Dogs More Likely to Follow Misleading Human Suggestions When Informants Have False Beliefs

Release Date: July 21, 2021https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.0906

Explanation

A study investigated whether dogs (Canisfamiliaris) can distinguish between true beliefs (TB) and false beliefs (FB) of humans.

According to three experiments using a pre-registered location change task, dogs (n= 260) were able to retrieve food from one of two opaque buckets after witnessing a misleading suggestion by a human informant ("communicator") with either TB or FB about the location of the food.

Dogs in both the TB and FB groups witnessed the initial concealment of the food, the subsequent transfer by the second experimenter, and finally, the misleading suggestion by the communicator to empty buckets.

Averaged from these, it was observed that the dogs were more sensitive to the experimental manipulations, as they chose the suggested container considerably more often in the FB group than in the TB group.

Terriers were the only breed group that behaved like human infants and apes tested in previous studies in a similar paradigm, by following the communicator's suggestions more frequently in the TB than in the FB group.

Overall, the results provided evidence that pet dogs distinguish between TB and FB scenarios.