The Domestication of Social Cognition in Dogs

By Brian Hare, Michelle Brown, C. Williamson, Michael Tomasello. Science, 2002

1,033 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Dogs are more skillful than great apes at a number of tasks in which they must read human communicative signals indicating the location of hidden food. In this study, we found that wolves who were raised by humans do not show these same skills, whereas domestic dog puppies only a few weeks old, even those that have had little human contact, do show these skills. These findings suggest that during the process of domestication, dogs have been selected for a set of social-cognitive abilities that enable them to communicate with humans in unique ways.

Subfields: Genetics, Pharmacy, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7ac7a92b8e9b7f682fc16c8d348eedbffe094622

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Genetics

1. C. Wynne
2. Michael Tomasello
3. Á. Miklósi
4. Juliane Kaminski
5. Brian Hare
6. J. Call
7. M. Udell
8. J. Serpell

In Pharmacy

1. Á. Miklósi
2. C. Wynne
3. M. Udell
4. Juliane Kaminski
5. Michael Tomasello
6. J. Call
7. Brian Hare
8. J. Topál

In Social Psychology

1. Michael Tomasello
2. Brian Hare
3. J. Call
4. Juliane Kaminski
5. E. MacLean
6. E. Herrmann
7. J. Bräuer
8. Á. Miklósi

Citations in the corpus

• What a Dog Can Do: Children with Autism and Therapy Dogs in Social Interaction (2010, background): “…turned dogs into students of human movement (Gladwell 2006) who are highly skilled at ‘‘ontological choreography’’ (Haraway 2003:50) and problem solving in coordination with humans (Hare et al. 2002; Hare and Tomasello 1999; Hearne 1986; Horowitz 2009; Marshall Thomas 1993, 2000; Smuts 2001, 2008).”
• A friend or an enemy? Dogs' reaction to an unfamiliar person showing behavioural cues of threat and friendliness at different times (2005, background): “Generally, it seems that compared to wolves, dogs social interest towards humans is accompanied by relatively greater sensitivity to human behavioural cues (Hare et al., 2002; Frank and Frank, 1982).”
• Chimpanzees are more skilful in competitive than in cooperative cognitive tasks (2004, methodology): “study in which chimpanzees and dogs were directly compared, the dogs were much more skilful, and this included puppies with little human experience (Hare et al. 2002).”
• 2. Evolutionary context of human development: the cooperative breeding model (2005, background): “In an ingenious set of experiments, Hare et al. (2003) demonstrated that dogs (and even puppies not yet exposed to humans) were more skillful than chimps at using human social cues like direction of gaze, finger pointing and finger tapping, to locate containers with hidden food.”
• Wolves outperform dogs in following human social cues (2008, background): “hypothesis, domestication would be a requirement for untrained sensitivity to human cues (Hare et al. 2002; Miklósi et al. 2003; Kubinyi et al. 2007; Virányi et al. 2008).”
• Individual differences in cooperative communicative skills are more similar between dogs and humans than chimpanzees (2017, background): “To explain these findings, the domesticated cognition hypothesis (Hare, Wobber, & Wrangham, 2012; Hare et al., 2002, 2005) proposes that humans and dogs underwent similar selective pressures for ‘survival of the friendliest’, leading to convergent skills for cooperative communication in both…”
• Visual perspective taking in dogs (Canis familiaris) in the presence of barriers (2004, neutral): “This suggests that this is a skill that was evolved in dogs during the long time they have been living with humans (Hare et al., 2002).”
• Domestic dogs are sensitive to a human's perspective (2009, background): “Indeed, in direct comparisons in the object choice paradigm, dogs outperform apes in reading human social cues (Bräuer et al., 2006; Hare et al., 2002).”