Do Dogs Feel Guilt or Shame?

Everyone has laughed at internet photos of shamefaced dogs alongside evidence of their naughty deeds. There's no doubt that dogs are good at looking guilty, but is guilt or shame an emotion they actually experience? If your guilty dog is truly ashamed of his bad behaviour, why does he turn around and do it again at the next given opportunity? Read on to see if dog shaming really means anything to your dog.

Do Dogs Feel Shame?

While there's little doubt that dogs are capable of feeling primary emotions, which include feelings such as happiness, sadness and fear, there's far less evidence that dogs experience what are called secondary emotions, which include guilt and shame, says Scientific American. Secondary emotions are much more complex, and researchers surmise that dogs simply don't have the cognitive ability to process such complicated feelings.

Learned Behaviour

The truth is, while there is no scientific evidence that dogs actually feel guilt or shame, there is also no proof that they don't. That said, PBS News Hour reports that some studies, such as one conducted by New York City's Barnard College associate professor of psychology Alexandra Horowitz, suggest that the guilty look dogs give when they're caught in the act is a learned response to human reactions. In the study, dogs acted guilty when scolded by their owners, regardless of whether they had actually committed the act for which they were being scolded. Based on this, it seems likely that dogs learn quickly that when pet parents are unhappy with them, they can placate their humans by looking sad.

Another experiment conducted by Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, which appeared in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, corroborated these findings. The experiment was designed to answer two questions: would "guilty dogs" who had misbehaved greet their owners differently from those who had not misbehaved, and could owners accurately determine by the way they were greeted whether their dogs had done something wrong? The study found that not only were dog parents unable to accurately tell whether their dogs had messed up, but as with the other study, both guilty and innocent dogs acted ashamed only when their owners assumed they had misbehaved and spoke to their dogs accordingly.