Dogs feel envy? Grossly flawed study, or good science?

[Bear_Nenno]

Inspired from this thread. There is a link to a study here:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1865847,00.html

It says they proved that dogs are capable of a type of envy. But when you read about the mechanics of the study, they seem irrelevant and incomplete to me.

To reveal Fido’s green-eyed monster, Range and three other scientists at the University of Vienna put together pairs of domestic dogs, each accompanied by an experimenter. Both dogs in each pair were given commands to place their paws in the experimenter’s hands, and when they obeyed, they were given a reward — a piece of bread or sausage. But when one dog wasn’t given a reward for obeying, and the other dog in the room was, the unrewarded dog would refuse to respond to the repeated commands. The scientists measured the dogs’ responses by how many times they had to prompt the unrewarded dog before it obeyed.

This seems to me to be a natural degradation of desired results due to a random reward schedule. To me, I dont think the study shows anything without a control group. Where are the animals who were simply denied reward without watching another dog receive the reward?

If a control group shows that an individual dog will stop responding to commands if you stop giving him rewards, or will require more commands to respond if you don’t reward him, then wouldn’t that negate the results of the study?
Why is there no countrol group? Is there some biased agenda here? Or maybe they just didn’t think it through?

Or is this a valid study but I’m off base? What do you guys think. And try to leave out your natural biases in this debate. I want this debate to be about the merits of this particular study and not necessarily about whether you think the results are true.
In other words, it is possible to totally believe that dogs do feel envy, but that this particular expirement does not validly prove it.
It’s also possible to believe that dogs don’t feel envy, but that this expirement was vaild as executed and it does prove there is something at work which should be studied further. So regardless of how you feel about dogs or their ability to feel emotions… what’s up with this experiment?

I submit that the expirement did not have enough groups of dogs, no control group, and the ambiguous methods did not prove anything except what the testers set out to prove in the first place. It’s bogus.

[Richard_Pearse]

Is there a link to the actual study? Media reports don’t bother with details like control groups etc, but that doesn’t mean those parts of the study weren’t conducted.

[silverfish]

The actual article seems to be this: The absence of reward induces inequity aversion in dogs.

It indicates they did compare the unequal rewards with “both a baseline condition (both partners rewarded) and an asocial control situation (no reward, no partner)”.

[Whack-a-Mole]

Without commenting on the study itself I personally would not find it surprising at all that dogs can feel envy. They are intelligent (I have read roughly equivalent to a 3-year-old human but take that with a grain if salt) and social creatures. Anyone who has had a dog can tell you they exhibit a range of emotions readily identifiable to any human. I do not think this is anthropomorphism either. You cannot miss it.

Perhaps envy requires higher thinking than other, more simple emotions such as anger or happiness but I think dogs could manage it. Again though I have no idea of the merits of this particular study.

[ITR_champion]

I’m not able to read the article that silverfish linked to, but I did read the Time article, and I’m going with “grossly flawed study”. The investigation has two dogs who do the same task and get different rewards, and the unrewarded dog stops doing the task. So what does that prove? Envy? Couldn’t it instead be that the unrewarded dog is simply smart, and won’t do a task for no reward? Or perhaps it’s getting distracted by its awareness of sausages nearby. Calling it envy is simply projecting human traits onto dogs.

And from the same article:

Emotions are a result of evolution: they cause organisms to act in ways that enable their survival.

That’s purely theoretical; there’s no evidence to back up such a wide-ranging assertion. The whole article is a perfect demonstration of how the mainstream media dumbs down and distorts scientific findings.

[Markxxx]

I believe you can approximate feelings but this is a great example of why direct comparisons are impossible.

For instance, I had a dog and he’d love to sit next to my sister. My sister was clearly his favourite, but he was overall friendly to anyone. But if I said “Go away,” and shoo’d him off the couch and sat next to my sister, he’d give me a dirty look.

But was this because he was jealous of me sitting next to his favourite or that he wanted to sit next to anyone?

I tried this I put the cat next to my dog and said “Shake a paw,” to the dog. Which he did and I said “Good kitty, and I patted her and gave her a kitty treat.” This would blow my dog’s mind. I would do it again saying “roll over,” the dog would do it, and I’d pet the cat and says “Good kitty,” and give her a kitty treat.

The dog would look astonished, like “Holy cow, the world has gone mad.”

The dog knew something was wrong but I don’t think he would be jealous. (BTW I did give the dog his deserved snausages after the experiement)

I would find the original example more convincing if the dog that got denied things, started acting out against the favoured dog, not just quit doing tricks. Usually jealousy is directed toward something.

Pets feel things but it’s too hard to know exactly what they are thinking. Another example, the dog and cat were outside and I fell asleep about an hour later thunder woke me up and I hear the dog barking to get in. Both cat and dog came in and were soaked. I dried them off and gave them both a cuddle and the dog was like “OK I’m dry and all is right with the world,” then he went to bed. The cat even when dried off, continued to meow loudly. She climbed on me and continued to mew, as if the scold me.

So in this case was the cat more vindictive or less willing to forgive? Who really knows.

[SmartAleq]

Anybody who doesn’t think dogs exhibit envy has never given two identical rawhide treats to two dogs, then watched them endlessly steal them back and forth from each other. To each dog, whatever treat the other one has is inherently superior and must be acquired, never mind that five minutes before it was the despised treat that was abandoned for the one the other dog had possession of. This can go on for hours. Dogs are weird.

[Buran]

Isn’t it a commonly accepted that dogs can get jealous when a new (human) baby is brought into the family? I know my dad had to give his beloved dog away when my brother was born for that very reason.

btw on the BBC news website version of that story it did state that a control study was tried with just one dog and that it continued to perform the task for much longer than when another dog was present.

It also stated that while dogs show jealousy when they aren’t receiving a deserved treat there is no evidence of the more complex emotion of objection to unfairness towards another. The dog receiving the treats doesn’t object to the other dog not receiving any…

[curlcoat]

@Markxxx

So in this case was the cat more vindictive or less willing to forgive? Who really knows.

I think this is an example of the problems with trying to “prove” human emotions in pets. From this story, I would have said that the cat was more upset by the storm and required more comfort from the human. Or maybe it was trying to tell you about some dumb thing the dog did before you let them in.

Same with the study. If I was going to put any human emotion on the unrewarded dog, I’d say it was acting put out with the human for breaking the trick for treat agreement. But since I don’t put human emotions on pets, I’d guess that the unrewarded dog was acting as a pack animal acts when the leader obviously favors one over another. I can only guess because there is no mention of the age, breed or level of training of the dogs, how they were housed and whether or not they were neutered. All of those things could have a big affect on the study results.

[ZenBeam]

Here’s a link to a NewScientist article on this that’s a little better than the Time article. From that article,

The animals performed the trick at almost every request, regardless of whether they were given a reward or not, or whether alone or alongside another dog.
However, the dogs’ enthusiasm quickly waned when they saw another dog getting a food reward but received nothing themselves.
Dogs that got this raw deal extended their paws on average a third less often than in all other circumstances.

So it’s not just that they aren’t getting a treat, it’s that another dog is.

[ITR_champion]

But there’s another explanation. Once dog A sees dog B getting a sausage, it knows that there’s an available supply of sausages somewhere. Then it has sausages on the brain, and that can affect its behavior.

I’m not saying that it’s impossible that dogs experience envy. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t project human characteristics onto dogs without considering other possible explanations.

On a loosely related note, Scientific American has just published an excellent article with a skeptical look at the claims of evolutionary basis for emotions.

[RaftPeople]

@ITR_champion

On a loosely related note, Scientific American has just published an excellent article with a skeptical look at the claims of evolutionary basis for emotions.

They aren’t skeptical of the evolutionary basis of emotions, they disagree with the breadth of Pop EP’s claims due to a lack of evidence (the Pleistocene is over which is apparently Pop EP’s primary driver of evolution of human behavior), and the method (multiple choice Q+A) with which they have determined specific attributes exist.

This is their critique of the notion that human nature was developed in the Pleistocene, their point is that it’s more complex than that and some was earlier and some was later:

“Some human psychological mechanisms undoubtedly did emerge during the Pleistocene. But others are holdovers of a more ancient evolutionary past, aspects of our psychology that are shared with some of our primate relatives. Evolutionary neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp of Bowling Green State University has identified seven emotional systems in humans that originated deeper in our evolutionary past than the Pleistocene. The emotional systems that he terms Care, Panic and Play date back to early primate evolutionary history, whereas the systems of Fear, Rage, Seeking and Lust have even earlier, premammalian origins.”

[Burton]

I have two dogs. One of them tries to get all the attention. If you pet the other one he comes over and muscles his way in between her and the attention giver every time without fail.

I can get him to sit and stay while I pet the other one, but it works for a few moments then he’s right back again.

[ralph124c]

Who hands out the funding for this type of “research”? A little bit of commeon sense is in order here…

[Sam_Stone]

I think there’s a little anthropomorphism going on here in calling this behavior ‘envy’. It seems to me to be more akin to pack behavior, in which the dominant member is given preference in terms of being first to eat the kill and all that.

Instead of the other dog thinking, “No fair! You gave him food and not me! I’m not doing any more tricks for you!”, it’s more likely that he’s thinking, “He got food and I didn’t. He’s the big cheese, the head honcho. I’d better keep my head down and not try for some of that food until he’s done. I’d better just slink over here and hide.”

[RaftPeople]

@Sam_Stone

I think there’s a little anthropomorphism going on here in calling this behavior ‘envy’. It seems to me to be more akin to pack behavior, in which the dominant member is given preference in terms of being first to eat the kill and all that.

Instead of the other dog thinking, “No fair! You gave him food and not me! I’m not doing any more tricks for you!”, it’s more likely that he’s thinking, “He got food and I didn’t. He’s the big cheese, the head honcho. I’d better keep my head down and not try for some of that food until he’s done. I’d better just slink over here and hide.”

Why is there an assumption that the human brain work so much differently than other animal brains? To me it’s most logical to consider a continuum with the differences being degree. Whatever you want to call it, it seems reasonable to conclude that social species could both have common internal responses to similar situations. Not guaranteed, but many seem to put humans in a category all alone (as if we are “special”).

[BrandonR]

I’ve had three Miniature Pinschers and they have all expressed jealousy in the same way… If I sit next to someone else and pretend to be close and hug or kiss them, they would immediately jump up and try their best to wedge themselves between the two people and try to direct the attention to them. I don’t know how you could attribute that to anything but jealousy. The same would happen if I were simply laying on the couch or bed next to someone – they are quite persistent in digging themselves between the two people.

[Rapier42]

@BrandonR

I’ve had three Miniature Pinschers and they have all expressed jealousy in the same way… If I sit next to someone else and pretend to be close and hug or kiss them, they would immediately jump up and try their best to wedge themselves between the two people and try to direct the attention to them. I don’t know how you could attribute that to anything but jealousy. The same would happen if I were simply laying on the couch or bed next to someone – they are quite persistent in digging themselves between the two people.

Why does it have to be jealousy? Doesn’t jealousy require more identification of “self” and “other” than most dogs have?

I mean, I can be outside on a hot day and see a waterfall splashing over a rock, and be inspired to get in that waterfall without feeling jealous of the rock.

[curlcoat]

@BrandonR

I’ve had three Miniature Pinschers and they have all expressed jealousy in the same way… If I sit next to someone else and pretend to be close and hug or kiss them, they would immediately jump up and try their best to wedge themselves between the two people and try to direct the attention to them. I don’t know how you could attribute that to anything but jealousy. The same would happen if I were simply laying on the couch or bed next to someone – they are quite persistent in digging themselves between the two people.

This is very easily explained in actual dog terms. Affection is being expressed, and they want in on it. Dogs are not generally born with manners so if they are not taught any, they will, well, act like animals.

[BrandonR]

@curlcoat

This is very easily explained in actual dog terms. Affection is being expressed, and they want in on it. Dogs are not generally born with manners so if they are not taught any, they will, well, act like animals.

But why can’t this be considered a form of jealousy? The animals sees something they’d like but don’t have, so they try and get some of it. That sounds like jealousy to me.