Jun 25 2009
Doubting Dog Guilt
I believe that dogs likely have rich emotional lives. They are social creatures, after all. Intelligent, social creatures tend to have complex emotional lives. That said, I do doubt that dogs experience guilt. Maybe something a bit like it–a rudimentary form, perhaps–but not guilt as we know it.
“Guilt” is a secondary human emotion that appears only after a significant amount of neurological and cognitive development has occurred. The newborn experiences no guilt, nor does the 1 year-old. The emotion only follows on the heels of growing self-awareness and a waning egocentric orientation. The word, and emotion itself, implies conscience. A knowing better. Morality even.
New research out of Barnard College in New York tells of an experiment conducted on “dog guilt.” The finding -
Horowitz was able to show that the human tendency to attribute a “guilty look” to a dog was not due to whether the dog was indeed guilty. Instead, people see ‘guilt’ in a dog’s body language when they believe the dog has done something it shouldn’t have – even if the dog is in fact completely innocent of any offense.
I have been a dog owner for decades and am familiar with their behavior. Certainly, I could mine my own experiences for anecdotal support of why I think they might or might not experience true guilt. But as a scientist tends to, I doubt my own experiences. I take them with a huge grain of salt. I know it is all too easy to project my own beliefs and preferences onto events. Particularly ambiguous events.
Is dog body language ambiguous? Heck yah. It can be difficult enough to accurately read exactly what another of our kind is emotionally expressing. Dogs do not speak the same body language we do. There is a huge potential for “mis-translation.”
In the above quote we read of “the human tendency to attribute….” Yes. We are so primed to find intention and motive behind events, we sometimes add these elements where there is in fact none. Consider talk of “angry weather” etc.
In addition, dogs are perceptive animals. They can certainly perceive us looking at them. Stare at a dog at random, for no reason whatsoever, and it may alter its behavior. The dog-guilt experiment revealed that as well.
[D]ogs that had been obedient and had not eaten the treat, but were scolded by their (misinformed) owners, looked more “guilty” than those that had, in fact, eaten the treat. Thus the dog’s guilty look is a response to the owner’s behavior, and not necessarily indicative of any appreciation of its own misdeeds.
My moral to this story? Go ahead, love and value pet canines. But please understand that they are a different species than we are. Respect that. Sure, give them a name. But stop short of dressing them in human clothing.
