Dogs as lie detectors: They can tell when we fib to them

Dogs as lie detectors – who’d have thought it?

According to a new study conducted by researchers at Austria’s University of Vienna, dogs can tell when humans lie to them.

Here at Dog O’Day we learned of this through People Magazine, and they cite phys.org, which is itself summarizing a paper published in the academic journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. (Whew.) 

Researchers took 260 canine volunteers of various breeds and taught to follow the advice of a random unknown human about which of two bowls to get a hidden treat from. Then the second phase of the trial introduced another random human, with one moving the treat while the new one watched. The second person was missing in some testing at this phase as well.

Dogs as lie detectors isn’t as far-fetched as it may sound.

The third phase saw the second human being the treat-pointer-outer, with the dogs usually ignoring the advice if the second human had not been there before, and about half the dogs ignored the human when they pointed to the wrong bowl (having seen with their own eyes which bowl was the treat-filled one).

This experiment has also been previously conducted with children younger than five years old and with chimpanzees, and with the average canine intelligence roughly the same as a two- or three-year-old child, it seems to make sense that dogs would have a kind of honesty radar – how else to you explain their hunches about things (which can lead to appearances on TV shows like Miracle Pets or stories in Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover’s Soul collections.)

Little kids and chimps have been more gullible, believing the human with false information, so it seems like this is a case of canine intuition winning (and we would bet that mutts are likely better at this project).