One of the most beautiful and amazing things about puppies is how they approach most people in a trusting and friendly manner. The same is true for small children. However, at a certain point in their development, children begin to be more selective, they start to trust some people and distrust others. Recent studies reveal that dogs follow this same pattern of behaviour and that they have a much more sophisticated Social Intelligence than we supposed.
Lying to dogs means immediately losing their trust
Just like with children, if a dog is lied to frequently, it will eventually lose trust in the person and start acting as if it cannot trust the information that the person is giving it. An experiment conducted at Kyoto University in Japan showed that dogs only use information and follow orders from people they trust.
In the first study, the psychologists worked with 24 dogs and started with the idea that, since they were well trained, they would follow the instructions of the people. So, they placed two opaque containers, one of which had food under it, the other was empty.
In the first phase, the person pointed to the container containing the food. The dogs followed the command and received the reward.
In the second phase, the researcher placed the food in front of the dog. The person then pointed to the empty container, encouraging the dog to go to it. In this way, the feeling was created that the person was no longer trustworthy, that he or she was lying.
When the experiment was repeated once more, this time without the dog knowing where the food was hidden, it was found that only 8% of the dogs that had been tricked followed the person’s instructions.
At this point, the researchers wondered whether the dogs would be able to make distinctions; that is, whether they would think that all people were unreliable for carrying out this task or whether they would only distrust the person who had lied to them.
In this regard, studies carried out in the past showed that dogs are capable of making judgments about people’s personality and behaviour, and they do not generalise their results to everyone. Therefore, the researchers recruited another 26 dogs and got to work again.
They replicated the first two phases of the experiment: in the first phase the person gave a correct indication and in the second phase they lied. However, the trick was that they used different people. In this way, they could see whether the dogs made a distinction.
The results left no room for doubt: the dogs trusted the first person when he pointed at the containers again, but they distrusted the second person and did not follow his orders because they had realised that he was a liar since his instructions were not reliable.
The sophisticated social intelligence of dogs
These psychologists are convinced that dogs have a much more acute Social Intelligence than we think. In fact, a similar experiment carried out with children showed that children begin to accept that certain people are not trustworthy only after the age of 5.
In fact, dogs’ intelligence has evolved over the decades, mainly due to the close relationship they have had with people. So it is not surprising that another study has recently found that dogs really do understand us and that their brain processes language in a very similar way to our brains; that is, they are not only guided by the emotional tone of our speech but also by the meaning of the words.
In this regard, an amazing experiment conducted with Chaser, a border collie, which was published in the journal Behavioral Processes , showed that with proper training, the dog was able to recognize the names of 1,022 toys and choose them correctly 95% of the time.
Perhaps the most surprising study of all, however, which leaves no doubt about the social intelligence of these pets, was conducted by psychologists at the University of Milan. In this case, the researchers had the dog owners or a person unrelated to the dog react differently to an ambiguous stimulus that caused some tension and fear in the animals.
In some cases, the person reacted positively, laughing, being relaxed and making positive comments about the stimulus whenever the animal made eye contact. In other cases, the person showed signs of fear and disgust, making comments with a negative emotional tone about the stimulus.
The researchers were able to observe that the dogs used what is known as “social referencing” to regulate their behavior, regardless of the emotional relationship they had with the person.
In practice, the dogs not only demonstrated that they were able to pick up on our reactions and moods, but they also regulated their behaviour based on these, taking into account our experience to decide whether or not they could approach the object. This is surprising if we take into account that the ability to use social referencing develops in children from approximately 15 months of age.
Therefore, dogs have a highly developed Social Intelligence, which allows them to interact with people and regulate their behavior based on the information they obtain.
References:
Takaoka, A. et. Al. (2014) Do dogs follow behavioral cues from an unreliable human? Animal Cognition 18(2): 475-483.
Merola, I. et. Al. (2012) Dogs’ Social Referencing towards Owners and Strangers. PLOS ONE 7(10).
Vanderbilt, K. et. Al. (2011) The development of distrust. Child Development ; 82: 1372–1380.
Pilley, JW & Reid, AK (2011) Border collie comprehends object names as verbal referents. Behavioral Processes 86(2): 184–195.
Repacholi, BM et. Al. (2010) Linking actions and emotions: Evidence from 15- and 18-month-old infants. British Journal of Developmental Psychology ; 27(3): 649-667.
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