Are owners' reports of their dogs’ ‘guilty look’ influenced by the dogs’ action and evidence of the misdeed?

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Highlights

•

We test cues that trigger dogs’ ‘guilty look’ behaviours.
•

The dogs’ action and evidence of the misdeed have no effect on the ‘guilty look’.
•

Dogs might not show the ‘guilty look’ in the absence of concurrent scolding by their owners.

Abstract

While dog owners claim that their dogs’ greeting behaviour after having performed a misdeed indicates the dogs' ‘guilt’, current experimental evidence suggests that dogs show these ‘guilty look’ behaviours as a response to being scolded by their owners. Given reports that ‘guilty look’ behaviours are shown also in the absence of being scolded, we investigated whether the dogs' own actions or the evidence of a misdeed might serve as triggering cues. We manipulated whether or not dogs ate a ‘forbidden’ food item and whether or not the food was visible upon the owners’ return. Based on their dogs’ greeting behaviour, owners stated that their dog had eaten the food no more than expected by chance. In addition, dogs’ greeting behaviours were not affected by their own action or the presence or absence of the food. Thus, our findings do not support the hypothesis that dogs show the ‘guilty look’ in the absence of a concurrent negative reaction by their owners.

Related collections

Most cited references 18

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Differential sensitivity to human communication in dogs, wolves, and human infants.

József Topál, Gergely Csibra, Ádám Miklósi … (2009)

Ten-month-old infants persistently search for a hidden object at its initial hiding place even after observing it being hidden at another location. Recent evidence suggests that communicative cues from the experimenter contribute to the emergence of this perseverative search error. We replicated these results with dogs (Canis familiaris), who also commit more search errors in ostensive-communicative (in 75% of the total trials) than in noncommunicative (39%) or nonsocial (17%) hiding contexts. However, comparative investigations suggest that communicative signals serve different functions for dogs and infants, whereas human-reared wolves (Canis lupus) do not show doglike context-dependent differences of search errors. We propose that shared sensitivity to human communicative signals stems from convergent social evolution of the Homo and the Canis genera.

0 comments Cited 102 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Disambiguating the "guilty look": salient prompts to a familiar dog behaviour.

Alexandra Horowitz (2009)

Anthropomorphisms are regularly used by owners in describing their dogs. Of interest is whether attributions of understanding and emotions to dogs are sound, or are unwarranted applications of human psychological terms to non-humans. One attribution commonly made to dogs is that the "guilty look" shows that dogs feel guilt at doing a disallowed action. In the current study, this anthropomorphism is empirically tested. The behaviours of 14 domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) were videotaped over a series of trials and analyzed for elements that correspond to an owner-identified "guilty look." Trials varied the opportunity for dogs to disobey an owner's command not to eat a desirable treat while the owner was out of the room, and varied the owners' knowledge of what their dogs did in their absence. The results revealed no difference in behaviours associated with the guilty look. By contrast, more such behaviours were seen in trials when owners scolded their dogs. The effect of scolding was more pronounced when the dogs were obedient, not disobedient. These results indicate that a better description of the so-called guilty look is that it is a response to owner cues, rather than that it shows an appreciation of a misdeed.