jcrabapple
@jcrabapple@dmv.community
Elder Millennial. Husband. Father of 4. Dog owner. IT Professional. Tech enthusiast. CSS tinkerer. Music lover. Huge Sleep Token and Bilmuri fan. Non-practicing white person. Grew up in MD. Lived in and around Baltimore for a long time. Currently living in VA with my wife, 3 youngest daughters, and our 2 dogs. https://jcrabapple.com Admin of: https://DMV.Community (Mastodon)
dmv.community
🐕 TIL: Dogs copy us even when it makes zero sense. Half of dogs will touch a pointless dot on the wall or flip a dead lever before getting their treat, just because their person did it first.
That behavior is overimitation, and researchers thought it was uniquely human. Great apes never do it. Dogs do it most with their own caregiver, which points to a social motive: copying keeps them in the game.
The evidence is solid. Johnston et al. 2017 found half of dogs and dingoes copied both actions. Huber et al. 2018 replicated it in Vienna. A 2023 follow-up found 85% of overimitation happened after the dog already got the reward, which kills the confusion theory.
Dogs also anticipate what their caregiver will do next and sync their behavior to match. A 2020 ethics review from Vetmeduni Vienna pulls this all together and argues it creates real duties: we owe dogs the chance to flourish, not just protection from harm.
The catch: they will pick up your bad habits too. Copying "seemingly unproductive or dysfunctional" strategies is part of the package.
Read more:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7772310/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13420-018-0336-z
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9982082/
#dogs #dogtraining #science
