A new study claims that when dogs act remorseful, they are picking up on cues from their owners and not responding to feelings of their own
MANY DOG owners have had this experience: arriving home, they discover their pooch looking sheepish, with its head down, ears pulled back, tail tucked between the legs, maybe slinking behind the sofa.
Puzzled, they soon discover the reason: a favourite pair of shoes chewed to pieces, or perhaps the kitchen bin upended.
But is their canine companion really acting guilty? Or is this an example of people projecting a human emotion onto their four-legged friend?
A new study concludes that it is more likely the latter – that the behaviour people interpret as dog guilt is more likely to be just a reaction to subtle cues from their owners.
“I’m not denying that people have had that experience – I have had it myself,” says Alexandra Horowitz, an assistant professor of psychology at Barnard College in New York who conducted the study published in the July issue of the journal Behavioural Processes. “But I don’t think we can say it’s because the dogs are showing guilt. I don’t think it maps to some inner emotion in the way we think it does.”
Horowitz conducted the research as part of a broader interest in understanding anthropomorphisms – the tendency people have to ascribe human emotions to animals.
“One of the things that interests me is the disconnect between how scientists refer to the behaviour of animals and how pet owners refer to the behaviour of animals,” Horowitz says. “Within science, anthropomorphisms are verboten. But they seem to be a prevalent method of talking about animals for non-scientists. Even scientists who will speak of the monkeys in their lab by number will go home and talk about their dog feeling spiteful, for example. I wanted to test some of these.”
So Horowitz devised an experiment involving 14 owners and their dogs – six males and eight females, including six mutts, a Brussels griffon, a Tibetan terrier, a cockapoo, a Shih Tzu, a wheaten terrier, two dachshunds and a Labrador retriever.
Horowitz asked each owner to show the dog a biscuit, instruct the dog not to eat it and then leave the room. While the owner was gone, Horowitz either allowed the dog to eat the treat or removed it. Then the owner returned and was told the dog had obeyed the command or had been disobedient and had eaten the biscuit. Owners scolded the disobedient dogs. But half the time the owners were told the truth about whether their dog had misbehaved while the other half were misled.
And here is the surprising thing: the dogs that had obeyed were just as likely as the ones that did not to exhibit one of nine behaviours associated with the “guilty look” – dropping their head, pulling their ears back, avoiding eye contact, rolling over onto their side or back, dropping their tails, quickly wagging a lowered tail, licking their lips, offering a paw, or slinking away.
In fact, Horowitz found that the pooches were most likely to show such behaviours when their owner believed they had disobeyed and scolded them.
“The most guilty look was when the owner scolded an innocent dog,” she says. “It was a bit surprising.”
HOROWITZ CONCLUDED that such behaviour is most likely the result of subtle cues that dogs picked up from their owners that make them anticipate punishment, rather than the dogs necessarily feeling guilty.
“What we call the guilty look overlaps a lot with what is described as submissive behaviour – a posture you might take when you think someone is angry or might punish you,” she says. “What it looks like is the dogs are responding to cues from the owner. It’s a reaction or an anticipation of when someone is angry or might punish you.”
The dogs that were most likely to exhibit the behaviours in response to being scolded were those that had gone through obedience training, she says.
“They might learn this is a good look to put on when they see a certain body language or detect a certain tone of voice in their owner. I think the reaction is in anticipation of punishment. They might realise their behaviour is related to later punishment. It’s a subtle difference but an important difference.”
Horowitz stresses that her experiment could not measure whether dogs feel guilt – only whether the behaviour humans interpret as demonstrating guilt really is that. “This doesn’t mean dogs don’t feel guilty. When they are playing together, they have a code of behaviour and can distinguish right from wrong. And I think the thing we call the guilty look exists, but I don’t think it necessarily maps to actual guilt,” she said. “But I can’t claim to know what they are feeling.”
LA Times service