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“The Guilty Look” - Does it Mean Your Dog is Really Guilty?

Deanna Raeke
For the Love of the Dog Blog
Thursday, June 11th, 2009

If you have dogs, you’ve seen it, “the guilty look.” You see a mess and
look at your furry family member, maybe ask if they did it and you get
it and it confirms their guilt. The question is, is your dog actually
feeling guilty or is “the guilty look” a response to you; your tone and
attitude?

I’ve always believed that it’s just a response to a person’s tone and
attitude because I don’t believe a dog can feel “guilt” as we know it.
I can get that look from mine just by using a certain tone of voice
regardless of the words whether my babies have done anything wrong
or not. I think more what we are seeing is nervousness, worry or even
fear, in response to us.

When you think about it, it really follows along with the thinking that
unless you actually catch a dog “in the act” of doing something wrong,
it makes no sense to correct them because dogs don’t “know” right from
wrong except by training. If a dog has an “accident” and you discover
it hours later, admonishing them will only create fear and rather then
further the housebreaking will actually set it back. Same goes with dogs
getting into the trash, chewing shoes or other items, etc. They don’t
“remember” or associate the forbidden act with the admonishment.

Now a study conducted by Alexandra Horowitz, Assistant Professor
from Barnard College in New York and recently published in the “Canine
Behaviour and Cognition” Special Issue of Elsevier’s Behavioural Processes
seems to back up my thought on this issue.

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 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. Dogs looked most “guilty” if they were admonished by their owners
for eating the treat. In fact, dogs 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. (Science Daily)

So next time your dog gives you “the guilty look,” instead of scolding
your canine companion, think about what you did.

Posted on SHARE Yahoo group - June 12, 2009