Your dog's personality has little to do with its specific breed and more to do with the circumstances is was raised in, according to a new study using the largest dataset on canine behavior assembled, the Associated Press reports.

According to the study, which was published in the journal Science, your dog's personality has more to do with the specific parentage rather than the genetic make-up of the animal. While certain traits are specific to the breed–from physical characteristics to things like herding instincts–your dog's more mundane attributes are created by watching the other dogs, and humans, around it.

For example, while most hounds are known for their baying howls, the time and circumstance of when the dog barks are learned by the animal by watching other dogs and humans. If the dog learns that its bark–for say, the doorbell or the mailman–creates a response in the human or another dog, it will continue to do so to elicit that response.

In another example, researchers found golden retrievers did not have the breed's famous "fetch" instinct if they did not observe it or weren't taught it when they were young puppies. Most goldens pick up the skill by observing their trained parents retrieve an item, which gets rewarded by their humans.

Researchers interviewed more than 18,000 pet owners and analyzed the genomes of 2,150 individual dogs to develop the model used for research.