If you tell lies, these animals will tend to ignore us. A study tested how dogs assess people’s truthfulness and found that, in some cases, they can tell when they are being lied to.
Dogs can tell when we are lying to them and, in this case, they will tend to ignore us. The discovery was revealed by a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The research tested whether, like humans, these animals could understand the truthfulness of people. They found that, in some cases, dogs could detect when someone was deceiving them, which primates and children could not. “We used to think that dogs would behave like children under 5 and like monkeys, but now we hypothesize that maybe they can tell when someone is lying,” co-author Ludwig Huber of the University of Vienna told New Scientist.
How can dogs tell if you’re lying
For these animals, food is always a primary motivation. Therefore, the researchers conducted a simple experiment with 260 dogs of various breeds, including schnauzers, retrievers, border collies and terriers, to find foods hidden in buckets. According to the scholars, the dogs followed their intuition when they were given misleading instructions about where the food was and didn’t listen to what they were told.
The tested animals were shown two opaque buckets and taught to follow a person’s directions about which of the two containers hid food. A man tapped on one of the two objects with a treat, telling the puppy “this is good.” Following the advice, the dog received the tasty treat. Then a second person moved the food from one bucket to the other in front of the animals’ eyes, both in the presence of the other man and in his absence. At the next erroneous advice given by the person who had not seen the exchange of containers, half of the puppies ignored the indication understanding that the human did not know where the treat really was. More importantly, two-thirds of the dogs ignored the wrong suggestion from the person who had been present at the exchange.
This behavior indicated how these animals can recognize when a human is lying to them. Aware of the lying information coming from the human, the animals followed what they had seen rather than what was suggested to them. The researchers noted that, in previous studies, both primates and children were more likely to listen to the lie. The result therefore suggests that dogs have little trust in those they don’t know. It is not yet clear whether the same thing could happen in the case of animals receiving misinformation from their owners because no such test has yet been done. The study, however, has shown an important new element that helps to understand the type of intelligence of dogs and the relationship they have with humans.
A research of the College of Arts and Sciences of Syracuse University has instead tried to understand if you will ever be able to establish a “total number” of species of animals living on Earth.
Stefania Bernardini