Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 90, April 2014, Pages 263-271
Animal Behaviour

Side matters: potential mechanisms underlying dogs' performance in a social eavesdropping paradigm

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.01.035Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We examined dogs' ability to evaluate humans on the basis of indirect experience.

  • One experimenter gave food to a beggar, the other withheld the food.

  • In the control condition the donors swapped places in half of the trials.

  • 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.

Section snippets

Experiment 1

In this experiment we assessed whether dogs use information about two unknown experimenters (the donors) after having witnessed interactions between those two donors and a third person (the beggar). They observed the unknown beggar begging from the two donors, with the ‘generous’ donor giving food to the beggar and the ‘selfish’ donor withholding the food. The prediction was that if dogs are able to use the indirect information about the food-sharing behaviour of the two donors, they should

Experiment 2

In experiment 2, we tested whether dogs use the information about the typical behaviour of the two donors (same as in experiment 1) after having witnessed several interactions between the donors and their owner. The important role of the owner might enhance the salience of the donors' roles so that the dogs potentially consider the experimenters' behaviour as more relevant.

General discussion

In our study we found no support for the hypothesis that dogs are able to assess humans' food-sharing tendencies after having witnessed interactions of a food-sharing experimenter versus food-withholding experimenter with a third person, the beggar. Instead, we found indications of an alternative explanation for the dogs' behaviour in this setting: It was influenced by the side, which was emphasized during the demonstrations.

In the experimental conditions (i.e. when not controlling for

Acknowledgments

We thank the dog owners, without whose support this work would not be possible. We also thank Kerstin Esau, Katrin Schumann, Marlen Hinz and Julia Steinbrueck for help with data collection and Anne Hertel for reliability coding. We thank Roger Mundry and Colleen Stephens for statistical advice. We are very grateful to Sarah Marshall-Pescini for valuable comments on the manuscript.

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