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.
###
Elsevier
Every pet owners have to face some destruction at time. That part of fun to expect.
Originally posted by Chew Bakar:Every pet owners have to face some destruction at time. That part of fun to expect.
look at the new thread in Chit Chat by Y K
Like that also have.... interesting.