Many dog owners have had this experience: Arriving home, they discover their pooch looking sheepish, with its head down, ears pulled back, tail tucked between the legs, maybe slinking behind the sofa. Puzzled, they soon discover the reason: a favorite pair of shoes chewed to pieces, or perhaps the kitchen garbage can upended.
But is their canine companion really acting guilty? Or is this an example of people projecting a human emotion onto their four-legged friend?
A new study concludes that it is more likely the latter -- that the behavior people interpret as dog guilt really is more likely just a reaction to subtle cues from their owners.
"I'm not denying that people have had that experience -- I have had it myself," said Alexandra Horowitz, an assistant professor of psychology at Barnard College in New York who conducted the study published in the July issue of the journal Behavioural Processes. "But I don't think we can say it's because the dogs are showing guilt. I don't think it maps to some inner emotion in the way we think it does."
Horowitz conducted the research as part of a broader interest in understanding anthropomorphisms -- the tendency people have to ascribe human emotions to animals.
"One of the things that interests me is the disconnect between how scientists refer to the behavior of animals and how pet owners refer to the behavior of animals," Horowitz said. "Within science, anthropomorphisms are verboten. But they seem to be a prevalent method of talking about animals for non-scientists. Even scientists who will speak of the monkeys in their lab by number will go home and talk about their dog feeling spiteful, for example. I wanted to test some of these."
So Horowitz devised an experiment involving 14 owners and their dogs -- six males and eight females, including six mutts, a Brussels griffon, a Tibetan terrier, a cockapoo, a Shih Tzu, a wheaten terrier, two dachshunds and a Labrador retriever.
Horowitz asked each owner to show the dog a biscuit, instruct the dog not to eat it and then leave the room. While the owner was gone, she either allowed the dog to eat the treat or removed it. Then the owner returned and was told the dog had obeyed the command or had been disobedient and had eaten the biscuit. Owners scolded the disobedient dogs. But half the time the owners were told the truth about whether their dog had misbehaved while the other half were misled.
And here is the surprising thing: The dogs that had obeyed were just as likely as the ones that did not to exhibit one of nine behaviors associated with the "guilty look" -- dropping their head, pulling their ears back, avoiding eye contact, rolling over onto their side or back, dropping their tails, quickly wagging a lowered tail, licking their lips, offering a paw, or slinking away.
In fact, Horowitz found that the pooches were most likely to show such behaviors when their owner believed they had disobeyed and scolded them.
"The most guilty look was when the owner scolded an innocent dog," she said. "It was a bit surprising."
Horowitz concluded that such behavior is most likely the result of subtle cues that dogs picked up from their owners that make them anticipate punishment, rather than the dogs necessarily feeling guilty.
"What we call the guilty look overlaps a lot with what is described as submissive behavior -- a posture you might take when you think someone is angry or might punish you," she said. "What it looks like is the dogs are responding to cues from the owner. It's a reaction or an anticipation of when someone is angry or might punish you."
The dogs that were most likely to exhibit the behaviors in response to being scolded were those that had gone through obedience training, she said.
"They might learn this is a good look to put on when they see a certain body language or detect a certain tone of voice in their owner," she said. "I think the reaction is in anticipation of punishment. They might realize their behavior is related to later punishment. It's a subtle difference but an important difference."
Horowitz stressed that her experiment could not measure whether dogs feel guilt -- only whether the behavior humans interpret as demonstrating guilt really is that.
"This doesn't mean dogs don't feel guilty. When they are playing together, they have a code of behavior and can distinguish right from wrong. And I think the thing we call the guilty look exists, but I don't think it necessarily maps to actual guilt," she said. "But I can't claim to know what they are feeling."
Horowitz acknowledged that her findings were likely to be met by skepticism from many dog owners.
"A lot of owners also feel their dogs express love for them by giving them kisses when they come home -- licking them on the face. That's one way to talk about the dogs' behavior," she said. "But if you look at the behavior of their forbears -- wolves -- when a foraging wolf returns to the group, all the other animals swarm around him and lick him on the face. They are trying to get him to regurgitate the food he's eaten. So this licking is a little attempt to try to get us to regurgitate a little bit of food or see where we've been."
Other researchers praised the study.
"It's a startling and unsettling conclusion," said Clive D.L. Wynne, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Florida at Gainesville who edits the journal that published the study. "We live with these animals in our home thinking and feeling that they and we are on the same wavelength. What this shows is we're often talking past each other. We're not understanding each other at all."
But some researchers said that while the study was well done and provocative, they remained uncertain how conclusive it was.
"I think this is a very good, important study," said Marc Bekoff, a professor emeritus of animal behavior at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "But I'm not convinced this is the end of the story. I don't think it puts the nail in the coffin that dogs don't feel guilty and we can't use that behavior to indicate guilt."
The study involved too few dogs, and too little was known about the background of the animals or their owners to know exactly how to interpret the findings, he said.
"I think the take-home message is that a guilty look doesn't necessarily mean the dog did something," Bekoff said, noting that research indicates people are fairly accurate at interpreting animals' emotions. "But it could mean that the dog did something. There is very high agreement about the emotions people attribute to animals, and they are correct much of the time."
Credit: Rob Stein - Washington Post Staff Writer