Sorry, But Your Dog's Guilty Look Probably Has Little To Do With Actual Guilt
Researcher Julie Hecht writes at Sci Am that research has not found that a dog's "guilty look" necessarily corresponds with dog's knowledge of some misdeed:
In 2009, Alexandra Horowitz of Barnard College (and author of "Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know") published a study in Behavioural Processes exploring what precedes the "guilty look." By varying both the dog's behavior (either eating or not eating a disallowed treat) and the owner's behavior (either scolding or not scolding), Horowitz was able to isolate what the dog's "guilty look" was associated with. She found that the guilty look did not appear more when the dogs had done something wrong. Instead, the "guilty look" popped out in full form when the owner scolded the dog. In fact, Horowitz also found that when scolded, the most exaggerated guilt look was performed by dogs who had not eaten the treat but were scolded anyway because the owner thought the dog had eaten it. In a multi-dog household, a dog could easily look guilty without ever having transgressed."But wait!" cries the peanut gallery. "It can't only be about scolding." The claim is as follows: you come home only to be greeted by your beloved dog, this time, with low posture, ears back, squinty eyes, lip licking and a tail wagging low and quick. Or maybe the dog is under the bed and won't budge. You enter the kitchen and find that the dog has done a lovely job rearranging the trash all over the floor. Not your design of choice, but you can see what he was getting at. In this context, owners claim dogs show the "guilty look" prior to an owner discovering the misdeed. This, they claim, indicates that dogs know they have done something wrong because the owner is not scolding yet.
In 2010, I investigated this scenario while conducting research with the Family Dog Project in Budapest. In the experiment, published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science in 2012, dogs had the opportunity to break a rule (that food on a table is for humans and not dogs) while the owner was out of the room. When the owner returned, but before they saw whether the dog ate the food, the dogs who ate were not more likely to look guilty than those who did not eat. We also wondered whether owners would be better able to recognize their dog's transgression in their behavior than a researcher simply coding for the presence of the commonly assigned "look." Owners who had previously witnessed their dog attending to the rule were not able to identify whether or not their dog had transgressed in their absence. The study did not find that owners could identify a "guilty dog" without scolding.
She also points out that the joke of dog shaming photos works because the dogs do not look guilty. I dunno. I think this pug in the photo kinda does, but maybe that's just my human need to attribute something that they're looking into in these studies. (Then again, I suspect that many of these dogs at the dog shaming site have gotten a talking to.)
I love the dog shaming site and check it daily. Since I have to send out emails on report progress every day, I like to include a goofy picture, especially when the database crashes and the reports are late. The dog shaming shots always get the most reaction.
What I really want to know about dogs is do they have any idea how much time has actually passed? If I walk to the mailbox and return in 5 minutes, they react as enthusiastically as if I had been gone all day. Maybe it's my fabulous personality, but I suspect not.
Annie at April 22, 2015 4:09 AM
I wonder about their memories, too. I read somewhere that their memories only last about two minutes. Can that be right? Then how do they remember who we are after we've been gone all day?
On the other hand, my little puppy mill rescue spent ten years in a cage cranking out litter after litter of puppies before I adopted her. Living the life of a pampered retiree in my home took some adjustment for her. She had never seen a TV before, or lived with humans, or slept in a soft bed. There was a learning curve, but after two months it's like she has always lived here. She doesn't dwell on the past at all, and it does make me wonder if she doesn't remember it. Very Zen.
Pirate Jo at April 22, 2015 5:35 AM
My cur dog will counter-surf and eat an entire tray of food and act like nothing happened. He also killed half of our chickens- we had no idea it was him until I caught him gnawing on one of the remaining ones one afternoon. If I yell at him though- for anything... you've never seen a more remorseful look.
And I agree that the dog-shaming photos are hilarious.
ahw at April 22, 2015 7:10 AM
Has Ms. Hecht ever disclosed how many cats she owns? She sounds bought and paid for by the FEI, the Feline Enterprise Institute.
She describes herself as a "canine researcher" and well, something from a horror show, that's all I can imagine the inside of her laboratory looks like.
And how do people get this way? Toxoplasmosis.
jerry at April 22, 2015 7:40 AM
He also killed half of our chickens
Lucky dog. Had my father caught such a dog red toothed, said dog would have caught a steel pipe up aside the head.
You can have a dog that eats chickens, or chickens, but you can not have both.
I R A Darth Aggie at April 22, 2015 8:30 AM
He's still around because he's supposed to be a bay dog for hog hunting. He's actually really sweet (to people). He and the lab have driven off coyotes before. And, he ran somebody off last week that didn't belong... But yeah, he stays in his crate now while the birds are out in the afternoons. Hunting dogs dogs don't make good chicken guards.
ahw at April 22, 2015 9:12 AM
Pugs tend to look like that as a matter of course. Silly little goobers.
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