It turns out that humans are not very good at noticing aggressive behavior in dogs. Or, other people for that matter. Although identifying aggression is a vital social skill, it seems we give dogs the benefit of the doubt.
A new study published in PLOS ONE details how even as social creatures, humans are actually pretty bad at calling out aggressive behavior. As researchers from the Dog Studies Research Group put it, “participants [in their study] were not better at assessing aggressive situations than playful or neutral situations”.
Even more surprisingly, “participants performed particularly poorly when assessing aggressive behavior for dogs”. And just to top it off, “participants were not better at assessing social interactions of humans compared to those of other species”.
Predicting Aggression Versus Playfulness
According to Cosmos Magazine, the Dog Studies Research Group is based at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Germany. In their study, researchers asked 96 people to rate video clips of different animals interacting. Included in the study were videos of human children, dogs, and monkeys. Notably, the clips featured body language clues and posturing but didn’t actually show any physical interactions.
Half the study rated the clips, while the other half guessed the most likely outcome. Interestingly, people in the study were very good at predicting playful outcomes, getting the right answer 70% of the time.
However, this was not the case for predicting aggressive behavior. Whether among human or animal subjects, people consistently chose the wrong outcome or rating, even below chance probability levels.
Why Are We So Bad at Noticing Aggression?
The results ran against the researcher’s hypothesis, but sometimes that’s the way science goes. “It is possible that we are biased to assume good intentions from other humans and from ‘man’s best friend’,” says first author Dr. Theresa Epperlein. “Perhaps this bias prevents us from recognizing aggressive situations in these species.”
Not surprisingly, this brings up the need for more studies to understand the mechanisms at work here. However, according to Dr. Juliane Bräuer, the study’s senior author, “Our results underscore the fact that social interactions can often be ambiguous and suggest that accurately predicting outcomes may be more advantageous than categorizing emotional contexts”.
