Dogs Understand When A Person Is Lying

Parents are clear that if we don’t tell our children the truth, they will eventually fail to trust us. So, while it may seem surprising, with some pets a similar thing happens, as, according to an interesting study, dogs understand when a person lies to them.

The University of Kyoto, Japan, has been conducting curious research on the social intelligence of dogs and how they are able to notice that we lie to them.

Furthermore, the study shows that if we lie to them, they will stop trusting us and obeying our orders, as they only submit to the instructions of the people they trust.

First study with 24 dogs

A first study was carried out in which  several psychologists analyzed the behavior of 24 dogs that were trained, starting from the premise that, therefore, they would obey the orders received. Several opaque containers were placed in front of the animals, one of which hid food and the other did not.

At first, the animal was given the order to go to the container that contained food.

Then, the order was given to him to go to the container that was empty, with the intention that the dog would begin to realize that the person was not worthy of his trust, since he was giving false information.

When they repeated the instruction, they found that  80% of all dogs that had been previously deceived obeyed the order. Now they were faced with a new question: whether the mistrust was only for the person who had lied to them or for humanity in general.

Although there are some previous studies showing that this type of pet was able to judge individually, people wanted to prove it for themselves.

A second study to see how well dogs know who lies to them

For this second research, they joined another 26 different dogs, with those that repeated the previous study, step by step.

On this occasion, two different people were used , the first one who told them the truth and the other who then lied to them.

For them the result was more evident: when the person who did not deceive them gave them any orders, they obeyed without hesitation. However, they decided not to obey the liar’s orders.

For the authors of the study, this research demonstrates that the emotional intelligence of this type of animal is superior to what is usually found.

They even comment on how a similar test has been carried out with children who, before the age of 5, are not able to discriminate whether a person is trustworthy or, on the contrary, not trustworthy.

The social intelligence of dogs

For experts,  the intelligence of dogs has improved a lot in recent decades thanks to living with humans. For this reason, as another study indicates, they may even understand what we are telling them.

The brain has been shown to process language in a way that is not very different from what people use.

Not only do they pick up the tone of our voice, but they  also understand the meaning of some words. This was confirmed by a surprising experiment with a Border Collie, which was able to memorize the names of 1022 toys and recognize them with a 95% correct rate. Maybe that would be too hard for some humans, wouldn’t it?

Also, other investigations show how dogs understand our reactions to certain stimuli and take them as a reference.  That is, they observe how we react to certain events and then take our behavior as a reference and repeat it.

For example , in a situation that theoretically should be frightening, if we react in a relaxed way, on many occasions they will learn to behave in the same way.

It was even seen how these social reactions were learned independently of the emotional relationship they had with the person.

It doesn’t necessarily have to have an emotional bond to learn to imitate human behavior. A skill that, of course, children acquire from 15 months of age onwards.

We are sure that, from now on, you will start to look at your most faithful partner with new eyes and that you will never lie to him. Otherwise, he will no longer trust you.