Are you going to trick your dog by lying? Stop! Tell the truth.
Dogs being so close to humans for the last 40,000 years, can easily sense when we deceive them. According to a recent study, they can even can tell when people are lying to them. And due to your lying, they might hold grudges or have trust issues.
Researchers at the University of Vienna say that after studying 260 dogs of different breeds, they found that dogs can discern truthfulness in humans. They tend to ignore people, lying to them. The study also tells that unlike human infants and non-human primates, dogs know when someone is deceptive.
How was the experiment conducted?
It has been a question for a long time that, like humans, can dog tell when someone is lying? And to find a solution to it, an experiment was conducted on 260 dogs to study their behavior.
In the experiment, purebred dogs have to find the food among the two given bowls. The human communicator, unknown to them, trained them to build trust by guiding them to the correct bowl (bowl with a treat), “Look, this is good!” Eventually, they believed the communicator.
After establishing the trust, the second unknown communicator changed the food from the first bowl to the second. And the first communicator was absent from the room and did not witness the shuffle. In both cases, the communicators pointed at the first bowl with no food, and the following was the observation.
Case 1: The communicator was absent during the switch
When the communicator himself didn’t know where the food was and was being honest, half of the dogs followed the misleadings advice despite knowing the correct bowl. It was quite opposite to the observations of the last experiment, conducted on children under 5, Japanese macaques or chimpanzees, as they did not follow the misleading though honest advice of the instructor.
Case 2: The communicator was present during the switch
When the children under 5, Japanese macaques or chimpanzees, were put in this situation, they followed the instructor knowing that he was misleading them, and went to the empty container. But, two-third of dogs, unlike the children and apes, ignored the direction of the communicator and went to the bowl filled with food. They made their own choice on what they saw.
The two observations tell a lot about how dogs behave. The first case explains how they trust and react to social information, while the second confirms that dogs know it very well when we deceive them.
“We initially believed that dogs react just like children under 5, chimpanzees and apes. But the observations make us speculate our thoughts as dogs know when humans are being deceitful,” says Ludwig Huber of the University of Vienna in Austria. They may consider that humans have the same amount of intelligence as they have and can easily sense the misleading intention of lying.
So stop lying, as we never know when our beloved dog does the same to us.
In a similar news, we reported how Dogs can detect 90% of COVID-19 cases faster than PCR tests with 94% accuracy.