Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [93]
Can dogs know right from wrong? Do they know that this particular action is clearly, maddeningly, wrong? A few years back, a Doberman employed to guard an expensive teddy bear collection (including Elvis Presley's favorite bear) was discovered in the morning with the devastation of hundreds of maimed, mauled, and beheaded teddies around him. His look, captured in news photos, was not of a dog who thought he had done wrong.
It would seem to defy reason if the mechanism behind the guilty or the defiant look were the same as ours. After all, right and wrong are concepts that we humans have by virtue of being raised in a culture that has defined such things. Excepting young children and psychotics, every person winds up knowing right from wrong. We grow up in a world of oughts and oughtn'ts, learning some rules for conduct explicitly and others by a kind of observational osmosis.
But consider how we know that other people know right from wrong when they cannot tell us so. A two-year-old sidles up to a table, gropes toward an expensive vase, and knocks it over, shattering it. Does the child know that it is wrong to break things that belong to other people? This might be an occasion on which, given the probable explosive reaction from any adults in the vicinity, she begins to learn. But at age two, she does not yet understand the concepts: she did not maliciously destroy the vase. Instead, she is an ordinary two-year-old who is clumsily trying to master moving her own body. We get an indication of her intent by watching what she did before and after the vase fell. Did she head directly for the vase and act to push it over? Or was she reaching for the vase and was uncoordinated in doing so? After it fell, did she evince surprise? Or did she look, well, satisfied?
Essentially the same method can be applied to dogs by allowing them to break expensive vases and watching how they react. I designed an experiment to determine if those guilty looks come from being guilty or from one of the something-elses. Though my method is experimental, the setting is ordinary, so as to best capture the animals' natural behavior: in the "wild" of their own homes. To qualify for subjecthood, dogs had to have been exposed to an owner's disallowance—for instance, by the owner pointing at an object to be left alone and loudly stating No!—and must know to therefore leave it be.
In the place of expensive vases, I use highly desirable treats—a bit of a biscuit, a cube of cheese—that will not be shattered, but will be expressly forbidden. Given that the claim being tested is that a dog knows that engaging in a behavior that has been disallowed by the owner is wrong, I designed this experiment to provide an opportunity to do that very behavior. In this case, the owner is asked to bring the dog's attention to the treat and then clearly tell the dog not to eat it. The treat is placed in an enticingly available spot. Then the owner leaves the room.
Remaining in the room are the dog, the treat, and a quietly observing video camera. Here's the dog's chance to do the wrong thing. What the dogs do is only the beginning of the data for our experiment. In most cases we assume that if given the opportunity, the dog's first move is to get the treat. We wait until he does. Then the owner returns. Here is the crucial data: How does the dog behave?
Every psychological and biological experiment is designed to control one or more variables, while leaving the rest of the world unchanged. A variable can be anything: ingestion of a drug, exposure to a sound, presentation with a set of words. The idea is simply that if this variable is important, the subject's behavior will be changed when exposed to it. In my experiment, there are two variables: whether the dog eats the treat (the one owners are most interested in) and whether the owner knows whether the dog has eaten it (the one I guessed the dogs