Here’s Scientific Proof That Dogs Can Tell if a Person Is Reliable or Not

You know dogs are terribly loyal and will do everything in their power to make their master’s life easier. A dog is, in every way, a man’s best friend. And it has been relentlessly claimed by scientists that dogs are one of the most intelligent animals, and might even be smarter than dolphins. But are dogs a better judge of people than humans? Can they actually tell good people from the bad?

A study conducted recently investigated whether dogs can tell if someone is lying to them. Mainly, if they could identify untrustworthy people from the trustworthy ones and the results might shock you. Read on:

1Dogs might know

Over the years several studies have reported that dogs can actually sense what a person is feeling at any given point of time. The studies found that dogs can tell happy faces from angry faces and disappointed faces and can thus, know what you are feeling. Dogs can also sense subtle emotions like jealousy which you obviously don’t always show. The studies have also revealed that once a dog decides whether a person can be trusted or not, they treat them differently.

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2What was the study?

A study was conducted by Akiko Takaoka of Japan’s Kyoto University, in which Takaoka and his colleagues attempted to find out if a dog would ever trust a person who has lied to them. They created a three-part experiment to understand if dogs can tell if a person was untrustworthy. The group of scientists claims that the study can be a breakthrough in animal behavioral studies and found that dogs, especially, prefer to know for certain if they can trust a person.

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3How it works

The experiment had to be designed on a simple format so that clear conclusions could be figured out based on the results. Here is how it progressed. People who own dogs would point to a container which had food, and the dog would obviously run towards the container. Next, they would point to a container without any food and the dog would run towards that too. So, the people made sure the same cues were given out to the dogs both times.

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4But the third time

It was seen that after the second cue, the dogs would not follow the cue and would not approach the container its master tells it to go to. Mainly because they did not trust their masters after a lie. 34 dogs were part of this extensive experiment and interestingly Animal Cognition Journal confirms that, they all reacted the same way. Basically the dogs relied on their own experience with their owners to determine if they can be trusted.

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5Dogs can tell

Takaoka says that dogs determine whether a person is reliable depending on the cues they give out. If the command checks out, dogs end up trusting the person who gave out the cue. They are also curious to find out if new people they meet can be trusted which is why the experiment showed that the dogs followed the new person with quite a lot of interest as they were trying to figure them out.

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