Do Dogs Know Who’s Good or Bad?

When dogs watched how humans treated other dogs, they didn’t favor the kinder person later. Even direct interactions didn’t sway their behavior. The study suggests dogs’ reputational judgments might be more nuanced—or harder to study—than we realized, the journal Animal Cognition reported.

Many people put a lot of faith in a dog’s instincts when it comes to judging character. If a dog immediately warms up to someone, it’s often seen as a sign that the person is kind and trustworthy. On the other hand, if a dog seems hesitant or wary, some might take it as a red flag. But whether dogs actually assess people’s behavior in this way is still not fully understood.

Research has shown that certain intelligent and highly social animals, like chimpanzees, are capable of forming opinions about humans based on personal interactions or by watching how others are treated. Because dogs have lived so closely with humans for thousands of years, scientists have been especially interested in whether dogs can do the same. However, the results from studies so far have been mixed.

One earlier study from the Wolf Science Center in Austria found that both domesticated dogs living in packs and wolves did not form reputations of individual humans, even after direct interaction or observing how those humans behaved. This lack of judgment could be due to the limited exposure those animals had with humans, which led researchers to design new experiments involving dogs with more human experience.

To explore this further, scientists studied 40 pet dogs to see whether their ability to form opinions about people changes with age or development. The researchers set up a situation where each dog could observe another dog interacting with two people. One person behaved generously by feeding the other dog, while the second person did not offer any food.

After watching this exchange, the observing dog was allowed to interact with both people. The researchers closely monitored the dogs’ behavior, noting which person the dog approached first, whether the dog jumped up, and how physically close it stayed to each individual.

The results revealed that dogs across all age groups did not significantly prefer the generous person who fed the dog compared to the selfish person who refused to feed the dog. Their behavior toward the two humans did not exceed chance levels following indirect eavesdropping or direct experience with them.

“It’s clear that reputation formation may be more complex than previously thought, even for animals like dogs that closely cooperate with humans,” says corresponding researcher Hoi-Lam Jim, who recently joined the faculty at Kyoto University.

This study highlights the methodological challenges in accurately capturing dogs’ understanding and evaluation of humans. Since direct reputation formation is a prerequisite for eavesdropping, the researchers were not surprised to find no evidence of reputation formation, but they did not expect the lack of evidence for it after direct interaction.

“It is possible that methodological challenges in the experimental design, particularly the use of a two-choice test, may explain our negative findings, rather than an absence of capacity,” says Jim.

To better understand what influences dogs’ sociocognitive abilities, the research team says future research should systematically compare dogs of all ages from different populations and life experiences, expanding to include free-ranging dogs, service dogs, and police dogs.

To many of us, it seems reasonable to believe that dogs socially evaluate people, but for now we simply do not know.

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