When your dog looks “guilty”

this is very interesting

Scientists Find Dogs Don’t Feel Guilt at All

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Dog owners have no one to blame but themselves when they think their canine pals give them that familiar “guilty look.”

You see guilt, but the dog doesn’t necessarily feel it, a new study shows.

By setting up conditions where the owner was misinformed as to whether his or her dog had really committed an offense, researcher Alexandra Horowitz of Barnard College in New York uncovered the origins of dogs’ allegedly downcast mugs.

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.

During the videotaped study, owners were asked to leave the room after ordering their dogs not to eat a tasty treat. While the owner was away, Horowitz gave some of the dogs this forbidden treat before asking the owners back into the room. In some trials, the owners were told that their dog had eaten the forbidden treat; in others, they were told their dog had behaved properly and left the treat alone. What the owners were told, however, often did not correlate with reality.

Whether the dogs’ demeanor included elements of the “guilty look” had little to do with whether the dogs had actually eaten the forbidden treat or not.

read more via Scientists Find Dogs Don’t Feel Guilt at All – Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News – FOXNews.com.