Description
- Abstract:
- People have strong intuitions about human intelligence, but also dog intelligence. Yet the content or organization of these intuitions remain unknown. Over three experiments, we define laypeople’s conceptual map of dog intelligence. Experiment 1 elicited people’s ideas about what makes a dog smart or dumb via open-response survey. In Experiment 2, we asked participants to picture a smart or dumb dog, then rate their performance across multiple questions. These questions developed from themes identified within Experiment 1 responses. A Principal Component Analysis validated that our Experiment 2 items clustered, and revealed three dimensions predictive of people’s conception of dog intelligence: Social Ability, Physical Reasoning, and Temperament. In Experiment 3 we surveyed both dog owners and non-owners on Experiment 2 questions alongside dog personality questions (Ley et al., 2009). We aimed to validate the condensed Experiment 2 survey by verifying the items’ predictive nature in distinguishing perceptions of smart and dumb dogs. All participants rated dogs considered "smart" or "dumb" on the provided questions. Our combined data reveal that laypeople picture smart dogs as socially skilled with a good temperament and dumb dogs as bad at physical reasoning and avoiding threats. Laypeople’s intuitions also align with canine research showing that dogs understand humans well but struggle with physical reasoning, and with dog trainers’ knowledge that a dog’s temperament affects performance. Lastly, we demonstrated that our survey questions are predictive of people’s beliefs about dog intelligence. We plan to use this survey to investigate dog guardians’ perceptions of their own pet’s intelligence.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Sc. M.)--Brown University, 2024
Citation
Ross, Miriam,
"What Makes Lassie Smart? Human Perceptions of Canine Intelligence"
(2024).
Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:9tmh6sc7/
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Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences department....