The dog is a very sociable, faithful and affectionate animal that, in addition, shows a very high emotional and social intelligence. Various studies have empirically proven that man’s best friend is capable of differentiating and recognizing emotions such as joy, sadness or fear, experiencing jealousy and even detecting certain diseases . Another interesting study, published in the journal Animal Cognition in 2015, showed that dogs are capable of perceiving when a person is not trustworthy and, in addition, at that moment they stop following their signals.
Anyone who has lived with a dog knows that these animals understand perfectly what it means for a human to point to something with his hand and, if the owner points to the location of a ball, a stick or food, the animal will immediately run to explore in the direction indicated. This study went one step further and revealed that, in addition, dogs are very quick to discover whether human gestures are deceptive and are capable of flexibly modifying their behavior according to the confidence that a particular person transmits to them.
The work was carried out by a team of researchers from Kyoto University in Japan, with 34 dogs participating in three rounds of tests. In the first round, the technician pointed to the animals a container with food. In the second round, however, the designated container was empty. When the researcher correctly pointed to the food container again in the third round, the dogs no longer responded to the signal, so it appears that they could quickly use their previous experience to assess whether the person was trustworthy.
Social intelligence of dogs
After these rounds, a new experimenter replicated the first round. Once again, the dogs followed this new person with interest, so the previous experience of deception did not make them distrust humans in general but someone in particular. It came as a surprise to the researchers to discover how animals devalued a human’s reliability so quickly. These results suggest that dogs are not only very adept at understanding human gestures, but also make inferences about a person’s reliability and, consequently, flexibly modify their behavior depending on the inference. “Dogs have a more sophisticated social intelligence than we think. This social intelligence evolved selectively in their long history of life with humans,” the authors indicate.
Referencia: Takaoka et al. 2015. Do dogs follow behavioral cues from an unreliable human? Anim Cogn. 2015 Mar;18(2):475-83. doi: 10.1007/s10071-014-0816-2. Epub 2014 Oct 28.
