats Are Aloof And Indifferent To Their Owners: Researchers Found That About Two-thirds Of The Cats They Could Classify Showed Secure Attachment Patterns Resembling Those Seen In Babies With A Caregiver

The cat as a cool tenant who puts up with you for the food is one of the most durable ideas in pet culture. A 2019 experiment at Oregon State University it put a real dent in that stereotype, and the result is worth a look.

A quick note first: I am not a veterinarian or animal-behavior researcher, and this is reading and reflection on one study, not advice about your particular cat. The work below describes a behavioral experiment, and a pattern measured across a group of animals is not a verdict on any individual pet.

A cat that hides when guests arrive, or ignores you when you get home, gets treated as proof that cats just don’t care. But, the lead researcher on this study  argues that behavior tells you about one particular cat, not the whole species. Kristyn Vitale put it plainly: “Cats that are insecure can be likely to run and hide or seem to act aloof. There’s long been a biased way of thinking that all cats behave this way.”

In September 2019, Vitale’s team at Oregon State University’s Human-Animal Interaction Lab published their results in Current Biology. They used a Secure Base Test, an abbreviated version of the Strange Situation procedure developed for human infants, to examine whether cats treated their caregivers as a source of security in an unfamiliar place.

The setup was simple. A cat and its owner spent two minutes together in a room the cat didn’t know. Then the owner left for two minutes and came back for a two-minute reunion. Coders scored the reunion using behavioral criteria adapted from research on babies and dogs. A securely attached cat reconnects when the owner returns, then goes back to exploring, treating the person as a secure base rather than clinging or remaining avoidant. An insecure cat remains stressed, either avoiding contact or clinging excessively.

Vitale’s shorthand for the secure pattern is the most human-sounding line in the whole study. A secure cat, she explained, may greet its owner and then go back to what it was doing. “That’s how a secure human also behaves.”

Here is the number the whole thing turns on. Among the 70 kittens whose behavior could be classified, 64.3% were categorized as securely attached and the rest as insecurely. The 38 adult cats split almost identically, with 65.8% classified as secure. Both round to roughly two-thirds.

The paper notes that studies of human infants also put the share classified as securely attached at around 65%, nearly the same proportion found in these cats. As Vitale summed it up, “The majority of cats are securely attached to their owner and use them as a source of security in a novel environment.”

Two cautions are worth keeping in mind. This was one study with a modest sample, and other experiments have reached different conclusions. A 2015 study of 20 cat-owner pairs found no clear secure-base effect, while a 2024 study comparing different groups of cats likewise reported no clear owner-specific attachment in its tests. The evidence is therefore mixed, and the 2019 result is better read as an important finding in an unsettled debate than as the last word.

The researchers were also careful about how far to push the baby-and-cat comparison. They suggested, rather than proved, that there could be an evolutionary reason the behavior looked similar. In their words, “In both dogs and cats, attachment to humans may represent a flexible adaptation of the offspring-caretaker bond.” That’s a hypothesis about where the behavior came from, not a proven explanation.

Part of the reason the aloof label stuck is that we’ve long measured cats against dogs and found them wanting. A dog that mobs you at the door is easy to read as devoted. A cat that glances up and carries on is easy to misread as bored.

But the 2019 paper notes that dogs have also shown secure and insecure patterns in comparable tests, suggesting the two species may not be as far apart on this measure as the stereotype implies. Vitale’s framing was that “like dogs, cats display social flexibility in regard to their attachments with humans.”

So the useful shift here isn’t to start calling cats secretly needy. It’s to stop treating a cat’s reserve as proof of indifference. In the 2019 experiment, a cat that greeted its owner and then wandered back to exploring was displaying the pattern researchers classified as secure: using the person as a safe base, but wearing the bond with considerably less fuss.

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