Volume 90, April 2014, Pages 263–271
Highlights
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- We examined dogs' ability to evaluate humans on the basis of indirect experience.
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- One experimenter gave food to a beggar, the other withheld the food.
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- In the control condition the donors swapped places in half of the trials.
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- We found no evidence for social eavesdropping in dogs.
Social
eavesdropping is the gathering of information by observing interactions
between other individuals. Previous studies have claimed that dogs, Canis familiaris,
are able to use information obtained via social eavesdropping, that is,
preferring a generous over a selfish human donor. However, in these
studies the side was constant between the demonstrations and the dogs'
choices, not controlling for potential location biases. In the crucial
control condition of our experiments, the donors swapped places in half
of the trials before the dogs chose. We found that first choice
behaviour as well as the time dogs interacted with the generous donor
were influenced by location (side). In a second experiment the subject's
owner interacted with the two donors. Again, the result of the side
control revealed that the critical factor was location (side) not
person. The results of these experiments provide no evidence for social
eavesdropping in dogs and show the importance of critical control
conditions.
Keywords
- Canis familiaris;
- dog–human relationship;
- social cognition;
- social eavesdropping
Copyright © 2014 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
