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Dogs can figure out if a person can be trusted — and there's science to prove it as well

Apart from being loyal and protective, dogs can be quite intelligent when understanding people.
PUBLISHED JAN 24, 2025
Representative image of a dog and an owner (Cover image source: champpixs/Getty Images)
Representative image of a dog and an owner (Cover image source: champpixs/Getty Images)

Dogs aren't just adorable companions but they started out as loyal protectors of human beings because of how intuitive they are. One of the things that makes them so alert is the ability to smell fear and judgment about people that can be trusted. According to a report in Good, Kyoto University’s Akiko Takaoka led a team to perform a study looking into this with 34 dogs. The creatures could not tell whether a person was untrustworthy from the get-go and the experiment followed a simple formula to see if a dog would trust someone who lied to them once.

They used food to test how good canines were at figuring out if a person could be trusted or not. It’s no secret that if you point to an object in front of a dog, they will run to it and check it out. Hence three containers were placed for each of the dogs with food in the first one which was a treat for the canines. The second container did not have anything inside, hence the dogs who trusted the person were let down.



 

Now the third container did have food inside it, but when it was pointed out to the dogs, they didn't run in to check it. This is due to the negative experience they had with the second container. This is because they had lost the trust they had in the person pointing them in the direction of containers.

It means that dogs can identify people who are not truthful or it indicates that they just have a lot of trust issues. "Dogs have more sophisticated social intelligence than we thought. This social intelligence evolved selectively in their long life history with humans," Takaoka said. The animal has the intelligence to assess a person’s behavior and react in a way that it deems appropriate.



 

Such patterns of behavior help us understand these creatures better but there’s still a lot that most people aren’t aware of. Dogs are related to wolves who usually stay in packs with an alpha leader. Many humans believe that dogs also require an alpha leader who they respect and are therefore obedient towards human beings. However, as per a report in AOL, that is not exactly the case.

Experts at Happy Dog Training believe that it has more to do with reinforcement and trust. They respond positively to positive reinforcement and vice versa. “Unfortunately, this is a major point of misinformation. Respect is a human concept and has nothing to do with your dog’s behavior. Dogs naturally do what is reinforcing. If they are failing it is an indication that the trainer needs to make adjustments,” they said.


 
 
 
 
 
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Let’s say someone is training a dog to sit. At first, they’re not gonna understand what that means. So the person is going to have to physically make them sit after saying it and reward them with a treat. That will create the impression in their head that they will get food if they follow that command. That’s how dogs function based on reinforcement.

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