What really prompts the dog's 'guilty look'
Thursday, June 11, 2009
What dog owner has not come home to a broken vase or other valuable
items and a guilty-looking dog slouching around the house? By
ingeniously setting up conditions where the owner was misinformed
as to whether their dog had really committed an offense, Alexandra
Horowitz, Assistant Professor from Barnard College in New York,
uncovered the origins of the "guilty look" in dogs in the recently
published "Canine Behaviour and Cognition" Special Issue of
Elsevier's Behavioural Processes.
Horowitz was able to show that the human tendency to attribute a
"guilty look" to a dog was not due to whether the dog was indeed
guilty. Instead, people see 'guilt' in a dog's body language when
they believe the dog has done something it shouldn't have – even if
the dog is in fact completely innocent of any offense.
During the study, owners were asked to leave the room after
ordering their dogs not to eat a tasty treat. While the owner was
away, Horowitz gave some of the dogs this forbidden treat before
asking the owners back into the room. In some trials the owners
were told that their dog had eaten the forbidden treat; in others,
they were told their dog had behaved properly and left the treat
alone. What the owners were told, however, often did not correlate
with reality.
Whether the dogs' demeanor included elements of the "guilty look"
had little to do with whether the dogs had actually eaten the
forbidden treat or not. Dogs looked most "guilty" if they were
admonished by their owners for eating the treat. In fact, dogs that
had been obedient and had not eaten the treat, but were scolded by
their (misinformed) owners, looked more "guilty" than those that
had, in fact, eaten the treat. Thus the dog's guilty look is a
response to the owner's behavior, and not necessarily indicative of
any appreciation of its own misdeeds.
This study sheds new light on the natural human tendency to
interpret animal behavior in human terms. Anthropomorphisms compare
animal behavior to human behavior, and if there is some superficial
similarity, then the animal behavior will be interpreted in the
same terms as superficially similar human actions. This can include
the attribution of higher-order emotions such as guilt or remorse
to the animal.
The editor of the special issue, Clive D.L. Wynne of the Department
of Psychology, University of Florida, explained, "this is a
remarkably powerful demonstration of the need for careful
experimental designs if we are to understand the human-dog
relationship and not just reify our natural prejudices about animal
behavior." He pointed out that dogs are the oldest domesticated
species and have a uniquely intimate role in the lives of millions
of people. Recent research on dogs has indicated more human-like
forms of reasoning about what people know than has been
demonstrated even in chimpanzees.
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Elsevier
Thanks to Elsevier for this article.